Shuntaro Tanikawa reads Yukio Tsuji

December 08, 2006 YOUR UNCLE

Your uncle went crayfishing. Your uncle went crayfishing and caught crayfish. (He didn’t catch a crucian carp or a loach. He couldn’t catch a crucian carp or a loach.)

Your uncle ate acorn “rice” atop a box of tangerines for a “dining table” and drank “soup” from a small vessel. Or was it meant to be sake? When he looked up and drank it down, he could see the blue sky… ? I don’t know whether larks were trilling in the sky.

Your uncle liked anything that moved or ran. When he heard a train coming from a distance he stopped eating and ran towards the railroad bridge. Lying on his back under the bridge, he looked up at the train roaring along above him.

When your uncle’s older sister first gave birth to a baby, he peered at it and said, “What’s this? A monkey?” Oh, how hateful your uncle was! Even if it looked exactly like a monkey it wasn’t, because it was you.

Oh, if your uncle were still alive and saw me today what would he say? Would he say, “Be kind to K [this is your initial letter]! She’s very good, just like me!”? Or would he say “Don’t hang around with her. She deserves a better man than you!”? Your uncle! 

You, your uncle! How lavishly you lived! You didn’t survive and disappeared when you were still a child, ignorant of the hell of the human world! I hate you. I hate my uncle, too. I hate everyone who is dead. I like ships, trains, the roofs of buildings, that fountain and you.

(from Now I’m a Minstrel, 1970)


Commentary by Shuntarô Tanikawa

In this poem the person to whom the speaker (a man) is talking, that is, the one who is referred to as “K”, must be the speaker’s lover. Her uncle (“Your uncle”) who caught crayfish, played house, liked trains and said, “What’s this? A monkey?” when he saw his newborn niece, did not survive childhood. The speaker misses this “uncle” whom he knows only through his lover’s description by the ironical expression “I hate you”, but in the last paragraph the “uncle” becomes the symbol of all “the dead”. His feeling that he hates anything “dead” is directly linked to his feeling that he likes “living”, but Tsuji narrows down “living” to “ships, trains, the roofs of buildings, that fountain and you”, thus avoiding the abstract notion of “living” or “living things”. 

“Trains” represents his feeling of sympathy for the “uncle”, and the emphasis put on “that” of “that fountain” is especially effective, for it suggests 
private memories of the fountain shared with his lover but kept sacrosanct with regard to the reader. It is often the case that a specific image such as this one, an object from daily life which appealed to sight and mind, should arouse in us a certain kind of urgent existential emotion. Tsuji moulds the image into part of the poem carefully and with elegant humor. It doesn’t matter to what extent the speaker corresponds to the author himself. The speaker (“boku”) is the first person singular pronoun representing everyone, including Tsuji himself, and that doesn’t happen in all poems. 


TO MY YOUNGER BROTHER, BY SPECIAL DELIVERY


Have you seen
Grandma recently?
‘Grandma’ is
Nobuko-chan,
our mother.

I heard that when her grandchild was born
she thought of Haruka*
as a name.
One can see clouds and mountains
in the distance —
a feeling of vast space.
Is that what Grandma said on the telephone?
I wonder.

I immediately thought
of her glasses
which seem to have become a little loose.
I bought them for her
with my fifth or sixth month's salary
when I got my first job.
That was my first present to her,
and she was very happy.
When you and I were kids
we caused her an awful lot of worry.

Well, I’m taking the train
up north tonight.
I’m going to see
the distant mountains and plains;
and that little dream
I have kept having
for a long time.
Even if your daughter isn't named
Haruka,
bring her up as a girl
who will always have something ‘distant’ in her heart.

I won’t call you
from up north.

(from Up to The Sumida River, 1977)

*Haruka means “far away” in Japanese.


Commentary by Shuntarô Tanikawa

This poem’s keyword is the name, or rather the word, “Haruka”, which means “far away” or “distant”. The poem probably originated from that one word. It is a name which may or may not be given to the speaker’s mother’s grandchild, and it is also a word associated with the glasses that the speaker bought for his mother. Moreover, the name also suggests the direction North and also reminds the speaker of the dream he has been harboring. 

This poem embodies the notion that the function of poetry is to connect apparently disparate entities and unite them so as to produce one polysemic emotion. For a long time now, the term “human life” has been incompatible with poetry. Yet Tsuji’s poems are inseparable from the term human life, or rather from human life itself. Just why is it we feel that way? In one of his essays, Tsuji writes that, “the eye which discovers the ordinary daily things around us — I feel that this kind of eye is the starting point of poetry”.  I think what he means by “discovering” is noticing ordinary things in an extraordinary context. At that moment we perceive “human life” anew, in a way we are not usually conscious of, that is, within a more catholic perspective. But the final two lines — “I won’t call you/from up north”— tell us that a poet cannot live a comfortable human life. Although we can’t say what his “little dream” may be, it seems to be a solitary one that rejects friendship with the ordinary world. That solitude is also the attribute of a poet.