Читать книгу The Haiku Apprentice - Abigail Friedman - Страница 10

Traveling Man Tree’s invitation arrived in the mail about a month later. The Numamomo haiku group, it read, would next meet at the Goyōtei, in the town of Numazu, on Saturday, October 5, from one to five in the afternoon. I had no idea what Numamomo or Goyōtei meant, and no one I asked at my office had ever been to Numazu. One of my colleagues, a native of Tokyo, said with a tone of disdain, It must be one of those small towns in the countryside somewhere. After some searching, I found the town on the map. It looked to be about an hour and a half west of Tokyo by train, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji.

That Saturday, leaving my family behind, I took the bullet train out of Tokyo to Mishima, the transfer point to popular tourist destinations south on the Izu Peninsula. It was the first time since having children that I was taking a trip unrelated to work, alone. I traveled so much for my job that it was hard for me to leave my family simply for pleas­ure. But the train sped along and I began to relax, catching glimpses from my window of the surface of the bay glimmering in the sun, stretching out toward the horizon. An apartment building whizzed into sight, blocking my view of the sea. Moments later it was gone, and the sea and curve of the horizon reappeared. Another building appeared, blocked the sea, became a blur, and vanished in a blink.

How strange life is! Fifteen years ago, I was sitting in a bed at Dr. Takahara’s Lady Clinic holding my newborn son, wondering how I had ended up in Hiroshima and what it all meant. I was far from home and did not know the first thing about babies. I pored over child-rearing manuals as if they were science textbooks, trying to figure out why my baby was crying. I had spent four years in college studying the history of science and another three years studying law, and now I was supposed to intuitively know how to handle a baby.

One evening, my husband came home and, as he watched me struggling to breastfeed our son, sighed, I don’t think this housewife role is right for you. You really should follow up with the Foreign Service. I had passed the Foreign Service exam before leaving the United States but had been lackadaisical in pursuing the option. I was having a hard time picturing myself as a diplomat. I recalled the scene well: our colicky baby had bit me, squirmed, and started to cry. Well, maybe you are right, I said, handing him the baby. A few months later we booked train tickets to Tokyo, so that I could complete my application there. Soon after that, I entered the Foreign Service.

I thought that once I joined the Foreign Service we would come back to Japan. Instead we were sent to the Azores, windswept islands in the middle of the Atlantic. After that our life became a series of checkerboard moves, with assignments in Washington, Tokyo, Washington, Paris, and again Tokyo. Fifteen years, seven moves, and two more children later, I was back in Japan sitting on a train, this time heading out of Tokyo, past beautiful scenery, toward a town and people I did not know. I was midway through my second Japan assignment and no more certain of where I fit in the world as the day when, cradling my crying baby in Hiroshima, I first decided to join the Foreign Service. I had a great job, three energetic children, and a husband I loved dearly. So why was I still in a restless search? What was I looking for? The sea disappeared and appeared and disappeared again.

I was one of only a handful of passengers who changed trains at Mishima that day for the local to Numazu, in the foothills of Mount Fuji, far from the peninsula’s luxurious beaches and mountain retreats. We rattled past cement-block buildings, laundry lines, and electric wires, arriving at a forlorn station with two bare platforms and no roof overhead. I had expected clean, crisp views of Mount Fuji from the train. Instead, the only image of the mountain I saw was in the station when I got off the train, splashed on posters advertising everything from English-language institutes to cut-rate business hotels. Outside, too, images of Fuji adorned the stands near the station that sold dried fish snacks and bean-paste-filled sweets. In Numazu, Japan’s most famous mountain was reduced to a marketing device.

In front of the station, I found and got on the bus for Goyōtei, that still-mysterious destination. Like the train, the bus was almost empty. A thin old man in worn, shiny pants sat close to the driver at the front. A little further back, another elderly man in a faded fedora and a once-fine suit sat patiently waiting for the bus to start. A desultory young woman in a soft red leather Italian jacket and a knee-length black wool skirt stepped onto the bus. She looked around, found a seat far from all of us, and marked her territory by placing a large leather bag on the empty seat beside her.

