Mieko Kanai - Writing becomes an act of unknowing, an act of obfuscation. Ideas of self, time, and fact become fugitive issues

Mieko Kanai, The Word Book, Trans. by Paul McCarthy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009)

«Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he's an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.»

«After starting this blog I've come to realize just how much Japanese literature,(just considering the twentieth century alone), there is yet to be translated. So it's great to learn that the Dalkey Archive is adding Mieko Kanai's, The Word Book to the list in their Japanese Literature Series. It's a collection of twelve short stories, originally published in Japan in 1979 under the title 'Tangoshu' by Chikuma Shobo, and is translated by Paul McCarthy. In Japan, Mieko Kanai has published collections of short stories, novels, and has won numerous awards for her poetry, this is her first collection to appear in English.
Mieko Kanai has a detached dream like quality to her prose, but retains a certain exactness to her writing, through these stories she presents an array of characters that seem to be lost in memory. Many of the stories feature memories from childhood, her narratives mingle real events in the character's lives, with recollections, seen or remembered again by the character as an adult, some of the characters here seem to be in a locked groove,repeating or re-enacting scenes or memories from childhood, in a way that sometimes resembles a Kafka like world, it sometimes feels that there is a distant nihilism in her writing. These stories portray lives, lived as a reflection of incidents in the past or the reflection of their memory. Mieko Kanai has an unnerving ability to dislodge notions of time,memory, dream, i was completely captivated how Kanai can pick up a theme and circle over it,and not waste a single word.Another disorientating aspect about this collection, that gives the whole a unifying feel, is that the character's are rarely named, many of the stories being depictions of family relationships, so it's just, mother,father,brother sister. In the other stories,characters are distinguished by being referred to as, her or he. I found this to be a really interesting element, and creates a great feeling of intimacy with the characters. In fact the only names i think in here are the names of other authors; Mishima, Yoshioka Minoru, Jun Ishikawa , and also Von Geczy and Leo Reisman , whose songs feature in the story 'The Rose Tango', which tells the story of a violinist of a small band, who is witness to a fight caused when a jealous gangster punches a man for dancing with his girl. But none of the stories are solely about these people. Mieko Kanai, who herself features in the story 'The Voice', a story about an author,(Kanai), who receives strange,sometimes hostile phone calls from a young aspiring writer/reader, who foresees that Kanai will write a story featuring the phone call they are having, another story that explores the world of authorship.
The last three stories,(Kitchen Plays,Picnic, and The Voice Of Spring) seem to have connecting elements to them, again memories from childhood, a mother's instruction to buy a litre of milk, spindle-tree hedges, train journeys, a visit to a dilapidated basement theatre,the milk being spilt,the possibility of a father's infidelity.Kanai mixes the narratives to the degree that it's uncertain to who is actually narrating the story,the father?,the son?.The mirror like labyrinthine quality to these stories is spellbinding,'Windows', starts with a meditation on authorship,the author (Kanai?) sitting contemplating writing a story on plants, but gets distracted by objections made by the character she is about to create, the character questions the author's knowledge of the character,but slowly the character's story emerges,a memory from childhood, a building, a weapons depot, and a first experience with a camera, a photo album from father with pictures of mother as a young woman,before we were married,his father tells him, the mother he never met. Photography becomes his obsession,wanting to photograph every second,every hour. He returns to the weapon depot building of his youth to photograph it everyday,to witness it slowly deteriorate into a ruin,but then come to be dissatisfied with what a camera can capture, he dreams of the single photograph,which catches the stopping of the instants, separate from time's continuous progression.
The brilliance of this collection completely caught me off guard, explorations of relationships lost, meditations on authorship, examination of events, that skip from dream, to memory, from childhood to adulthood,and pass from generation to generation, memories that seem to hover and exist in some other ethereal realm. I'm already looking forward to another collection.» - nihondistractions.blogspot

«Reading Mieko Kanai's stories is an unsettling experience, like swimming underwater, existing in a new and shimmering medium, and coming up for air between stories just to make sure everything is still real — or as real as you remember it. Concurrently, it feels as if one were skating on a slippery surface, gliding along, glimpsing things possibly more substantial beneath — maybe even catching sight of your own double.
In "Rivals," a standout among the stories collected in "The Word Book," a writer travels north on a train, moving through dreamlike landscapes of forests and wastelands. She meets an encyclopedia salesman in the dining car who asks her to join him for a whiskey. He reveals that he used to be a writer; he tells her of his first love, of a rival for the woman's affections, and how he found the rival's notebook, identical to his own, with passages from his own works. This mirror effect, this fragmenting of self, forced the man to abandon writing. The story enfolds and explodes like a rose grenade, asking questions about originality and inspiration.
In "Windows," a photographer meets an author in a teahouse; already an imagined character, he arrives just as the author is delineating his nature. He tells her of memories and photographs and the shifting relics of past and present, and how he took the same photograph every day for 20 years. Concerned with fluctuations of time and the impossibility of capturing memories and things, the story allows us into the writer's mind.
"The Rose Tango" tells of a boy's childhood in postwar Peking, his return to Japan, the death of his parents, his membership in a criminal gang and the formation of a musical group. It reminded me of Borges' "Man on Pink Corner" with its tangos, violence and yakuza molls.
The history of memory, the hierarchy of recall, the question of fictive selves, autobiography, identity, and fiction about fiction are the subject matters of "The Time of One's Life."
"Vague Departure" and "Fiction" are mirror-image stories. The first deals with an act of loss, a lover's departure and the different-depth perceptions of love and forgetting, while the latter is a story of longing for something insubstantial, something just out of reach. Both enact their own storytelling within their fictions — that is to say, both are self-aware that whatever our reality is, whatever stage our desire is at, then that "situation" may change in an instant or change imperceptibly over time until it is unrecognizable from the original.
Regaled by a rival and a reader, the narrator of "The Voice" questions what it is to be a character, and from where writers get their stories — how difficult is it to be original without appropriating others' stories and others' lives?
Three stories reminded me of Surrealist paintings. "The Moon" is like a Paul Delvaux painting. A ghostly paranoia pervades; the narrator, haunted by memory, realizes things are not quite what they seem. "The Boundary Line" — a nightmarish story about a drowned corpse — conjures images of Yves Tanguy-like beaches, where the boundary lines between the real and dream, life and death are vague. "Kitchen Plays," with its chance encounters and dreamlike train journeys, is very Chirico-esque.
Kanai's tales are fragmented and nebulous yet remain vivid in the memory. Smells and objects act as catalysts for narrative. The storyteller becomes a character telling a story about a storyteller. The stories tell of plays and films that are versions of the stories, and vice versa. These interconnected stories are concerned with travel, memory, identity and writing — like Roberto Bolano rewritten in the slow-motion prose of W.G. Sebald. Very good.» - Steve Finbow

