This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems, Rin Ishigaki: A Review

This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems, Rin Ishigaki (edited and introduced by Janine Beichman), Isobar Press, 2022, ISBN 978-4-907359-41-6, £15.04

With the publication of Rin Ishigaki’s selected poems, Isobar Press continue my education in 20^th century Japanese poetry. Ishigaki’s story is a peculiarly Japanese one, it seems to me. Born in 1920, she seems to have had a conventional enough Shinto upbringing with one exception; from an early age she wrote and published her writings in magazines aimed specifically at young female writers. As she did not collect any of these early poems, they do not feature here.

As was the case for so many of her compatriots, defeat in 1945 changed everything as she discovered that all she had been brought up to believe about her country was built on lies.

She had, by then, been working in a bank for a number of years, and under occupation, workers were unionised, with the happy result that unions became significant publishers of their members’ writings, including Ishigaki’s poems.

The first poem in the book, ‘Greetings’, was a Union commission published in a ‘wall newspaper’ over the table where her fellow workers clocked in each morning. The poem, written in 1952, is a shocked response to the first photographs of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing seven years earlier:

Oh, this face
so horribly burned
one of the hideous burns of the 250,000
people who were in Hiroshima
on August 6 1945

is no longer in this world

and yet
dear friend
look again at our faces
as we turn to each other
today’s healthy faces
morning’s fresh and open faces
that show no trace of the fires of war

We see here, among other things, a turning away from the nation as focus of loyalty to the ‘friends’ addressed, the collective represented by the Union, by her colleagues in the bank. We also, I think, see Ishigaki’s accommodation with Japanese free verse, and its roots in the work of Walt Whitman and his direct address to the reader, the celebration of the ordinary, and the social awareness.

As well as her colleagues, Ishigaki’s main loyalty during the post-war years was to her family of two brothers, father, stepmother and one grandfather. As the sole wage-earner, the family were dependent on her, as she was dependent on her job in the bank, and these dependencies soon became paired burdens for the independently minded poet. These tensions are reflected in such poems as ‘Poverty’, ‘The Pay Envelope’ and ‘Roof’:

Japanese houses have low roofs
the poorer the family, the lower the roof,

the lowness of this roof

weighs me down

There’s also a subversive celebration of traditional ‘women’s work’, as in the title poem from her first collection, ‘Before Me the Soup Pot the Rice Pot and the Bright Burning Flame’:

with feeling as deep
as when with these cherished vessels
we cook meat and potatoes,
let’s study politics and economics and literature,

not for the sake of pride or glory but
all and always
to provide sustenance for human beings
all and always our efforts infused with love

Later on, in ‘Nursery Rhyme’ from her 1968 book Nameplates and More, the act of cooking becomes associated with death and the dissolution of the family unit:

When Daddy died they laid
a white cloth on his face

Just like the white tea towel that’s laid
on the food cooked for dinner

Everyone was crying
so I realized, Daddy must taste awful,
awful enough to make them cry

This poem also shows us something of Ishigaki’s surrealistic streak, the world seen aslant, sometimes through the eyes of her inner child. It’s an approach that, in translation at least, is all the more effective for being understated.

In 1970, Ishigaki’s desire for individual freedom won out, and she moved out of the family home into a small apartment where she was to live out her days. The title poem of Nameplates and More prefigures this move with its insistence on proper naming, nothing superfluous, and of owning the process of naming:

Miss
the Honorable
a hex on them both,

wherever you live nothing comes close
to attaching the nameplate with your own two hands

This move from group to individual identity is reflected the poem ‘After the Ceremony’, which opens with the awarding of medals to the families of soldiers who died in WWII, more than 20 years earlier. But in the third stanza, the poem takes a typical Ishigaki turn, as the dead soldiers appear:

The soldiers who died with their eyes open
throng in belatedly, saying
oh, look
it’s the great Empire of Japan
all the old familiar faces are here

How good to see you in fine health, General
we are here at your service
There may not be another chance so please
hand out the medals to us in person

They’re no use to our wives and children
Atten-shun!

The quiet anger of the dead is aimed as much at their suppression as individuals as it is at the Empire that caused their deaths. In a sense, they are demanding their own nameplates. The poem also reflects her enduring opposition to war and the systems that enabled it.

There is something of the early William Carlos Williams in these poems of the everyday, but Ishigaki brings her female perspective and acute sense of the absurd to proceedings, and, in a number of poems, also draws on her Japanese literary heritage in interestingly unselfconscious ways. In a culture with a long tradition of women poets, se represents a vital continuity.

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Once again, I am indebted to Isobar for furthering my education in Japanese poetry, and this is another volume that English-speaking readers with an interest in the rest of the poetic world would do well to read. I’m also left pondering the problems associated with reading translations from a totally unknown language, especially one like Japanese where the sound values are so different to those of English. Janine Beichman is to be thanked for the work she has done in bringing Rin Ishigaki’s poems over as very readable English texts, and it is through no fault of hers that we are left guessing as to the verbal music of the originals. It is, for me at least, a problem without an easy solution.