I tried to guess which of my fellow passengers might be going to the Goyōtei for a haiku session. Other than my brief acquaintance with Traveling Man Tree, I had no sense of what a contemporary Japanese haiku writer might look like. The only other person I knew who wrote haiku was a French woman I had met five years earlier, when I was posted to Paris. Until then, “haiku” was just one more poetic term, like “sonnet” or “iambic pentameter,” tucked away in a drawer in my mind marked “poetry,” ready for me to pull out in the event that a conversation ever turned to that subject. But my friend from France, Elizabeth Guinsbourg, wrote haiku. She showed me a journal she kept in her purse, where she jotted down haiku as they came to mind. Writing haiku for her was a spontaneous, uncomplicated act.

pluie bienvenue si

je ne songe pas à regretter

le soleil d’hier

rain welcome if

I don’t think to regret

yesterday’s sunshine

métro: un type porte

une vieille selle de vélo dans

une cage à oiseaux

subway: some guy is

carrying an old bike saddle

inside a birdcage

dans une vitrine en

passant j’ai vu le visage

de la fille qui t’aime

in a window in

passing I saw the face of

the girl who loves you

ELIZABETH GUINSBOURG

(both French and English)

Elizabeth had already published one book of haiku and by the time I left France she was well underway on her second. She was a strikingly handsome woman with black eyes glowing with artistic passion. If anyone on the bus was a haiku writer, I was sure it must be the classy woman in the red leather jacket.

The light changed and the bus lurched forward. Numazu was unremarkable in every way. We passed coffee shops with ersatz French names, a shop selling plastic buckets, a string of fast-food restaurants, and a row of car dealers. I began to regret wasting my first holiday without my family on this town.

From somewhere above my head the silken, recorded voice of a woman purred the name of each stop. When I was growing up in the America of the 1960s, the recorded voice of machines or movie documentaries was always optimistic, matter-of-fact, confident, and male. Sometime in the 1980s, the voice became assertive, instructive, and female. The voice of early postwar Japan, which I knew from documentaries, had been bright, sunny, and male. Today, on this bus, as everywhere in Japan, the recorded voice was young, cute, and female. Change was happening in Japan, but I was unsure in which direction it was heading.

Numazu’s commercial strip eventually gave way to private homes packed close together. The bus rounded a corner and pulled to a stop. The recorded voice announced, Goyōtei, Goyōtei. Please watch your step. Please don’t forget your belongings. The woman in the red leather jacket buffed her fingernails and made no move to get off the bus. The gentleman in the fedora, however, had stepped off the bus and was walking briskly toward a high iron gate. I got up, paid my fare, and followed after him.

A wooden sign near the iron gate marked it as the Goyōtei. I stepped through the gate and found myself in a richly wooded stretch of land, wrapped in quiet. I stood silent, breathing in the scent of pine mixed with the salt air of the sea. I closed my eyes. I was far, far from Tokyo.

I had lost track of the man in the fedora, but a gatekeeper in a wooden hut handed me a brochure with a map of the area and a description of the Goyōtei. I now learned it was once a summer retreat for the imperial family. Like many imperial holdings the Goyōtei had been turned over to public use after the war. I asked the gatekeeper if a haiku session was being held on the grounds. Unaccustomed to hearing a foreigner speak Japanese, he used hand motions, pointing first to a low, Japanese-style wooden building at the far end of the grounds, and then to the impeccably clean slate walkway I was to take to get there.

I walked up to the low building, toward a gathering of about thirty elderly-looking men and women who were taking off their shoes and placing them in cubbyholes at the entryway. Everyone bowed and smiled at me as I neared, and I bowed and smiled back. I was the only non-Japanese in the group, and my longtime habit of setting myself apart from others kicked in.

I had never been to a haiku group, and was not much for joining groups in general. A feeling of paranoia grew within me. What if this turned out to be a cult? An American colleague in Japan once told me of being invited by strangers into their home. After taking off his shoes and entering the house, he realized the strangers were members of a pseudoreligious cult. They smiled and offered him tea and talked to him of spiritual salvation, but would not let him leave. Hours later, after much negotiation and growing panic on his part, his hosts relented and gave him back his shoes. I placed my shoes in the cubbyhole with some anxiety, but resisted the urge to carry them in with me.