«Writing is where you learn to think. Yes, you gather information through reading--about everything from science and the natural world to philosophy--and through your own life experiences and personal observation, but writing is where you work out your own thoughts on the matter. Writing is how you share those thoughts with an audience, especially yourself. Most writers and critics can tell you that sometimes it helps to get thoughts onto the page before seeing where you might want to go with them. Sometimes, merely seeing them offers you the chance to consider what they mean, where they're coming from, how you feel about them. Writing is a path to self-knowledge.
Not in the extremely skilled prose of Japanese author Mieko Kanai, though. In The Word Book writing becomes an act of unknowing, an act of obfuscation. Ideas of self, time, and fact become fugitive issues in Kanai's prose, and she achieves such an inchoate state through writing that is both as logical as a scientific proof and as gossamer ornate as a flower's petal. The tension between these forces, the poetic and the argumentative, gives her work a curious dreaminess, a fleeting mental space that she even describes in her "Fiction," included here:
'The young narrator in the story waits for this apocryphal woman of his memories or imagination at a train station, but through a series of subtle changes in voice and point of view, Kanai slowly alters this story from being about a young man waiting for a woman in a train station to a young author passing his time at an old folks home to an old man at this home who may be a writer trying to make sense of a story of a woman at a train station, a story he feels like he's read before--or maybe even written.'
Kanai's narrators aren't so much unreliable as they are mutating forces of uncertainty. And her prose - in stories whose titles (such as "Vague Departure," "The Time of One's Life," "The Boundary Line") often suggest a built-in prosaic pliability - so elegantly moves from narrative drive to reflective musing and back again, in precise control of tone and mood that makes The Word Book's stories not merely stories, but writings that plumb quotidian consciousness. Such a skillful wooziness recalls the architectural paragraphs of Borges or Robbe-Grillet, only Kanai has an ephemeral sensuality that offsets and compliments her modulated voices, who guide you through mini epics in this crisp, cool collection.» - Bret McCabe

«The short stories in THE WORD BOOK begin with a prosaic remark or observation, typical of how we spend the vast majority our days. For example, the first line of "Fiction" is "The platform was crowded with commuters boarding the 6:58 a.m. train for Tokyo and with high school boys in uniforms, their hair slicked back with pomade." MIEKO KANAI, a well-respected author in her first book to be translated from Japanese into English, takes those mundane starts and delves into complex psychological and philosophical journeys.
When reading her carefully-crafted stories, the reader will experience a vague and restless uneasiness, a subtle but effective way to drive the plot. In "Fiction", a cleverly disconcerting point-of-view shift (from first to third person) makes us reconsider who the story is about, or even if it is truth or fiction. A young man, besotted with a mysterious woman, waits daily at the train platform for her return. But she never arrives and the man leaves disappointed. The story proceeds with a vague dread that perhaps something bad happened to the woman, perhaps that the man did something bad to her. He is staying in a cheap seaside resort inn, where the other visitors speculate that he is a writer, most likely a novelist, perhaps taking a break from writing. In the end, the man's fate is not so much revealed as questioned.
In "The Moon", a husband sets out on an errand at night when the moon is rising. The sight causes memories to bubble up, transporting him back to times in his life when he the moon or weak, pale sunlight held him transfixed in the moment. We wonder why these moments have meaning, and how they tie to the present. In a few pages we come to know him as if we have known him all his life, and feel the weight of his existence.
Kanai's stories, while each is unique, all have a meta-cognitive and meta-narrative experience. The characters, and readers, are thrown into a soup of wonder, sometimes addressed directly, other times revealed obliquely like shadow puppetry. We wonder about their thoughts and our own, and how they relate to the stories unfolding in many layers. Readers will have to consider their role in reading: to answer the characters questions and solve their problems, or perhaps to construct the characters fictional existence.
The settings, characters, and themes could be in Europe or South America, as much as Japan, but perhaps not in America which is often too transparent and requires a more conflict-driven approach to storytelling. Kanai's stories remind me of Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges, with their stylistically vague flatness yet strong character-driven underpinnings. They need to be read in a quiet room to fully appreciate their subtlety and power. But however you read the stories, I highly recommended them and look forward to more.» - Todd Shimoda

