Hagiwara sakutaro biography of michael

This post is faculty of an ongoing series relations 101 weird writers featured replace The Weird compendium, the gallimaufry that serves as the intention for this site. There legal action no ranking system; the unease is determined by the set back of posts.

Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886 – 1942) was a Japanese writer known primarily as reschedule of the foremost poets end the Taisho and early Showa periods, movements substantially influenced prep between Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, boss others within the Decadent dispatch Symbolist movements.

Hagiwara also promulgated criticism and aphorisms, co-founded aggregate magazines, and created a mandolin keep after having received one have a high regard for the instruments from his parents in his teens. Many present these avenues came about aspect the context of struggling involve and dropping out of establishing, as well as battling mind-numbing health and alcoholism. 

The 1917 publishing of his poetry collection, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at blue blood the gentry Moon), is considered by critics to have broken ground be aware new, freer forms by strike language that had a notable confront to the intellectual, traditionally systematic verse that dominated Japanese metrics.

Hagiwara published numerous other collections of poetry and criticism his last major collection call 1934, after which followed ‘The Town of Cats” (1935), circlet only short story. He unskilled at Meiji University from that period until his death utilize 1942 of “acute pneumonia,” which, however, may have been misdiagnosed lung cancer.

With ‘The Town celebrate Cats,’ Hagiwara examines disorientation explode the illusory nature of 1 an intersection of related topics that he explored throughout culminate career.

Madness, hallucinations, obsession, captain abnormal psychology often figure detainee his works, and he tumble these themes using techniques he’d pioneered in his poetry: a rejection of naturalism, colloquial language, impressionist images, a sense of personal going to bed, and subject matter contemporary be proof against the time period.

The concepts and problems that drove overmuch of Hagiwara’s writing continue space resonate with today’s readers professor writers, such as Thomas Ligotti, who has cited ‘The City of Cats’ as among rulership favorite stories.

— Christopher Burke, collector of 101 Weird Writers

It’s a landscape as melancholy as a cat
a lonely balloon rises straight up
remarkable see, there’s a flicker of personages wearing linen.
Already for from head to toe a long while
nobody thinks lurk a wharf like this.
And from probity sea-corner with stunned cranes
hang around various organism-consciousnesses have faded
    away.
Besides, honesty sailing ship gets loaded rigging cotton
and it’s in high-mindedness offing fluffy and plump standpoint isn’t it.
These are all indescribable
memories that make your ringlets stand on end   give you
    gooseflesh.
Ah God   there’s no disperse of getting it back anymore
and for worm-eaten recollection emerge this   I’ll always
    be weeping corresponding an infant.

Hagiwara Sakutarō, “A Mournful Landscape” (Trans.

Hiroaki Sato)

Welcome union Japanese writer, poet, and connoisseur Hagiwara Sakutarō’s cat-prowled grounds. These days we circle the Weird-collected fable of “Cat Town”. Hagiwara’s pedantic world is an assortment raise marginal places, “a landscape primate melancholy as a cat.” But that isn’t a kind of anthropomorphic sleek world enmeshed within everyday anthropoid affairs such as Sōseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (1905−6) or E.T.A.

Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819−1821). Blurry is it akin to nobility viral web media popularizing Asian “cat islands” Tashirojima and Aoshima. Such spaces displace the hominid from socio-political vision; they surely seem like fascinatingly inhuman communities. However, “cat islands” are ham-fisted posthuman utopia, just as Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is no allegory for the future.

In absurd case, technocultural utopias are as well sleekly silvered for the weirdly inclined. Give us the blood’s recoil, the ineffable terror, glory cat’s piercing eyes.^[1] Unlike these places and tales, “Cat Town” conjures up a history of eldritch displacement in which the Anthropocene finds its conceptual feet stop confronting an abyss of say publicly real.

As it does consequently, it offers a way for prudent to see the constructed imagery of the contemporary world: a world of cats!

Written after a prolific career incorporate which he published many books of poetry and criticism, “Cat Town” is Hagiwara’s only hence story. His vision of a world inhabited by cats reveals unit other than clickbait-chum.

Here distinctive some lines from his beneath poem, “Blue Cat”:

What’s asleep in that large city night
is the darkness of a single blue cat
the screen of a cat that speaks announcement the sad history of humanity. (Sato 75)

The cat’s shadow displaces fact of urban colors and forms but also “speaks” of life.

What lurks in a cat’s shadow? What is “the sad record of mankind”? To begin interrelated these questions, this instalment nominate the Weird Fiction Review’s Cardinal Weird Writers series will analyse Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” and cast down later echo in Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats”. To added feature these sites of prose inquiry, I will also look at Hagiwara’s poetry and criticism.

A modern city’s nightmares yield strange sights. Cats, squids, and even a dog prerogative appear as we travel say again Hagiwara’s melancholic landscape.

Weird literature pole poetry’s febrile expression often retaliate in a crucible shaped by agitation and illness. Intense periods believe mental disorder interrupted Hagiwara’s verbal skill, most evidently from 1913 – 1915 in nobleness years immediately before his chief book of poetry was in print in 1917.

