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Colin Blundell

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Review Article

Fumiko Miura: Pages from the Seasons, Selected Tanka, translated by James Kirkup

Fumiko Miura: Pages from the Seasons, Selected Tanka, translated by James Kirkup 2002. Asahi Shuppan-sha, Tokyo ISBN 4-255-00145 C0082 Yen 1500

The tongues of fire seem
to be tasting, licking up
bodies of the dead -
a girl’s hand shading her eyes
as she stares upon the scene.		   August - those days of
the sixth, the ninth, the fifteenth -
days of aching hearts -
at the die-in on the square
filled with the smell of death.

August 1945.  Nagasaki. Appalling inhumanity by humanunkind about which, as war on Iraq is blithely, if ‘patiently’, contemplated as some  kind of simple scrap in a school play-ground, we need a constant reminder. Fumiko Miura, now Professor Emeritus at Keio University, Tokyo, is the school-girl shading her eyes with her hand.

     The full horror of her experience is conveyed both directly and  transmuted tellingly into metaphor. If the task of the poet is to warn, we need the balance:-

A half-naked woman
her throat and mouth blasted by
the heat rays, holding
a baby that keeps seeking
for milk from her mother’s breast.		   No cicadas sing
in this city of death, where
even crows have ceased
to fly: only white maggots
swarm wriggling over the land.

     The probable result of exposure to radiation - nine times under the surgeon’s knife for removal of cancers - carefully, controlledly catalogued both in clinical detail and again in metaphor:-

Further surgery...
Losing myself in the dark
of a lane, I watched
the hard, slanting rain falling,
lit by cars’ headlights		   Preparing dinner,
I am cutting up carrots
into floral shapes.
- The flowers within me still
withered in wintry decay...

     Less philosophical, less poetically aware people might have lost themselves in bitterness and anger; Fumiko Miura loses her self metaphysically in images expressing her existential state of being. This is not, of course, to say that she does not grieve or express the wish that things might have been otherwise; rather she painstakingly uses the details of her experience to forge new insights: it’s as though, pushing the operated-on body to one side for the moment, a new self grows through the experience of writing tanka.

My chest laid open,
did the surgeon, I wonder,
notice what hunger
and thirst had taken root in
my heart’s hidden recesses?

Laid on my sickbed
day after day, the face of
my other self grows
slowly visible, hidden
so many years within me.		   After surgery,
for the first time warily
taking a shower,
I guard new scars as I would
a new-born babe in my arms.

Something different
from a tumour seems with each
new operation
to have been growing in me
over all these ten long years.

     Wishes there are - a obvious wish to start all over again, to have somehow preserved things as they were before August 1945. But notice that such wishes are expressed through seasonal flux in the here and now.

As I listen to
the cuckoo’s enchanting song
I wish that I could
take the sandglass of my days
and turn my life upside-down		   Placing a white peach,
with its shimmering down, in
the palm of my hand,
I feel reluctant to tear
off the inviolate skin.

Having accepted it for just what it is and in spite of continuing pain, Fumiko Miura is able to transmute her total experience into art, to go way beyond the burden of life, to find a kind of release in natural images.

A full moon also
returned with me from Paris
shedding silver rays
upon my garden, in which
autumn insects were chorusing.		   Just for a moment
let me gaze at the fountain’s
eternal rainbow -
it is my birthday today.
- The fountain goes on splashing.

     In his monumental A Book of Tanka: An Anthology of tanka from the earliest times to the present day (University of Salzburg 1996), James Kirkup suggests, there being ‘no restriction on subject-matter’, that tanka ‘should be read as musical, rhythmical expressions of profound emotional feelings or of everyday events, objects and persons...’  In order to preserve the essentially musical process of rhythm, James translates tanka into the strict English syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7 with apparent consummate effortlessness, economically and, above all, musically.

     Two modern poems from A Book of Tanka give me a chance to reflect on the experience of reading Fumiko Miura’s 253 tanka at a single sitting

As if to confirm
their own survival, people
are beginning to
gather and exchange their smiles
so gently, wearing mourning.

              Mitomo Heikichi		   Drawing towards me
my midnight lamp, I began
to read your verses -
felt them turn to a dagger
stabbing deep into my heart 

              Yuki Aya

Fumiko Miura confirms her own survival by smiling in spite of gentle mourning for her something-self that might have been. I felt her tanka ‘turn to a dagger / stabbing deep into my heart.

 

Page(s) 63-64

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