Then again, the group might just as easily be a hotbed of Japanese far-right nationalism. After all, haiku had a long historical tradition in Japan, and we were meeting on grounds once owned by the imperial household. Or the haiku group might be a far-left association. My years as a diplomat analyzing political trends were distorting my judgment. Still, I made a mental note to check whether McCarthy-era laws remained in place, and whether I might be fired for membership in a Communist Party haiku group.

Whatever the nature of the group, there was no turning back. We were all making our way now down a narrow hallway. We turned right into a very large room, about twenty by thirty feet, with a high cedar ceiling and a tatami-mat floor where we were to sit Japanese-style. A delicately carved sheet of thin cedar spanned the ceiling at its midpoint, providing the room’s only decorative touch. Sliding paper screen doors along one wall hid recessed closets. Facing me, another set of sliding doors opened onto a glass-walled, enclosed wooden balcony that ran the length of the building. The room, rich with the scent of cedar and tatami, was beautiful in its simplicity.

A Japanese garden beckoned beyond the balcony, through windowpanes wavy with age. Toward the back of the garden, near a bamboo fence, stood an old stone lantern, squat and mossy—the kind that I had until then seen only in old prints of Japan. It was a “snow viewing,” or yuki­mi, lantern, so named because it is most beautiful when capped with snow. I could hardly believe that I was a part of this exquisite scene. Its sheer beauty calmed my fears.

Several members of the haiku group were taking low, folding tables out of the recessed closets and arranging them in a large rectangle around the room. Others sat on the tatami, placing their pens and rice-paper notebooks on the low tables. I spotted Traveling Man Tree seated in the far corner. Next to him was the man with the fedora who had been on the bus. He and Traveling Man Tree were absorbed in conversation with a third man, who was quite distinguished-looking in his three-piece suit. I hesitated, wondering where to sit, when two women smiled at me and patted the tatami between them. Relieved that I was no longer isolated, I went over to them, stepping over people to get there, bowing and excusing myself on the way.

The two women told me they were from Kamakura, the medieval capital of Japan, about an hour south of Tokyo by train. They had come up together for the haiku session. The first woman, graceful and of slender build, spoke to me in excellent English. She said she was a historian and her haiku name was Chōon, or “Sound of the Tide.” She had lived in the United States for six and a half years, she explained, having followed her husband there when the Japanese bank he worked for transferred him to New York.

Sound of the Tide introduced me to her friend, whose haiku name was Uono, or Fish Field. Fish Field, brimming with energy, gave me a big smile. She appeared to be one of the younger members of the group, perhaps in her late forties. Fish Field told me she was a caricature artist, a Japanese word I did not understand until she took out one of her calling cards to show me. The card had a self-portrait in the upper right corner—a caricature with a peppy smile, jet-black hair, and bright, intelligent eyes behind huge, round glasses. Fish Field made room for me at the table. How could someone so likeable have such a strange haiku name? Fish Field evoked a field of smelly, rotting fish. In my mind I called her “Field and Stream,” after the fishing magazine—a name that I found just as humorous but that evoked a more pleasant image.

I turned my attention back to Sound of the Tide. She intrigued me. I had always thought of haiku as an art focused on the present moment, where words came from a flash of poetic inspiration or were triggered by a scene, a sound, or even a scent. Yet here was Sound of the Tide, a historian devoted to researching the past, taking up the art. I could not understand why she would be attracted to haiku. I asked and she replied, I love doing historical research. But history is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. It is solitary and demands patience. I was looking for an activity that would involve more people. I was searching for something, but I did not know quite what.

I had never thought of haiku, or any kind of poetry for that matter, as a social activity. I assumed people wrote haiku to connect with themselves, in keeping with my image of the Zen monk writing haiku in the woods. Yet here was Sound of the Tide telling me that she was attracted to haiku because it would connect her with others.

Sound of the Tide explained that at about the time she was looking for something to add to her life, she learned that Field and Stream was starting up a haiku group in Kamakura. She had never written haiku at that point, but she joined Field and Stream’s group. Some months later, when they learned that Dr. Mochizuki was forming a group in Numazu, she and Field and Stream joined that group too. Hearing mention of Dr. Mochizuki, Field and Stream pointed out to me the elderly gentleman I had noticed earlier sitting with Traveling Man Tree and the man with the fedora. That’s him. He’s the organizer of our group. He’s a doctor and an essayist.