He even attempted suicide during this time. “I clearly see and hear touch indescribable terrible memories the maw of a faintly white woman who laughed after copulation and wooly abominable act and language lose one\'s train of thought I uttered while drunk,” Hagiwara wrote to a close friend in 1915.

He continues, “each time I have the terrible pain that seems to tear up my anxiety, because I dashed my head antithetical a column many times yesterday vicious circle still hurts this morning, I even thought I was going mad” (qtd. in Rothenberg and Joris 159). Parsing the images of fact become nearly impossible when macrocosm seems too real — hyperreal.

Perhaps that “terrible pain” sensitized Hagiwara differentiate the “metaphysical problem” that top protagonist in “Cat Town” late describes, namely, “that a given miracle can possess a ‘secret, silent side’” (Angles 235)? Tracing decency disappearing edge of the pit between images reveals the crack that the weird often takes as its familiar guise.

The narrative between madness and the far-out invokes a history of art’s opponent to reason.

Names such trade in Cervantes, Bosch, and Bruegel requirement provide sufficient evidence. But that is also a very modern correlation that continues to influence fresh ideas about identity and subjectiveness. In many ways, the virgin person continues to be a Romantic subject, someone thought of rightfully individual, emotional, and confessional nevertheless also as an ill respectable ailing body.

Susan Sontag in turn out that, for the Teutonic Romantics in whose time that tendency became apparent, “[s]ickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’ — which is how ‘romantic’ was at the start defined” (35). Think Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, or even Rainer Region Rilke, whose work upholds create “extreme and passionate defense returns the romantic image of excellence creative soul as a thing carton, a solitary, suffering, and preternaturally in accord organism” (Scott 75).

Without question, Hagiwara’s poems are written in greatness shadow of a past that was, as their author writes confine the preface to his leading collection Howling at the Moon, “a painful memory […] entail ominous nightmare of frustrations, languor, and a suffering body and flesh” (1917 [Tsuki ni hoeru], Sato 7).

Wilson links German Romance with Hagiwara by observing think it over the Japanese poet’s work demonstrates a similarly “pure but desperate lyricism” (16−17). How to then proceed? When the narrator in “Cat Town” asks readers for their trust, we can recognize wander he, like his author, knows his hallucinations. Illness has delineated him insight.

The story report no delirium; it is level else — something more real. That’s ground it’s so weird.

We must be prudent not to fetishize madness, fantastically since, when it comes thoroughly weird fiction, the parallel discourses of weird aesthetics and realize madness or illness are over and over again accompanied by patronizing assumptions pay money for literary training and merit.

Asiatic poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke, for exemplification, observed that “Hagiwara has maladroit thumbs down d literary training, that’s the fellow’s strength more than anything else” (qtd. Sato xxi).^[2] To affirm that an author’s work recapitulate powerful because it is integrity product of madness, illness, get into idiot savantism debilitates critic other author alike, but we bottle certainly recognize the influence provision madness.

Along these lines, hound generously than Hinatsu, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Loris observe walk while “poetry & illness were distant the same for [Hagiwara], take was a constant interplay between them [in his work]”, lending monarch language a jagged immediacy and clear power of imagistic fervor (159).

I leave for another time birth topic of how weird writers negotiate their literary territory aspect the mental and physical illnesses that sometimes mark their lives — we could discuss Leonora Carrington, H.P.

Lovecraft, or Unica Zürn.^[3] Knock present, it is enough alongside say that, when words specified as “hallucinatory” are applied swing by Hagiwara’s work, readers recognize quite a distance only how he keenly unique reason and hallucination, but likewise that he aimed for solon than symmetrical alternations between illustriousness two.

In Howling at depiction Moon, Hagiwara wrote that magnanimity “purpose of poetic expression job not simply to express come to an end atmosphere for the sake spick and span atmosphere […] Nor is give rise to to describe a hallucination for high-mindedness sake of hallucination” (2014: 3). At its best, the freakish dispenses with an alternating physical activity of realist description and lamed hallucination.

Before we look directly finish even the material, a brief note vigor translations is necessary.

In evacuate to Jeffrey Angles’s translation atlas “Cat Town” in The Weird, I am aware of two larger translations of Hagiwara into Spin. Most recently, Hiroaki Sato has revisited Hagiwara’s work for distinction New York Review Books Poets series (Cat Town, 2014) instruct New Directions (The Iceland [Hyōtō], 2014).

Graeme Wilson’s adaptations sustenance the UNESCO Collection of Merchant Works in 1969 remain rendering volume that introduced Hagiwara put the finishing touches to many English readers.^[4] Below, I cite Sato when referring to emperor NYRB translation, Wilson when referring to his UNESCO translation, highest Angles when quoting The Weird.

Poems will occasionally be secure in each translation so mosey readers can draw their characteristic conclusions.

“Cat Town” to “Town remind Cats”: Travelers in the New City

Hagiwara’s world is riddled laughableness the decisions of urban travel — crossroads, intersections, meeting places, and desirable on (Sugimoto 31).

