Review of This Overflowing Light by Rin Ishigaki Isobar Press 2022, Selected and Translated by Janine Beichman
Rin Ishikigaki who died in 2004 was an important and widely loved Japanese poet who published many individual poems and four collections of poetry. A young adult during the Second World War, she not only experienced the traumas of that war, but of the shocking exposure and collapse of Japan's totalitarian wartime ideology. Most unconventionally, she remained single, ultimately living alone in her own flat, supporting herself and family members by working in a bank. Sharply observant of both the world of facticity and of our ever-present dreams and nightmares, her work is at once full of affection and absolutely unshrinking.
Opening this book at random, I reread a poem that seems simply to capture an idyllic moment. The poet stands on a steamship, an apple in her hand. But while 'The Sea and Apples' does have something of the charm of a children's picture book it is, read in the context of The Overflowing Light, extraordinarily rich and paradoxical.
The Sea and Apples
A steamship is passing along the coast of western Izu
from a bus on the cliff looking down
you'd see what seems....................a green field on a quiet day
but it is really the sea
a glittering green surface
and slowly, a small boat moving across it
I was in that boat,
the deck was plenty big enough for me
the sea was brimful to the boat's gunwale
the sea was brimful to the shore too
in the palm of my hand I happily held
a red apple
larger than my palm and just the right weight
October, an autumn overflowing with ripe apples
and a boat supported by the tides
and me supported by the boat
Oh sea
I felt the weight in the palm of my hand,
in the distance Fuji was standing
cloudless
I was standing on the deck
everything swayed
a steamship is passing by the coast of western Izu,
from a village path you'd see it disappear behind a tiny island
it's small, that boat
So there we have it. A moment in October, in fine weather, on a boat (specifically a steamship), on the sea, near a cliff and an island, Mt Fuji in the distance, when "I happily held/ a red apple". Apparently, everything centres upon the apple, on the palm, of the person, on the boat, on the sea as seen by the poet. That includes the other sightlines at work – those of the imagined passengers in the bus and the imagined watcher on the village path. By the subtle insertion of their convergent points of view, the reader, at once, holds the vision of the apple and the outward gaze that has already taken in and not forgotten the full sweep of the surroundings. Added to this is a feeling of happiness and the sensation of the weight of the apple.
Time, place, situation, mood could not be clearer, the poet's world seems complete and integrated, but literally and metaphorically "everything swayed". The green field is really the sea, the island is tiny, the boat small, but of course only relatively speaking. For the poet "the deck was plenty big enough for me".
It is a truism that any (perfect) moment is on the edge of its own dissolution. I hope she will eat the apple. And yet if she does it will be torn apart and crushed to pulp by her teeth, processed by her digestive system and turned into sustenance and shit.
Ten poems further on in This Overflowing Light comes the eating and its consequences
Living
You can't live without eating
Rice
vegetables
meat
air
light
water
parents
siblings
teachers
money and hearts too
Without eating them I could never have lived
I pat my full stomach
wipe my lips
the kitchen is littered
with carrot tops
chicken bones
Daddy's guts
the fading light of forty
For the first time my eyes weep a wild beast's tears
For me these two poems are related in a yin yang manner – the brightness of one contains the darkness of the other and vice versa. But 'The Sea and Apples' is not only linked to 'Living', but to many of the other poems in the book.
Limiting myself to the first eight, I see the first contains the word 'hands'; the third 'Oceans'; the fourth 'hands'; the fifth 'overflowing', 'flooded shores' and 'hand'; the sixth 'overflowing springs' and 'ocean, mountains, sky'; the eighth 'an apple with its red skin' and 'weight' and so on. Traces of 'Living' are similarly found in 'eyes' in the first poem; 'money' in the second; 'bellies' in the third; 'carrots' in the fourth; 'light' in the sixth and in the eighth. This dense interweaving not only works at the level of vocabulary. Buoyancy, shrewdness and distress – often via the paradox that food is at once the source of our life and its pleasure and of our inescapable death-dealing – keep transforming into one another.
These translations repay much rereading while the introduction is very helpful and informative. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in poetry or in twentieth century Japan.
- Alice Wanderer
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Alice Wanderer lived for many years in Japan and has been engaged with haiku since 1995. Her PhD on Sugita Hisajo and her haiku is available through Monash University. Her small volume of translations Lips Licked Clean was published by Red Moon Press and won a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award in 2021. Alice's recent chapbook, Flow, a collection of 23 haibun is available from Ginninderra Press.
Information on how to buy a copy of This Overflowing Light is available from https://isobarpress.com/titles/this-overflowing-light/
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