I asked Field and Stream why she joined the Numamomo haiku group. Me? I joined because Kuroda Momoko is the haiku master. I’ve read some of her books and I like her openness of spirit. Also, I thought it would be great to do haiku in a place as beautiful as the Goyōtei!

I was nodding in agreement when the sliding paper screen door opened behind us. The room became quiet and I turned to see an exotic woman in her sixties walk in. I knew instantly that this must be the person Traveling Man Tree and Field and Stream referred to as our haiku master. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cropped like a schoolgirl’s—bangs straight across her forehead and then falling in an even cut about an inch above her shoulders, framing a deeply wrinkled, peaceful face. She smiled at us as she entered, and more deep creases broke forth around her eyes. She wore an unusual outfit, which appeared to be a modern variation on the traditional Japanese samue—a cotton wraparound blouse with loose, matching, calf-length pants. Our haiku master’s version of the samue was deep indigo, with white stitching in traditional Japanese geometric patterns. I have never seen anyone in Japan dress like her, before or since.

Our haiku master settled herself in at one of the low tables and gave us all a reassuring nod and bow. Traveling Man Tree leaned over to Momoko and mentioned that several of us were new to the group. She spoke:

It’s good to see so many new faces this month. If this is your first time, do not worry, I am sure you will do just fine. The most important thing for you today is not to think about whether your haiku is “good enough.”

Don’t try to write a haiku that is “like Bashō’s” or “like Issa’s.”

Work on developing a haiku that truly reflects you. If you can write a haiku that expresses you, then you are writing a good haiku.

My job is not to judge whether you have written well or poorly, but to help you write a haiku that is true to yourself.

We can each write haiku because we each have a soul. Every soul is equal in a haiku group, and there is room in a haiku group for every soul.

By listening to the haiku of others, you will learn about yourself and your haiku. And others in turn will learn about themselves through your haiku.

With that, the session began. Someone handed me five long, narrow strips of paper and told me to write down five haiku. I desperately tried to create haiku on the spot but could not even decide which language to write in, much less a theme. I turned to Sound of the Tide, who had just finished writing out:

蝉しぐれ句を練る人等美しく

semishigure ku o neru hitora utsukushiku

the beauty of

people struggling with haiku

cascading cries of the cicada

SOUND OF THE TIDE

Did that haiku come to you right now? I mean, are you receiving some inspiration? I asked. Of course not, she answered. I am only writing down the best five I’ve written over the past two months.

I looked around the room. Silence reigned. People knelt on the floor and bent low over their work, copying out their haiku. I stared at my five blank strips of paper. Now I am really in over my head, I thought. Here was a serious group of poets and I had just come here to . . . well, why had I come here? As an adventure? On a lark? I looked down at my strips of paper, which were as blank as my mind.

Slowly, words began to percolate inside me, and I jotted them down. As soon as I had a string of seventeen syllables, I moved on to the next. In all, I wrote down five haiku that first day: three in English and two in Japanese. They were not even mildly good haiku. Haiku should be spontaneous and come from within, I had read. These were desperate and pulled out of thin air. But that day, they were all I had.

Someone passed an empty cardboard box around the room, and we all put our five strips of paper in the box facedown. As poor as my haiku were, at least they were now out of my hands. I leaned over to Field and Stream and asked her again the name of our teacher.

She whispered back, Kuroda Momoko, but she’s just Momoko-sensei to us. She is very active. She’s written many books on haiku and won prizes for her works. She has a column every Sunday in the Nikkei newspaper, and she often appears on haiku programs on television. But don’t let any of that intimidate you. She is very thoughtful and will be very respectful of your work.

The cardboard box came around again, and this time we each pulled five haiku strips from the box at random. Sound of the Tide, sitting next to me, told me to copy these five haiku onto a single sheet of paper. When everyone finished this task, we passed the sheets around the room. There were a total of about thirty sheets, one for each member of the group, including Momoko. As the sheets came around one by one, we read the haiku, and if a particular haiku struck our fancy, we wrote it down on a sheet of paper. At the end of the session, after reading about 150 haiku, we were to narrow our selection down to our five favorites and read these aloud to the group.