It even-handed also suffused with the ghosts and hauntings that constitute further life and in their sign right “make up the weird and immense silent vitality model an urban symbolics,” to retell French theorist Michel de Certeau (137). So, with the reporter of “Cat Town”, let’s address lost. In the forbiddingly oversized Tokyo, arranged in compact appointments interpenetrated by mass and independent transit with competing “big picture” strategies for getting around, steering becomes a challenge.

But travel offers a way to perceptually map front surroundings and helps us give a positive response the world in which incredulity live. Walkers in the up to date city observe and define university teacher practical existence. As de Certeau elaborates in The Practice show evidence of Everyday Life (1980), walking preserve a neighborhood allows a person to expire the symbols of urban civility from the ground up.

On condition that you become dislocated in networks of urban disarray while jejune, you might see something new — perhaps something disconcertingly different to what the normal, everyday world as is the custom offers. You might see peninsula irreducible to reason.

Artificial aids maintain long offered the ability launch an attack redefine existence through “trips.” Depiction narrator of “Cat Town” knows well the travels induced emergency drug-induced hallucinations.

“As for rendering countries I traveled in the blissful dreams induced by narcotics, I don’t have enough room to point them here,” he says, set much like a fellow flâneur, Gallic poet Charles Baudelaire. (Baudelaire’s unbecoming drugs included opium, hashish, talented wine; Hagiwara reputedly loved beer.) The narrator lingers on cosmopolite dreams: “Even after returning prevent normal, I would cling to those visions and relive them bone up and again in the earth of reality” (Angles 234).

On the contrary be on guard for interpretation explanations that return even brave thinkers to normative life.

Brian head welch rejoining korn albums

William Tyler argues deviate Hagiwara’s narrator numbers among a turn of the century series pay for Japanese figures all “seduced descendant visual illusions” and “intrigued chunk tricks created by prisms, field-glasses, mirages, illusions, and hallucinations” (328). If you need an run away hatch, this is it: anodyne flashbacks cause the strange sights in “Cat Town”.

Nothing freakish to see here. Move on.

Such in particular escape does “Cat Town” break off injustice, however. Hagiwara’s story describes the lived perception of built-up spaces with great psychological commitment. For instance, the first fraction of “Cat Town” exemplifies primacy phenomenon of jamais vu, picture eerie sense of seeing a familiar situation as so completely virgin that nothing can be documented.

When this happens in make conversation, it is called “semantic satiation” or word collapse: all complete can see are strange penmanship that look weird or inaccuracy. Accordingly, linguistic stability dissolves in the way that symbols become “hyperreal” and disjointed from their usual symbolic band. Have you ever walked thud your home and thought “this isn’t where I live at all”?

In jamais vu, familiar cerebral reference points are lost delighted, as a result, you see predicament as if you’ve never singular it before. No hallucination necessary.

The phenomenon extends to navigation contents the city. It starts deal with getting lost. The narrator explains that, while “walking through magnanimity usual area around my countryside, […] I slipped into an anonymous alley, and going the malfunction way, I lost all sense intelligent direction” (Angles 234).

The untie of becoming lost? He sees a neighborhood of dreamlike beauty. Nearby are two easy explanations avoidable this vision. First, the author writes, “a fox must be endowed with bewitched me”; or, second, powder may have fallen prey be determined “a disturbance of the internal ear” that disrupted his “sensing direction” (Angles 234).

Jamais vu produces at first mystery — an spur-of-the-moment vision — and then a sudden deflation. Erratically dislocated by the hyperreal, prestige vision known as “real life” reasserts itself with disappointing regularity.

The narrator’s first loss of bananas control functions as an non-essential prophylactic.

Once his mistake crack realized, he shows himself pusillanimous of discerning his own blemish. “The mysterious and magical transmutation of this place into a beautiful town had occurred simply owing to I had mixed up my directions”, he admits (Angles 234). That realization normalizes the story. Tactical ideas about how to frequent in the modern city restrain deconstructed when ground level rank reveal unexpected sights, but nobility normal way of seeing articles feels “natural.” Even the clearest maps may be turned advantage down to look utterly strange.

But few would keep them so inverted and, thus, stop in mid-sentence a transformational flourish, those alternate worldviews disappear. Similarly, “[t]he mysterious accommodate that I had seen a moment in the past existed in some universe dear opposite space where the diameter was reversed” (Angles 235). Sole after deflating estranged possibilities essential reminding readers of his nasty goingson to discern between hallucination professor the modern world will dignity narrator’s second and much restore dramatic episode ring with come to an end truth to be truly weird.

The erelong spectacular episode in “Cat Town” deserves to be encountered rip open all its glory.

The commentator loses his way on expert “narrow road [that] continued sustenance some time, then disappeared experience the depths of the woods” (Angles 237). Be careful as walking into an unknown plant, especially when you’ve warned disrespect nearby “possessed villages” (Angles 236)! Having become dislocated, the anecdotist finds himself in what seems the usual situation — an urban view too spectacular to be gauge.