«That it has taken 30 years for Japanese writer, Mieko Kanai, to be translated into English seems like a surreal, absurd expansion of time performed in one of her short stories. Kanai's story collection, The Word Book, written in Japanese in 1979 and translated last year by Paul McCarthy, observes the filmy atmosphere of a dream with the objective precision of a scientist. A writer discovers his own words in a rival's notebook. A photographer documents a decaying wall for 20 years. Lives fade "into that strange silence that lies between memory and oblivion." The basic elements of fiction in The Word Book are elegantly fractured to expose new, delicate inner structures.
Perhaps the most interesting experiment Kanai performs is on the element of place. The nameless characters float through strangely familiar urban spaces: empty dining cars, amusement parks deserted in the afternoon, neon-bathed night streets. In abandoning the vernacular, the specificity of place, Kanai creates folktales of the modern, urban world. Her stories could take place in any lonely cityscape - Tokyo, Mexico City, New York. In this way, Kanai might be considered what Eliot Weinberger calls in an essay from Oranges and Peanuts for Sale, a "post-nationalist" writer. Her aesthetic is indifferent to the notion of nation, irreverent to rootedness of place. She is unfettered by the vernacular and so can create bold experiments-narrative voices shifting seamlessly, landscapes mutating, memory melting into the present. In our era of Weltliteratur, we might wonder how nation functions in fiction-do we stay grounded in the provincial, or hover above it? Kanai's translation seems to represent the latter both in form and content.» - Noelle Bodick

"The pink cover of this small paperback might lead one to think that it’s a short collection of chick lit. While it’s true that Kanai Mieko is female, and while it’s true that she has often been classified as a “women writer,” The Word Book is just about as far away from chick lit as you can get. The twelve short stories in this collection are perhaps not so much “stories” as they are prose poems, or perhaps even essays written in the form of short stories. Kanai’s language is gorgeous, and the way she presents her ideas is fascinating. The stories themselves are very loosely structured and don’t follow established narrative patterns.
Kanai’s preoccupation in The Word Book is the writing self, or the self who is speaking, or telling a story. Many of the narrators in this collection are writers, and many of them are trying to explain something that happened in the past. Kanai almost fetishizes her narrators as they write about writing and constantly question their ability to tell a story. Perhaps it happened like this, perhaps it happened differently. Who is writing? Who is telling the story? Is the narrator of the story the same person as the protagonist of the story? Many of these stories have multiple narrators within the span of less than ten pages. A reader is faced with two choices – to either puzzle out who the narrators are and what their relationship to one another might be, or to let the narrative flow wash over him or her and simply accept that the narrator of a story is never a stable or unquestionable entity.
In that each of Kanai’s stories resembles something of an intellectual puzzle, I am reminded of Borges’s Labyrinths. In that Kanai’s stories are filled with a multitude of unreliable narrators who may or may not actually be the same person, I am reminded of Faulkner, especially As I Lay Dying. However, since Kanai is still able to infuse her stories with a sense of place and beauty, I am reminded of Furui Yoshikichi (Ravine and Other Stories, translated by Meredith McKinney), another Japanese writer of mysterious short fiction.
An interesting aspect of Kanai’s prose that I think is undeniably characteristic of her and no one else, however, is her play on gender. Kanai is a woman, but all of her narrators are men. To be more precise, Paul McCarthy has translated all of her narrators as men. I have only read a handful of Kanai’s stories in the original Japanese, but it is my impression that the writer takes full advantage of the ability of the Japanese language to not differentiate gender. Why does Kanai write with exclusively male narrators? Or are her narrators all men? Is she intentionally writing within a masculine narrative realm? If this book did not have a pink front cover and an “about the author” blurb on the back cover, would the reader even know that the author of this collection is a woman? Does it matter?
Meta-textual issues aside, I really enjoyed reading The Word Book because of its narrative sophistication, dreamlike atmosphere, and poetic touch. To illustrate what I like so much about this book, I would like to end with a passage from a story entitled “Fiction:”
'But after awhile, I changed my mind: my guest’s words were as vague as they were clear, spoken by one who expresses by looks or by his whole weak body the scintillating talent of a born poet. Realizing this, I trembled with envy. Bitter as it was to admit, I was envious of those empty words, not understood even by the man who uttered them, those empty words that shone with a soft, rose-colored radiance. Words such as these, shining words bathed in a soft, rose-colored radiance, precisely because of their emptiness lusted after a shameless ecstasy of the sort one can only experience in dreams. And I thought, feeling a kind of despair, “Long ago my words, too, trembled violently in this shining, soft, rose-colored radiance.” - japaneseliterature.wordpress.com

«The stories that comprise The Word Book hold only a fragile grip on reality – and the effect is quietly unsettling. Poet, writer and film-maker Mieko Kanai is, perhaps understandably, concerned about stories: how they are told, how they are composed and what reading them actually means. This could make for heavy, even pretentious reading, but Kanai perfectly judges the balance between the theoretical and the enjoyable.
Like her contemporary Haruki Murakimi, Kanai is more indebted to the western influences of Kafka, Barthelme and Borges than the long traditions of Japanese literature, and this is obvious as the reader weaves through these dreamscapes. The plots are fantastical – a man finds his love rival writing the same journal as he keeps, a boy out running errands discovers he has turned into man – but the writing so exact and precise it feels crushingly real.
Undoubtedly these are stories that take effort and reward re-reading, but they are also playful, occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a deft and subtle collection that should see Kanai reach a much wider audience outside of her native Japan. In fact, the biggest surprise is that it’s taken thirty years for this book to make it to the UK.» - theshortstory.org

Read also: «The Rose Tango by Mieko Kanai»
http://www.untitledbooks.com/fiction/short-stories/rose-tango-by-meiko-kanai/