Sound of the Tide must have seen the look of confusion on my face. She turned to me and explained: The idea is to ensure anonymity. We write our haiku down on strips of paper without our names on them. But if we choose our favorite haiku just from the strips of paper, we might still be able to guess from the handwriting whose they are. On the single sheet, they are in someone else’s handwriting, so it is really hard to guess who wrote them. I had watched Momoko write down her five haiku on strips of paper and put them in the cardboard box with the rest of us. It would be easy to feel obliged to choose Momoko’s haiku, or to pay homage to Dr. Mochizuki, our group’s organizer, by picking his haiku. Equality and artistic integrity, I was learning, are essential aspects of a haiku group.

After reading through the sheets of haiku and choosing our favorites, but before reading them aloud, we took a break. I was one of the last still reading and writing. My legs were numb from kneeling Japanese-style at the low table. A woman came up to me and said, It hurts to sit like that, doesn’t it? There’s really no need to do so for such a long period of time. I looked around the room and saw that most of the men had been sitting cross-legged and many women had shifted from a straight kneeling position to tucking their legs slightly to the side. One woman had her legs straight out on the tatami and was wiggling her toes as she chatted with her neighbor. Here, try this, said the woman as she folded a zabuton pillow over and pushed it beneath my legs. I had been trying hard, too hard, to be Japanese.

When everyone was done and our short break ended, we moved on to the next phase of the session. Beginning with the person to the right of Momoko, we each read aloud the five anonymous haiku we had selected. After each reading, the author of the haiku announced himself or herself to the group.

My turn came and I read out the following haiku:

被爆後の生命をつなぐぶどう棚

hibakugo no inochi o tsunagu budōdana

after the bombing

life hangs on

to the grapevine trellis

TRAVELING MAN TREE

あかつきの夏富士の上星ひとつ

akatsuki no natsufuji no ue hoshi hitotsu

summer dawn

above Mount Fuji

a single star

SOUND OF THE POND

本を措くやがて秋富士見ゆる頃

hon o oku yagate akifuji miyuru koro

I set aside my book

Mount Fuji soon appears

in autumn form

DANCE

風の香ににじむ水色手漉き和紙

kaze no ka ni nijimu mizuiro tesuki washi

the scent of a breeze

wafts pale blue

washi paper

FIELD AND STREAM

掛物を水墨にかへ夕涼み

kakemono o suiboku ni kae yūsuzumi

black ink hanging scroll

now changed

the evening breeze blows cool

OKA TAKEHIDE

Momoko was the last person to read out haiku. Instead of limiting herself to five haiku, Momoko read, commented on, and praised about forty of them. She would take a haiku and use it to illustrate a point or offer a suggestion, peppering her commentary with stories about her own life and writing:

As a child, I learned how to write haiku at my mother’s side. It wasn’t until I went to college that I joined a haiku group. There was a famous haiku poet at my college, Yama­guchi Seison. My mother told me I should write to him and tell him of my interest in haiku. I did so because of my mother’s encouragement, and that’s how I joined a haiku group.

Sometimes, while reading aloud, she would stop and give us insights into the shared enjoyment of haiku.

It is wonderful to write haiku alone, to contemplate it, to read and reread it, and to polish it in private. We can learn a lot about our writing doing this. Yet joining with others and sharing haiku is an essential part of the haiku experience. Think about what a haiku represents. This small chalice of only seventeen sounds is, in truth, an expression of the nature of your heart and soul. There is something magical about sharing this piece of yourself with friends who have gathered together to read haiku aloud.

The Numamomo haiku group was filled with a spirit of warmth and common purpose. We were doing haiku as a group, but instead of social pressure I felt as in a warm embrace. Kuroda Momoko did not tell us what is beautiful, but asked us to judge beauty on our own terms. This was unlike learning experiences I had had at school or at work, and there was no place for my competitive streak. The only expectation seemed to be that I contribute haiku true to myself. I left Numazu brimming with enthusiasm, determined to come up with at least one good, “true-to-myself” haiku for our next gathering. Of course, I had no idea how to do this.