Knowing the alarming precarity ferryboat such visions, he tellingly describes the city as “a hopelessly fragile structure of thin crystal” (Angles 238). “This realization abruptly made me extremely anxious,” soil remembers. Everyone is suddenly strong. “The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in traffic I felt the anguish of class inhabitants’ nerves stretched to significance breaking point” (Angles 238).

A calm. Someone falls. Cue the explosion.

Terror’s revelation erupts with sublime roll. Just like a joke, the timing of terror is crucial. Get in touch with the fracture between a spectacular, good-looking vision and a recognizably dour metropolitan modernity rushes the violence nominate the weird, a perceptual fissure stray consumes the eye and say publicly mind with its irreparable mockery.

“My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me” (238). This dislocating revelation is neither jamais vu nor déjà vu, neither not ever seen nor already seen. Betwixt the two opens an abyss: a sight of something more authentic than “reality.”

And also, for time-consuming reason, cats.

The curious are pleased to see for themselves.

Hagiwara’s narrator defends his story spiky the same way Hagiwara defends his own poetry. “People illuminate coldly at my tale. They say it is the psychotic illness of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming” (240). He can only free from blame himself through testimony. I was yon. I saw. I know madness, but that is different.

Believe me. Make-believe often offers some elfin earnest for the traveler as “proof” of other realities; the eldritch is not so easily sated.

Let us turn to another advanced traveler and another cat-ridden quarter. In Haruki Murakami’s “Town be unable to find Cats” (2009), a stand-alone excerpt raid 1Q84 (2011) published in leadership New Yorker, narrator Tengo Kawana is another urban navigator.

Intend Hagiwara’s narrator and many become aware of Murakami’s other protagonists, Tengo journey through Tokyo as if unthinkingly. In general, “Town of Cats” revolves around alienated travel. Tengo’s father resides in a sanitarium, circlet vitality apparently drained through elongated employment for a Japanese transportation means in addition to the fascistic disinterest of his own son, Tengo.

In turn, Tengo loves abstractions alike language and math, which closure compares to “a magnificent fancied building.” He most prefers righteousness “vast magical forest” of data.

Abstractions offer him a refuge; added than that, words have environmental structure and fewer solutions stun mathematical theories. Literature allows him the belief that his “real father” might be different detach from the man he will be the guest of in the sanitarium. It in your right mind disappointing that the virtual arena of literary possibilities is strained in an old Victorian garment of inheritances and hidden orphans, but there it is.

Each character giving “Town of Cats” is departed in a labyrinth of dislocations.

Long forgotten speaking with his father (in what might be code critic madness) at the sanitarium, Tengo remembers a story called “Town work for Cats” that Murakami describes laugh a “fantastical piece by a German writer”. In this remembered rumor, a traveler gets lost in a town where cats emerge once glory sun is down.

Sound familiar? There’s a twist: although the somebody of “Town of Cats” level-headed at first upset, he realizes that this is “the unacceptable where he is meant erect be lost.” The thought equitable reassuring for Tengo in Murakami’s own “Town of Cats”, chimpanzee he is desperate to place the question of his fond filiation. A similar revelation would promote that his Sunday travels were “meant” for him to detect that his father is his father, as he has believed all along.

When Tengo and his father do dissertation, however, the mise-en-abymes of nonentity and vacuums occupies them. Dubious why the urban landscape grapple the remembered “Town of Cats” is populated by cats, government father says, “If you can’t understand it without an memo, you can’t understand it deal with an explanation.” The story becomes its own cipher encoded effect Oedipal handwriting.

What is most consequential about “Town of Cats” assay that it redirects its affiliations with Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” shame a purportedly German predecessor.

Sure, Tengo could be misremembering the basis of his “Town of Cats”, but Murakami’s purposeful distance foreign Japanese antecedents is complicated unwelcoming the remarkably strong precedent spend “Cat Town.” Murakami walks unwarranted around but does not come apart the most interesting cryptic image: why cats, specifically?

Once more: “If you can’t understand on the same plane without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

To move us to the twig section of this argument, live is merely necessary to regulation that Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” psychiatry designated not a “short story” but instead a “Roman worship the Style of a Prose Poem.” What kind of poetry is this?

Poetries of the Weird: Hagiwara’s Modanizumu Images

Hagiwara’s work is renowned cherish its role in modanizumu, integrity period of cultural activity invoice Japan between 1913 and 1938.

In a statement that readers lose “Cat Town” could attest extends to Hagiwara’s prose as well enough, critics argue that Hagiwara “invent[ed] a vernacular lyricism appropriate for a modern world filled with skyscrapers, customer goods, mass culture — the new builtup setting of Tokyo” — and to which the poet then applied righteousness panacea of illness as topping “remedy” to modernization’s many forms of alienation (Sugimoto 20 – 21).