Hiromi Itō - I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko, I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples

Hiromi Itō, Killing Kanoko, Trans. by Jeffrey Angles (Action Books, 2009)

“KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in finetranslation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, HiromiIto. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies anddelights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures–fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats.” - Anne Waldman

«Hiromi Itō has enjoyed literary acclaim in Japan since the 1980s, particularly after the publication of On TerrItōry 2 (1985) and On TerrItōry 1 (1987), both of which broke new ground in their forthright explorations of the female body, sexuality, and motherhood. Itō grew up with a shamaness grandmother and a mother who “believed in magical spells,” and she extends this spiritual tradition to her own work as a self-proclaimed shamanic poet and performer. Her fascination with Native American poetry and cosmology led her to the ethnopoetic movement and an introduction to Jerome Rothenberg, who encouraged Itō to visit the United States in the early 1990s. She relocated to Encinitas, California, in 1997, and currently divides her time between there and Kumamoto, in southern Japan. Despite sustained literary prominence in Japan, Itō has remained a mostly obscure presence in American poetics.
Sarah Fox: First of all, hats off to Action Books for continuing to shove at the margins of poetic convention with Killing Kanoko, a project deeply rooted in feminist, shamanic, and oral traditions. Not exactly trend ideologies—I suspect that few American poets would feel comfortable aligning themselves with such seemingly sacralized associations.
Lucas de Lima: It’s hard to think of a North American counterpart to Itō, isn’t it? Maybe that has to do with our preoccupations as postmodernists—how, by holding promiscuous linguistic play as our poetic ideal, we aim to disengage from ideology altogether.
SF: Well, I might argue that Anne Waldman and Alice Notley are among Itō’s North American sisters. Both embrace shamanic expression and the vatic. Both also reveal, and re-imagine, the feminine in mythic time, and share a blatant and outraged rejection of patriarchy. Itō contributes to their feminine mythopoesis, and helps model an alternative ideal. Her association with Rothenberg, too, involves her in his advocacy of poetry’s visionary, mystical potential. But I think we both agree that Killing Kanoko kicks some serious ass and is one of the more original collections we’ve come across in awhile.
LdL: Agreed; KK is a force to be reckoned with.
SF: For me, Itō models a truly innovative feminist aesthetic—in terms of both form and content. Readers may be anxious to nose around in the poet’s infanticidal fantasies and scatological excess, and may even wonder how Kanoko, Itō’s actual daughter, feels about all this—I mean, in the book’s title poem Kanoko is despised, and murdered, by her mother! But first, I’m eager to examine Itō’s shamanic framework. Her elevation of poetic objective to shamanic act elicits a complex reading of the more audacious and shocking personal narratives; I might even suggest that the poems have magical intention. If we think of the poetic voice as shamanic, perhaps we could read the text as exorcism, or a ruthless enactment—both cleansing and metaphoric—of repressed cultural impulses.
LdL: Yes, there’s a highly oral, aural, and visionary quality to Itō’s lines, as if they were being transmitted to and through her in real time. Simultaneous rather than linear, Itō’s spatiotemporal reach evokes the shaman as much as the pregnant body. Porous are the boundaries between speaker and subject in her poetry. Take the first poem “Harakiri,” in which homoeroticism foregrounds the ritual suicide by disembowelment that, having once caused Yukio Mishima’s death, now excites a certain Mr. O (the moniker, of course, is a throwback to that classic of S&M literature, The Story of O). Mr. O, we gather from translator Jeffrey Angles’s annotations, acts out scenes of harakiri for erotic pleasure. The speaker, initially merely witness to this subcultural eroticism, seems to occupy Mr. O’s subjectivity through the immediacy of the final lines: the first- and third-person pronouns suddenly disappear in a “weird and kinky” identification/obliteration of voyeur and queer exhibitionist. Ushering in the masturbatory ending, after all, is the line "He said he could commit harakiri face-to-face with a woman, he'd be in seventh heaven." Perhaps the speaker joins her subject through what Saint Genet’s version of shamanism would look like—a sadomasochistic avowal, on all fronts, of sexuality and its regulatory construction. So, participation and perversion. In a way, Itō is very Lady Gaga.
SF: Talk about bad romance! She does share Gaga’s affection for grotesque parody and erotic hyperbole, no doubt. I felt the influence of Kali on the poems’ trajectory of shameless destruction: anarchy as the catalyst for radical transformation. (I’m thinking especially of depictions in which Kali, wearing a necklace of skulls, stands triumphantly on the head of Shiva, her tongue sticking out with irreverent insouciance.) The more redemptive outcomes of destructive events emerge in the book’s final piece, “I Am Anjuhimeko,” which is Itō’s retelling of a Japanese folktale. Originally recited by traveling storytellers, the tale was only recently written down, having been transmitted telepathically, “over 20 centuries,” through a spiritual medium. In this story, a young girl is confronted with a series of horrific tasks—in Itō’s version they involve attempted murder and multiple rapes by various manifestations of the father/taskmaster—on her quest towards shamanic initiation. The story has, in a sense, three narrators—the girl Anjuhimeko, her original storytellers, and the medium, all inhabiting the “I.” By retelling this story, Itō adjoins to the polymorphous “I,” and declares her allegiance to mediumistic and oral forms. Over and over again, the narrator asserts, “I am Anjuhimeko,” a sustained projective identification. The allegorical resonance of Anjuhimeko’s narrative allows Itō to assemble a simulacrum of the book’s collective voice and demonstrate how the mythic mirrors and absorbs the autobiographical. She speaks as both mother and daughter in the narrative’s assorted embodiments of those roles, and consequently recontextualizes, if not converts, the annihilating energy of her more personal revelations—the meaning of destruction in the preceding poems is renegotiated. ”I Am Anjuhimeko,” and hence the book, resolves in gratification: “all I have is language, I respond with language, I respond, and as I respond, I sense the desire of the leech-child I carry on my back slowly being satisfied.” The leech-child is Anjuhimeko’s symbol of salvation—the offspring of a yamanba (trickster witch).
LdL: Notice how one of the manifestations of the father in “Anjuhimeko” is destroyed precisely through his own mirroring: “. . . when he saw his reflection in the water, his mouth was ripped open so wide his lips extended to the back of his neck and his teeth jutted out in every direction. . .” As you suggest, such oral grotesquerie condenses the modus operandi of Itō’s feminist-shamanic project. For her, it’s always necessary to embody, hyperbolize, as well as disfigure phallocentric speech to the point of fatigue or, in this case, violent dissolution. Hence the need for a yamanba to deflate the “huge, huge, huge phallus,” which she lustfully achieves while “completely wrapped up in having intercourse.” Quite a feminine power fantasy, especially when you throw in sublime leech-children.
SF: Yes, it’s an exhilarating finale. I see the yamanba as a vessel for the sublime—she endows Anjuhimeko’s shamanic authority at the end of her “wretched” journey. The yamanba enacts a revised, healed version of feminine sexuality: ecstatically commandeering the now disembodied and powerless object of Anjuhimeko’s abuse (a “rediscovered phallus” she had “located in the past.”) She illustrates uninhibited self-expression (“listen to what kind of voices I make! watch what kind of expressions I make!”), and echoes, in the forfeiture of her offspring, the poet’s infanticidal performance in the book’s title poem. There, Kanoko is like a “leech-child,” who “pilfers my nutrients” and “wants to bite my nipples off.” Itō’s Kali-esque mantra in the poem “Killing Kanoko,” congratulations on your destruction, supports the poet’s objective to liberate herself (by obliterating child, father, husband) in service to language, the channeling of shamanic/poetic utterance. In “I Am Anjuhimeko,” Itō accommodates the full breadth feminine experience—maternal, filial, sexual, victimized, annihilating, nurturing, generative . . .
The poem “Snow” likewise describes a literal shamanic enactment. The speaker observes the ill fate of a rabbit by tracking its footprints alongside those of a fox. She begins to undress, notes that fur has begun to sprout from between her toes, and instantaneously transforms into an animal—as shamans often do on their journeys. “You see that / I am writing / You see that / I want to show it to you . . . / You finish writing and put it away / You don’t seem to want to show me.” Rather than repress (“put away”) confrontation with death, the speaker “want[s] to show it to you,” and does so by actually embodying the metaphor—becoming the rabbit who awaits the devouring fox. The white fox, or kitsune, is a noted trickster figure in Japanese mythology, sometimes associated with the female demon goddesses known as Dakini.
LdL: Don’t tricksters traditionally bring fire, language, and other tools of civilization to humans? It seems Itō assumes the rabbit’s role in order to burrow inside the ambivalent power figure of the fox—literally and figuratively.
SF: Yes, that’s good! She invites her own destruction. Again, the evocation of Kali, the dark feminine force of time, death, and transformation: surrendering oneself in order to transcend the gendered conditions of creation. It’s enacted in almost every poem. Itō ruthlessly evades remorse, rejects decorum, reconfigures ethos, in a vocal register at once demotic and incantatory. Her poems graphically report both the mundane physical details of a woman’s life (pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, masturbation, defecation, leaking fluids, breast infections, diaper rashes, etc.) and the darker edges of feminine desire and despair. In “Logical Like a Baby,” she recounts the chronic diarrhea of her infancy and its corresponding obesity in later childhood (“I was the fattest in my whole grade at school.”) She credits her “cure” from diarrhea to her mother’s post-weaning loss of interest followed by her father’s growing monopolization of her, which “fattens” her. The poem makes transparent early psychological patterning and its persistence in consciousness and family systems. When the father began to interact with her (“Father had not just shown his desire to monopolize me but had started to act upon it”), the mother “started treating me meanly.” Itō elaborates on the psychic extension of early relational patterns by bringing the father as sexual object into the poem’s present, in which both poet and father engage (or do not engage) in writing poetry and in masturbating:
On days I cannot write poetry, I do not masturbate On days father can write poetry, he masturbates On days I can write poetry, I masturbate On days father can write poetry, he masturbates On days I can write poetry, I do not masturbate On days father can write poetry, he masturbates On days I cannot write poetry, I masturbate On days father can write poetry, he masturbates
