Ayukawa Nobuo’s “America & Other Poems”

Ayukawa Nobuo was born in Tokyo in 1920 between an influenza epidemic and a major earthquake, and died in Tokyo in 1985 while playing Super Mario Brothers. He served in the Japanese Imperialist army, and rebelled against Japanese post-World War II poetry’s tendency to protest the atomic bomb and the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nobuo thought Japanese writing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a means to forgot about Japan’s Imperalist past. Nobuo was a larger than life figure and his essays and social criticism was better known and more influential than his actual poems. Translators Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz provide excellent poems in English, and Kaya Press’s rare foray into publishing translations of Asian literature are well spoken for here in this collection.

While Nobuo was influenced by American and European Modernism, there is always an involvement with the personal in his work. Although Nobuo turned away from traditional Japanese poetic forms and subjects, such as nature and personal emotions, there is a striking resemblance between Nobuo and that of his Japanese romantic peers who wrote in traditional forms. In fact Nobuo, with his involvement with self, even in his political poems, resembles Ishikawa Takuboku and Yosano Akiko in their introspection, and tendency towards confession.

Ayukawa Nobuo’s political poems, such as “Army Comrades,” are important and interesting:

We quietly went on our mission towards the enemy.
We would become bones as night came to an end.
Where has that dispassionate belief gone?
That incarnation of purity that flows into the horizon,
believing in the honor of the motherland
and love for our brethren–
where did it disappear?

The speaker no longer believes in the “honor of the motherland,” but it seems to me that nothing is explicitly (or implicitly) stated in terms of Japan’s Imperialist position. Nobuo wrote a lot about war and his experiences as a soldier during World War II, but perhaps the larger context of these experiences were materialized in his essays.

Because Nobuo, like most Japanese writers, in my opinion, excel at thinking small to arrive at large experiences (Basho, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto), I think his smaller lyric meditations written in old age are the most natural. But Nobuo is far more articulate and insightful than me in exploring cultural differences. This is his short lyric, “About Love”–

I’m Japanese
so I don’t like to say
or hear
the word love.

I’ve never told
a woman
I love you
and I’ve never been told
by a woman
I love you
so why is it
that I consider myself lucky?

If the words I love you
had spilled from my mouth,
I would have been ruined by now.
A liar’s forked tongue
cannot survive the utterance
of a single honest phrase.

People from the West say I love you
out of habit.
They might even say I love you
instead of good morning.
but the purity of the words has been lost.
Is love just a formality?
Differences of customs and feelings
are inevitable.
Despite the abudance of foreign influences,
I can’t seem to make the word love
my own.

If I had,
I would have been ruined by now.

The word love,
which means “unconditional,”
frightens me, even now.
It shakes me to the core…

If everything I own
is taken from me,
I can’t complain.
If everything I ask for
is given to me,
I can’t complain.

Facing this inexplicable contract,
there’s nothing to do
but keep my mouth shut.

Locked in the heart,
forbidden,
the ai
in my Japanese love
is still
a virgin.

This poem reminds me of something Chris Abani said in a Creative Nonfiction seminar at UC Riverside: that the important poets and writers to read were not Americans, but Asian, European, African, and Latin American. No American poet could investigate the word for love in another culture without a level of exoticization, but Nobuo’s glance at the way Westerners use the word “love” is natural because of the globalization of the English language and the Westernization of the world. That Nobuo discovers at the end of the poem that the “ai” or “love” in his “Japanese love” is “still/a virgin” is remarkable, because of the dual ambiguity and straightforward presentation of this conclusion. It’s not that Nobuo’s “ai,” or “love,” is still “a virgin,” but rather–the speaker’s Japanese sense of love that is embodied in his Japanized sense of the Western idea of love doesn’t exist in the world yet, beyond the level in which the speaker has conceived of these differences. But the poem implies that the speaker’s sense of Japanese “ai” embodied in the Western idea of “love” will become a part of his experience in the world, i.e. virgins lose their virginity at some point. It might be too much to state that the speaker’s “love” is becoming Westernized, or a hybrid thing.

Nonethless Ayukawa Nobuo is one of the most fascinating figures in Modern Japanese literature, and no doubt Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz’s translation will be followed by many others in the years to come.

America & Other Poems
Ayukawa Nobuo
translated by Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz
Kaya Press, $14.95 2008

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