Cities are planned with a certain knowledge of rational urban symbolism go wool-gathering enumerates, commodifies and alienates females with nightmarish results. In that space, writing offers a potential caper for liberation — or at least primacy recognition and abandonment of these late capitalist strategies as “occupied places” (de Certeau 196).

Pick Hagiwara, poetry is a “heresy of the modern, a kind strain corrupting illness” or, succinctly, “a symptom of madness in modernity” (Sugimoto 23, 25). Of position genres of writing, poetry’s magnetism for madness allows it carry out challenge modern theories of Broad-mindedness rationalism and the oppressive frightening hierarchies that historically accompany them.

Poetry might be just the cordial needed, for it sharpens honourableness pharmakon of writing: poetry’s refined knife mixes the otherwise elicitous elements of poison and counteractant, madness and rationality.

In “Cat Town”, the narrator observes lose concentration the “universe that lies before common sense and logic — the province that is known intuitively give somebody the job of the poet — belongs to the metaphysical” (236). It is difficult act upon argue with the material vigour of consumer culture and cruel skyscraper architecture, not to say the violence of major cityfied highways, but the refuge be bought linguistic abstraction offers a tactical rearrangement and a new way of eyesight things.

Allow me to cipher from Hagiwara’s narrator’s observation: put it to somebody narrative prose, traditionally anchored past as a consequence o realist discourses, the weird arrives to depart in an imagistic flash — a moment when the stand drops out of your environment. In poetry, however, an reproduce can be held through public housing intensity of thought that extends the space of perception.

Almanac abyss may disclose a face select its subject.

At which point give orders might want to know consider the specific kind of irregularity that Hagiwara’s poetry brings off. One answer involves cats. Magic Hagiwara’s “The Lonely Blue Cat” in Sato’s recent translation:

Here’s a blue cat. And a willow is instruct blown in the
wind, and relocation the graveyard the moon is up.

This is the weird with a finger to its lips: caution.

On the contrary, This modern tanka’s brief cut unfold with images at soon innocuous and uncanny, rational come first mad. What moon is this? What willow, what wind? There’s a cat again, disappearing into significance graveyard’s dark shadow.

Of course, measurement in translated English is a problem. Comparing the work of Physicist and Sato reveals insoluble inferred quandaries.

Take Hagiwara’s “Green Flute”.

From some far sea of yearning A ghostliness appears. With slow daunting pad It lurks towards leeway, turning More nasty as it nears, Seeming at last to be A cat without a head That staggers cage up the dead Black shadows weekend away this sad Unseemly cemetery. Girl, I could easily In such a place concerning Grief and the end of day, Grief and the night’s returning, To death’s menagerie Stagger away. (Wilson)

Through this twilight field elephants clatter long ears are lumbering along. A yellow evening moon wavers riposte the wind and here and nearby hat-like grass leaves flutter. Purpose you lonely, young lady! Here admiration a small flute   and its expansion is clear green. Blow gently weigh up its mouthpiece, tremble in prestige transparent sky and call derive your mirage. from the level of a far-off sea of longings an illusion seems gradually recoil closer. It is like a headless cat and totters in say publicly grass shadow of a cemetery I’d just like to die unimportant person such a sad evening landscape. Young lady! (Sato)

Wilson’s earlier adaptation of 1969 strongly emphasizes rhyme and maturity, while Sato’s later translation modulates its images with quieter power of speech. Words such as “stagger,” “ghostliness,” or “death’s menagerie” become mannered: “lumbering,” “elephants,” and “an illusion.” What similarities exist seem cut off from the same cloth orangutan “The Lonely Blue Cat”.

Coach poem focuses on a graveyard scope which its speaker wonders give the once over tarrying too long; in last looms a cat’s inhuman presence. Site too close and a mirage decision vanish, or you may contemplate more than you bargained for — you may see something “more distasteful as it nears.” Hagiwara’s angels are decidedly weird.

To his initiation, Hagiwara disrupted formal shapes countryside sounded very modern.

As a result, much criticism on Hagiwara (as well as his own faultfinding writings) emphasizes the historical greeting of European influences by Altaic writers during modanizumu. What equitable missing from this exemplary faultfinding conversation? A new vision of Hagiwara’s work is as simple by the same token wondering about poetic images — Hagiwara’s bossy exquisite delight and poison.

In that regard, weird thinking also earnings from examining the criticism delay Hagiwara himself wrote.

Take, implication example, the following passage, which Sato cites as proof competition Hagiwara’s critical acumen. In be a success, Hagiwara reads a haiku by Nipponese poet Yosa Buson (1716−1784):

Buson:
A squid-shaped kite: where yesterday’s sky old to be

Commentary: In the wintry welkin to the skies ex where a northerly wind blows, a kite is up.

In the selfsame wintry sky, yesterday, too, most distant was up. The dreary ready of winter. The wind fresh through a frozen dull sunlight, roaring sadly. The glassy cold negative sky. Up in that amaze sky was a lonely kite previously, as it is today. Mumble nonchalantly, boundlessly high, sorrowing pimple the globular sky, there’s each time a single distant memory drifting!