Variations on these lines repeat—like a refrain, like a child acquiring language—dozens of times in the poem, positioning the banal events of physical daily life and its privacies alongside the complex interplay of psychic presences and pressures. The Oedipal drama of Itō’s childhood is transposed onto Kanoko, whose own chronic diarrhea makes “the area from her rectum all the way to her labia began to grow inflamed.” Kanoko “[pulls] at her own labia. / In other words, she couldn’t stand not touching herself.” At this point, Kanoko’s father (“Daddy” in the poem) enters the narrative, to masturbate or not masturbate, to cause the speaker to get fat or not get fat, to prompt Kanoko herself to “[masturbate] for Daddy” and “[get] fat for Daddy” and “[have] diarrhea for Daddy.” Here, Itō underscores the inevitable philos/aphilos between mother and daughter—from both perspectives—as it arises specifically in response to the father’s monopolizing interventions.
LdL: Like Pasolini before her, Itō posits the body as a site of transgression as well as destruction. Hers is a message of shit in a culture of death. The body is so pronounced, exaggerated, its capacities and failures constantly rehearsed, that it stands in for poetry. Or better yet, poetry’s flailing puppetry. It’s no coincidence that the text insists on linking poetic composition and masturbation—both circumscribed, self-involved, yet potentially seditious acts—so intimately. In other words, the body enacts the limitations of signification while providing a way through the latter: a means of momentarily irrupting our subjection to language. I think this possibility for extralinguistic excess is the occasion for “Logical Like a Baby,” especially in light of the poem’s frame in childhood and the thwarted pursuit of a coherent, precultural, prelinguistic self.
SF: Do you think the speaker reclaims autonomy over language, and body, by finally eliminating the father from her incantations? The poem’s closing word, “iiyoo,” is actually Kanoko’s: iiyoo repeated in eleven one-word lines, a kind of tail. “The day the diarrhea stopped, Kanoko started to say iiyoo.” In his notes, Angles describes iiyoo as a “childish pronunciation of the words meaning ‘That’s nice’ or ‘That’s good.’” It’s not a proper Japanese word at all, but rather, as you note, a prelinguistic projection of meaning and/or self-identification—the baby’s native logic undistorted by cultural determinism.
LdL: Yep, Itō’s sheer use of repetition suggests just how hard-earned the speaker’s autonomy is in the end. For me, though, such reiteration is as boring as it is heroic. Whereas repetition for a Language poet might serve as an anti-closural device that loosens and proliferates meaning, in Itō’s writing its primary quality is tedium. This isn’t to say that her poetry’s echoes stagnate. On the contrary, they’re uncannily generative because of their dullness, like hypnosis gone awry. Itō, to invert Baudelaire’s phrase, creates an oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Even in a refrain as ironic and damning as “Congratulations on your destruction,” the speaker explodes the negative space of death by filling the page with it. That line—a stand-out from the title poem—achieves, above all, the paradoxical effect of propagation by naming its Other again and again. Call it a backwards biology, if you will.
SF: The structure of repetition also accommodates the multiple projections and thematic mirroring throughout the book, most notably between Itō and Kanoko—the infant girl reflecting the infantilized mother/wife, in one sense, and thus the object of infanticidal fantasy as explored in “Killing Kanoko.” Itō recognizes, in Kanoko, both a reflection and a product of a culturally prescribed identity, and the poem seeks a mutual destruction where identity and infantilism are “disposed of.” At the same time, Itō exposes—as an ideally cathartic event—suppressed maternal fury in response to an infant’s demands on body, time, and autonomy (“Kanoko eats my time. . . Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit. . . I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko”). Her acknowledgment of an essential hatred for her infant recalls Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough” mother, one who provides reasonably successful attachment for her child by accepting, rather than repressing, her emotional ambivalence. Also, Melanie Klein’s concept of the “devouring mother” whose breast is met by the “devouring infant”—a reflective sadism co-existing with the sexual, emotional, and physical gratifications of breastfeeding for both mother and infant. In “Killing Kanoko,” Itō channels a collective maternal rage—for which she continually congratulates herself—with shamanic ceremony that in its fanaticism has, as you suggest, a paradoxical cleansing effect. I’m reminded of the medieval women mystics who professed great gratitude to God for “killing off” their children so that they could devote themselves entirely to spiritual merger.
LdL: Infanticide in the poem is tantamount to exorcism, consisting in a kind of passionate detachment. By killing Kanoko, Itō not only liberates herself for her own poetic-shamanic pursuits, but she also frees her daughter from future enslavement to motherhood and phallocentrism. It’s also possible that Itō is liberating herself by allowing the text to subsume the narrative voice. Kanoko’s name overshadows the “I” on the page, amplifying and complicating the drama of individuation you’ve identified, in which Itō lives and Kanoko dies. Notice the multiple “Kanokos” on the same page where an “I” alone constitutes a line. If doubleness, in the Freudian sense of the word, is a harbinger of death as well as unfulfilled, but possible, futures, we could say that the text also entertains the idea of Kanoko killing her mother. All in all, a pretty radical disruption of the ideologically inscribed mother-daughter dynamic.
SF: It certainly is. The poem, in fact, employs two narrating voices—in separate columns—and also engages in intertextual conversation (with Magda Denes’ book In Necessity and Sorry: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital), reiterating its doubleness. We might think of “Coyote” as the antidote, or alternative power structure, to “Killing Kanoko.” Here, Kanoko’s affiliation with the mythical coyote produces a multivalent cultural re-imagining. Itō alludes to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance piece, when he isolated himself in a small room with a coyote for three days. Itō addresses her own sympathies with Native American mythology through her enlistment of the coyote figure (equivalent here to the fox/kitsune of “Snow”), while also paying homage to her matrilineal shamanic heritage. Kanoko’s exchange with the coyote confirms her birthright to intuitive rapport with the animal world (where Beuys separated himself from the coyote by erecting physical boundaries, Kanoko and the coyote—at least in the world of the poem—enjoy an unobstructed interchange).
LdL: “Coyote,” in this sense, displaces Beuys’s performance onto the feminized familial scene. If Beuys was apologizing to the coyote—thereby indirectly and symbolically apologizing to Native Americans overall—Itō is apologizing to Kanoko for letting her leave the womb and initiating her into culture. But Kanoko’s exchange with the coyote—centered on their collaborative and nearly nonsensical revision of the Buddhist “Heart Sutra”—pollutes as much as it purifies. Coyote and child don’t recite the mantra correctly because they are themselves re-signifying what it is to be female, victim, and most controversially of all, human. Kanoko, by virtue of her contact with the coyote, lives the dream of dehumanization. The agent of spiritual invention and cultural transformation, she calls to mind Europe’s enfants sauvages, or wolf-children, whose flight from civilization collapsed our most fundamental categories of identity.
SF: Notably, the father’s participation is considerably diminished in “Coyote.” Itō attributes a slightly altered quotation from Beuys to the father: “I wanted to concentrate just on the coyote / I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing other than the coyote / And I wanted to trade places with him.” She insinuates that unlike Kanoko, or the feminine generally, the father is denied access to animistic merger. He “insulates” himself against chthonic interplay and subsequently stands outside of the drama. That’s more or less all we hear from him in this poem, although Itō catalogues extensive biographical details of daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. Elsewhere in the book, “my father is everywhere,” as violent obstruction to feminine autonomy. In “Father’s Uterus, Or the Map,” Itō describes a room in which the father’s “various body parts / Are stuffed into various bottles,” among them an exhibit of his “uterus that had grown teeth.” The father’s body: dismantled and reduced to relic, his feminine or maternal aspect (uterus) not only floating around in formaldehyde, but rigged to devour (in this case, and from his vantage, one assumes the teeth are a threat to the father himself—if he gets too close, that nasty uterus will eat him up). His “insulation” from somatic intelligence in favor of a clinically verifiable (cartographical) system reflects his antagonism towards nature itself, which he denigrates to the symbolically feminine. In Itō’s vision, the father is explicitly abstracted. As a map for navigating the underlying configuration of dominant culture, it’s a pretty dismal picture.
But Itō transcends this in “I Am Anjuhimeko”—indeed, she symbolically situates Kanoko (as “leech-child”) at the threshold of matriarchal renaissance. Here, the revisionist heroine is subjected to patriarchy, completely violated—literally raped—by it, but exploits those abuses for transformational gain.
LdL: Indeed. Anjuhimeko breaks the shackles of patriarchy by becoming a woman with shamanic agency. In response to the leech-child’s desire, she recognizes language and poetry as instruments of her shamanic technology. In this affirmative scenario, mother and child empower and complete each other by symbolically feeding and gratifying one another. The outcome, then, of individuation is equanimity: a reclamation of relationship and matrilineal rites/rights. “I Am Anjuhimeko” thus declares the book’s transgressive ethical core by ultimately redeeming motherhood, feminine sexuality, and sexual otherness as sources of transcendence. And by conjuring, on the page, a shamanic performance, Itō opens a channel for healing to her readers—at least those brave enough to celebrate the potency of her shadowy revelations.
SF: In addition to its many aesthetic and intellectual pleasures, Itō’s poetry has practical applications and wide-ranging cultural relevance. While the agents of empire blithely congratulate themselves on their increasingly perilous acts of planetary destruction, poets like Hiromi Itō locate in poetry’s ancient but ever-present and life-affirming technologies a powerful mode of resistance as well as a vehicle for cultural and personal transformation. It might be reasonable to consider whether we can accept anything less from the poetry of our times. Killing Kanoko is a stunning achievement, one that will surely inspire continued translation of Itō’s oeuvre, and establish her as a significant presence in American poetry.» - Lucas de Lima and Sarah Fox

«Hiromi Ito's poetry is often described as "shamanistic," and indeed, according to translator Jeffrey Angles, when she performs her poems she sometimes "sits on the floor like a shamaness and raps on a drum." That sort of thing, along with the insistence — often asserted but seldom supported — that oral poetry is more authentic than poetry on the page, can grow tiresome pretty quickly. Unless, that is, the poet doing the drumming has real talent. Hiromi Ito, no bongo-beating poseur, does.
The first thing to note is that she has more than one arrow in her quiver. She does do shamanistic outpourings, but in addition she produces poems in an austere style that display considerable delicacy and finesse. "So as Not to Distort," for example, is a love poem, simply written, but never simply romantic. The woman narrating the poem, eating sweets with her lover, revels in their love but is also aware of the risks love entails:
Then the two of us Bring together our syrupy mouths Slide the palms of our hands Moving them in the shape of love But You know I don't want to distort I don't want to be distorted This is what I think, oh man, my man. The deliberation with which Ito renders a lover's joy, hesitation, pleasure and fear reassures readers that, in poems where she has chosen a style more elaborate and emotional, it is a choice — it's not all she can do.
When Ito decides, as she often does, to write poems (as Angles puts it) "narrated in extended, sometimes even unwieldy passages of relatively colloquial text," the issues that elicit this inelegant style are often drawn from Ito's deep immersion in feminism, and inspire poetic responses that must have been shocking in the 1980s, when many of these poems first appeared. Consider, for example, the first stanza of the poem "Postpartum":
Childbirth was not dying nor defecating Childbirth was just a very painful period For the thirty-seven hours from beginning to end I kept on bleeding just as if I were having a period I wanted to change my maxi pad, change it right away I was constantly aware of my anus but I knew I didn't have to defecate
The pain was unpleasant The pain was unpleasant Dying was unpleasant Unpleasant.
That the poem mentions defecation, menstruation and even maxi pads must have been unsettling enough for some, but even more shocking would have been Ito's demystification of childbirth. It's a mess, to be sure, but it is neither the most painful thing a woman will experience nor the acme of her existence. In Ito's most notorious poem, "Killing Kanoko," she continues her debunking of the fairy tales told about women's lives by writing frankly about killing her daughter.
Also concerned with women's lives is the long poem that concludes the collection, "I Am Anjuhimeko." Based on the words of an early-20th-century medium, it is the most shamanistic of the poems included in "Killing Kanoko." Angles claims that Ito uses the shamaness' words as "the point of inspiration for a dramatic new myth of healing and self-discovery," but one shouldn't let this description, evocative of an Oprah's Book Club selection, put one off. Angles is not wrong, but neither is his summary sufficient to describe Ito's version of the Shamaness' words and the need Ito has to speak them, a need she likens to a leech-child on her back: "The only way I have to respond is language, all I have is language, I respond with language, I respond, and as I respond, I sense the desire of the leech-child I carry on my back slowly being satisfied."
Readers of "Killing Kanoko" will not be satisfied. They will thirst for more from Hiromi Ito.» - David Cozy