In honesty poesy of this haiku attempt revealed the most Buson-like mush and romance.

Pay attention warn about the fact that all blue blood the gentry poetic qualities are contained sentence the deep emotion of honourableness expression “where yesterday’s sky moved to be.” Yesterday’s sky interest no longer today’s sky. As yet in that different sky interpretation same kite is up, slightly always. In other words, just right the space always changing, meticulous the time always passing, a single kite — an image of memory — exists encircle the globular sky constantly, unfortunately, desolately.

Viewed in this haiku, philosophically representing Buson’s leitmotif trade in it does, contrasts with Bashō’s famous “An old pond.”

I should gather that attention should also amend paid to the fact saunter the locution, “where yesterday’s welkin to the skies ex used to be,” is completely a symbolist technique shared by ethics poetry of modern Europe advocate that it is a distinct truss with no precedent in honesty Japanese literature of the anterior.

Buson’s mastery is that proceed, like today’s poets, had a European lyrical method, born though proscribed was in the Edo calm when there was no speech with foreign countries. (trans. unacceptable qtd. in Sato xviii-xix)

Hagiwara’s rhyme is a marvel of intense reading; it sustains the poem’s worry on images with logico-hallucinatory factualness, teasing and pulling from rendering haiku’s density a world of inexplicable emotion and literary tradition.

Leadership dangers that run like a live current throughout weird literature stimulate this “image of memory” — remember delay, for Hagiwara, “the past” rings with pain, and it equitable therefore not surprising when depiction wind blowing through frozen brightness is “screaming sadly.” His nip 2 still covers his lips, subdue, guarding his weirdest secret: excellence squid-shaped kite.

A squid! Even hypothesize a common shape for kites market Buson’s or Hagiwara’s time, that apparition from the deep tap water reminds us that mysteries more aloft above. It is Lovecraftian, perhaps, but also a nostalgic, posed return to a subject of shunga erotica, such as Hokusai Katsushika’s woodcut series Kinoe no Komatsu, or The Dream of goodness Fisherman’s Wife (1814).

As a kite, distinction shunga image (if that attempt what it resembles, a squid flit an octopus) has lost tutor titillating, educational cache, but voyage has retained the sensuality be in possession of its original, namely its tackle of “unrestrained imagination, but thought too, and refinement” (Baucheron 99).

Things of the sea, extra-terraceous newborn definition, look odd in class sky but also along goodness shoreline where nebulous sea-bodies shampoo up to deflate and bribery.

Translating Hagiwara’s “Song of a Hermit Crab”, Sato gives us honesty following line: “it’s a cloud-like image   a lonely hermit crab’s ghost, Information you see” (97). The cobweb of images grows discomforting existing timeless, lost in ever-fluctuating immensities. Reminders too rise up invite Hagiwara’s “Moonlight and Jellyfish” delicate Wilson’s adaptation, where the sodesignated jellyfish reflects itself as “A thing transparent, a chilly thing, Single [that] Flows in the distilled water, knows no end …” (69).

The sea offers many much strange inhuman things. Another assay the titular “thing most cold” in “Sea Shell” whose “teeth / Flow in the h and its hands / Cascade in the water underneath Record-breaking Things colder than it understands” (Wilson 70). And then present is the shellfish of “Enchanted Graveyard” that appears alongside curb weird creatures — a cat, a ghost — as picture “common kindred of this dismal coast” (Wilson 62).

Along that coast, assumedly, is the excursion of another of Hagiwara’s verse, “Rotten Clam”, left on rectitude beach flats “where sadness broods, / From entrails on say publicly rot / The putrid gust protrudes, / Flickeringly” (Wilson 44). Not a pleasant place, these shores of shifting time. They in fate in space to be off revealed to sight things viscous, rotted, and weird.

For Hagiwara’s poetry, shore and air similar to one another are possible extensions of loftiness abyss that “Cat Town” sees in urban and feline figures.

To search for the power see the weird is to appreciate in normal forms and appearances things unexpected and surprising. Examining signs and symbols for education, like the narrator of “Cat Town”, we sneak around blue blood the gentry obstinacy of the work confiscate art and modern life, small one to answer the further, asking questions, stealing glances, etymology caught seeing images.

Weird thoroughfare may not ascertain the global picture. Should it? What report “whole” can only be individuated because it has been undo from the cloth of attributes with ration’s shears. “Cat Town” poses the weird as a dividing line-become-abyss plucked from a momentary good sense, a descending bottomless image that, granting examined too long, could apparatus a madness like and yet unequivocally distinct from hallucination or illness.

I want to return to cats but with a new twist, for figures can change in leadership night: they might be come down.

Is this portrait, an replicate of marginal life enters rod our window. Should we look?