"Ito's poems on motherhood often describe the physicality involved in child rearing as well as the spiritual,her poems also explore eroticism, hara-kiri, gender,childbirth and also included in the collection is the short story/prose poem, 'I am Anjuhimeko' a fable-like piece that tells of the ordeals,travels and sufferings of a young girl, abused and exiled from her mother by her father(s), searching for Tennoji,this allegoric story also incorporates the yamanba from Japanese folklore.
The use of language is looked at in differing ways in the poems,not only as a means of expression,as in the poem 'Happy Destroying' Ito explores her experiences visiting and living in other countries and examines the perspectives and perceptions associated within different usages of the Japanese language,and that of being an outsider.'Trans-Population' is a poem concerned with dislocation and rootlessness, about moving away from your birth place and the things you take with you when you leave, the deterioration of things left behind,the passing of time,and a slight suffocation to the associations and language that are inherited with it. Observations of her daughter often provoke memories of Ito's own childhood,(and likewise the other way around), as in the poem Tennoji,as Jeffrey Angles points out in his notes that Tennoji temple is well known as being a place of physical and psychological salvation,Ito recalls a circle drawn in chalk as part of a childhood game thirty years ago, the chalk circle acts as a metaphorical link within the poem and it's feelings of security,and ponders what happened to the boy who drew it.
There are controversial poems here and also observational poems like Snow and So As Not To Distort - a poem about preparing shiratama and the desire to preserve a pure love,also the more fragmentary poem The White Cat that Shone Like Sunlight.Hiromi Ito has won numerous prizes for her poetry including the Takami Jun Prize and recently the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize,perhaps a full novel will see translation soon.» - nihondistractions.blogspot