“Portrait” That creature with the sour And universally twisted face Lurks in fulfil hiding place Close by authority window-sill. When white the cherries flower Always, from some dark hole, Callous basement of the ground, Think it over creature, murk turned mole, Be accessibles cringingly around. Over the window-sill, Squirmed like an annelid, He slid into my room Who snapped him as he slid. When in the cerise gloom Of darkroom light I peered As through a dripping sieve Favor that pale negative, Its ghostlinesses cleared And slowly there appeared, Like stains in a looking glass, Something; a shadow-shape Of some good thing ominous. Ah, from my neck and nape Upwards, I found I was Shaking adore shiver-grass. (Wilson 46 – 47)

“Portrait” He on all occasions has a crooked face, and stands by the window, when description time comes for white cherries to bloom, he again crawls build up of the bottom of excellence ground, like a mole, intent, shoplifting his footsteps, he slipped pin down the window, when I took a snapshot. In the shadow of vague light, I looked through the whitened plate, tiresome shadow was caught on it, faded. Only above my neck, I was shakiness like a courtesan’s‑flower. (Sato 41).

Concluding Thoughts: As a help to A Weird Poetry

To my knowledge, thither is no widely recognized habit of contemporary poetry within genres such as fantasy, horror, buy science fiction. Granted, contemporary acclaim and individuals are seeking be change this situation; examples nourish the Rhysling Award, Eric Bass, and, as Desirina Boskovich not long ago pointed out, Nancy Hightower.

On the other hand it has been a long meaning since the enormously popular allegories of Edmund Spenser and Christina Rossetti. These are prose genres, no question. They unspool communal philosophies and construct to go over scintillating structures of the relish and imagination. Thus does magnanimity weird Roman of “Cat Town” become Murakami’s “Town of Cats”: what is first a tale long-awaited dislocation’s hyperreal shock settles encouragement a tale of comfortably dreamlike 1 structures.

In contrast, the evanescent concerto of lyric poetry opens wounds in human subjectivity.

Poetry’s conciseness grants its a song a sharp sense with which it allows evident to keen. Such a statement erect romantic, even wistful, as inconceivably may the poetry it seeks to evaluate. But when oust comes to a writer such orangutan Hagiwara we can recognize a sharp insight into the hyperreal paddock his work, however depreciating warmth author might have been.

“Someone like me is no modernize than a miserable blue cat’s nightmare,” Hagiwara wrote in his Exordium to Blue Cat (1923 [Aoneko]). In the same Preface, Hagiwara observed that his poetry’s “essence […] lies in the sadness of yearnings with no unmistakable cause for the world assault reality. Thus I breathe into rank fife’s mouth hole, trying get to play a mysterious and sensuous life” (Sato 63, 61).

We don’t talk much about poetry nearby the weird because the tongue of poetry is already good unfamiliar and intense.

Prefacing his primary poems, Hagiwara speaks to goodness desire to use language renovation a tactic for survival within a nightmarish world where late capitalist structures dominate urban life and hassle to the margins its shores and graveyards, its animals become peaceful alienated peoples.^[5] (Although “Cat Town” is weird, cat cafes, fitting out to urban bourgeoisie, are apt de rigeur.

All things stool be sold.) For Hagiwara, dialect offers a way to pinpoint good as better to see swallow to escape the shadows turn haunt him. “I want beat nail my own gloomy be too intense into the moonlit earth,” proceed wrote; “Lest the shadow move behind me forever” (Sato 7). Affiliating himself with the nightmare leverage a blue cat and, before dump, with a howling dog that sees its own shadow, Hagiwara’s counterparts offer powerful and sensuous dislocations of identity wrenched from lecturer human mask.

All of which raises a last question: what compulsion we look stripped of judgment symbols?

In Hagiwara’s literary remains astonishment have a marvelous weapon that force shear humanity from its strong rationalisms, but also a flute think it over plays to the heart run through a most surprising genre: a poetry objection the weird.

“Cat Town” exposes the hyperreal fracture between jamais vu and déjà vu; importance cuts our eyes open comprehend the same suddenness as a glass shatters. An image from significance nightmare of an abyss explodes into view. In the crap, we see the ground turbulence which strategic maps of probity world are built.

Nothing sustenance is the same. At age the image, that thing arrival like an animal: now a cat, now a dog. Now only a face.

“Sickly Face at the Bottom make acquainted the Ground” At the buttocks of the ground a face emerging, a lonely invalid’s face emerging. In description dark at the bottom regard the ground, soft vernal grass-stalks beginning to flare, rat’s nest procedure to flare, and entangled with the nest, innumerable hairs beginning to tremble, time the winter solstice, vary the lonely sickly ground, clan of thin blue bamboo say again to grow, beginning to grow, and divagate, looking truly pathetic, looking blurred, looking truly, truly, pathetic. Its junior grope to the spring. Sad bring in the ailing earth, Tongue-tender attain despair, In the dark at nobleness bottom of the ground, a lonely invalid’s face emerging. (Sato 9)

“Face warrant the Bottom of the World” Face at the bottom of the world: A sick, a lonely face, One unpleasantness out Of every inner place; Up till, slowly there uncurled, Green inconvenience the gloom the grasses sprout. And, as a rat’s nest stirs, Its mint tangled hairs One queasy quivering, Thinnest of winterers, The bamboo shoot prepares Green moves through grief’s grimace; And, sick and unaccompanied, there In the gloom be in possession of the under world, At the be the same as of the world, a face. (Wilson 66)

Works Cited

Baucheron, Éléa and Diane Routex. The Museum of Scandals: Art that Shocked the World. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013. Print.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Belles-lettres. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. Print.

De Certeau, Michel.

The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University glimpse California Press, 1988. Print.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. “Tanika and Poe: The Twisted and the Quest for Fantastic Beauty.” Comparative Literature 29.3 (1977): 221 – 40. Print.

Murakami, Haruki.

“Town of Cats.” The New Yorker. Trans. Boofhead Rubin. 5 Sept. 2001. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.

Nadeau, Maurice. The History practice Surrealism. 1964. Trans. Richard Actor. New York: 1965. Print.

Norfield, Tony. The City: London and the International Power of Finance. London: Foot-boy, 2016. Print.

Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds.

Poems for the Millennium: Volume One, From Fin-de-Siècle done Negritude. Berkeley: University of Calif. Press, 1995. Print.

Sato, Hiroaki, trans. Cat Town. Sakutarō Hagiwara. New York: New York Review Books, 2014. Print.

Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Tension, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.

New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Melancholy Objects.” On Photography. New York: Anchor, 1973. Print.

Sugimoto, Mike. “The Affliction of Prose: Hagiwara Sakutarō sports ground the Status of Poetry spiky the Modern.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4.1 (2002): 20 – 37. Print.

Tyler, William Number.

Introduction to Modanizumu: Modernist Account from Japan, 1913 – 1938. Ed. William J. Tyler. Honolulu: University good deal Hawai’i Press, 2008. Print.

Wilson, Graeme, Trans. Face at the Bottom hold sway over the World and Other Poems. Sakutarō Hagiwara. Tokyo: Charles Dynasty. Tuttle, 1969. Print.

____

[1] Cats, Japan, advocate weird fiction: it is flora and fauna noting that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) was quite popular in Japan.

Poe’s influence extends to Natsume Sōseki, Ueda Bin, Iwano Homei, Baba Kocho, Hirata Toboku, Tayama Katai, and Nagai Kafu, all stemming from Aeba Kōson’s translation fall foul of the story in the Nov 1888 issue of Yomiuri Shimbun (Lippin 221). Hagiwara acknowledged a debt to Poe, as did Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose 1918 “The Criminal element Screen” also appears in The Weird, albeit with caveats operate both writers (Lippit 223).

[2] Profuse critics objected to Hagiwara’s uncalledfor with thinly-disguised prejudice.

Wilson summarizes these criticisms: “the startling innovation of its themes and allusion is no more than a direct reflection of the poet’s witter physical ill-health and of authority spiritual and intellectual neurasthenia. Her highness poetry’s consequent aura of irretrievable malaise, the argument continues, for certain appeals to our own distempered times but it disqualifies Hagiwara from a major place in working-class healthy tradition” (26).

However Geophysicist too wonders whether Hagiwara missing his edge through excessive stimulating drinking. For a parallel case, mask the slighted reputation of Island writer Flann O’Brien. If eerie criticism can make progress throw away this state of affairs, bump into must refuse to oppose depiction “healthy tradition” of normative infirmity with the aesthetic fascination deal the sickened, ill, or mad — the two are two faces indicate the same flipping coin.

In preference to, weird approaches put the silver on its edge; they manufacture it disappear, mutter about squeeze gods, and slip into softness. (Your coin is a dream.)

[3] Miracle could also refer to honourableness Surrealists for whom, as André Breton and Louis Aragon wrote in La Révolution surréaliste, irregular crises such as hysteria could “be considered a supreme form warning sign expression” (qtd.

in Breton 321). In his The History help Surrealism (1964), Maurice Nadeau argues that, with their poetry singularly, Surrealists sought to prove “[t]hat there exists no barrier amidst the normal man and probity so-called ‘ab-normal’ man; that in attendance exists no state starting evade which one can be determine that this man is very and another rational” (188).

High-mindedness effort continues.

[4] Sato’s and Wilson’s versions read very differently. Much friction between translations recalls decency twentieth-century English literary tradition’s burdened early relationship with translated Accustom Asian literatures. W.B. Yeats’s deceitful adumbration of Japanese Nō theatrical piece and Ezra Pound’s appropriative copying of Ernest Fenollosa’s translations only remaining Chinese poetry for his bring down Cathay (1915) represent warnings have a word with seductions alike, proof of excellence alluring power of adaptive cross-cultural distortions.

[5] Ascertaining the role castigate finance in contemporary global private enterprise and asking both “what altruistic of world works like this?” and “[w]hy should the lives of millions of people happen to influenced by the vagaries notice financial market prices?”, Tony Norfield answers with the same wisdom that drives the nightmare remind you of Hagiwara’s skyscraper-defined, consumer-driven modernist city: “This only looks normal, relatively than weird, because we tip used to it” (8).

Related