«I’ve been reading this book in bursts for over a month now and it’s already become one I keep going back to for the way the repetition of her sounds get in my hair and mouth. Being a big fan of baby destruction, these poems freak even me out, being an actual mother invoking her daughter’s body and birth experience in the most crushing and yet hilarious and moving forms.
Ito invokes the mother body, the body as map site, as destruction site, as repetition module, as network of networks and of sound. She speaks freely of masturbation and of death in the same breathing, making poems that work not to core out some central heart, but that are the heart: beating, squirting, sound in face. If I had found these instead of Ginsberg at 16 I might not still be alive, which to me at 30 is a gift.
Ito calls you out. Ito can gross out the gross outers, and yet not in the shock shlock maneuvers of flash film and violence for violence, but in being plain about it, in repeating, in pressing on you with through the paper, in an interiority, in saying what and where she is. I mean it made me sometimes go, “Goddamn. Jeez,” which is more than I can ask for at this point. This is a book of many years in one place; it goes.
Ito’s so serious she even has ringtones of her language. Beat that, America.» - Blake Butler

«...This brings me to Hiromi Ito, a Japanese poet and author of Killing Kanoko, who, according to translator Jeffrey Angles, represents something “strikingly original in both style and content” and reveals perspectives of Japanese women and Japanese feminists. “Her poems so skillfully capture the idiosyncrasies of spoken language that they often give the illusion that they are pouring directly from the mouth of some narrator onto the page.” When I read the “narrative” piece, “I Am Anjuhimeko,” I thought immediately of Pinocchio. A horrific adventure takes place. A baby is buried. “[W]hen she was buried, the last thing I saw was her ear, a big, big, big ear, I could see the sand pouring into it so I took the hollow stalk of a reed and stuck it in the hole in her ear, and that was the last I saw of her, the hole was all filled in.” The baby survives, escapes. The baby stands in for women and families and patriarchy and despair and culture. The baby becomes a slave for a man. “Then the man saunters nonchalantly over and torments me, telling me, Anjuhimeko, suck on this, so I suck on it hating it the whole time [.]” The lines between points-of-view are blurry. Anjuhimeko receives a “Leech-Child.” The moments of her journey and her mother’s perspective suck on the body.
[T]he leech-child has no language so the meanings of all the words I say just slide over the slippery surface of intention of what I am trying to convey, or perhaps they are absorbed directly into the intention, I don’t know what to say, but the leech-child’s desire to know conveys itself to me, and I respond with language, the only way I have to respond is language, all I have is language, I respond with language, I respond, and as I respond, I sense the desire of the leech-child I carry on my back slowly being satisfied
I want to note that I was reading this “journey” while on the bus, in motion, sometimes stopped; I think there’s more here than just the transgressive nature of the imagery and content (and the book is packed with sexuality and infanticide and the splitting open of women to give birth to death). There’s the invitation. The reader enters the text as if with her own body. The reading experience is an adventure. It’s like not wanting to awaken from a nightmare -- because the “world” of the experience is both yours and not yours. What better response can there be to the terror of living in this world?» - Olivia Cronk