Bill Freind

Department of English
Rowan University
freind@rowan.edu

 

Review of: Araki Yasusada’s Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters In English.Eds. Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez. Cumberland, RI: Combo, 2005.

 

While Foucault imagines a time in which questions of the “authenticity” and “originality” of the author would become irrelevant (138), and while Barthes famously concludes that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author,” “the author” still plays a great role in our modes of reading. Until the early twentieth century, writers routinely published anonymous or pseudonymous works, and the reading public showed little reluctance in purchasing a text whose author remained unknown. In contrast, contemporary writers and readers have demonstrated little inclination to do away with the author function in the text. The journal Unnatural Acts, co-edited by Ed Friedman and Bernadette Mayer in the early 1970s, provides an instructive example. Work for the first issue was composed in Mayer’s first workshop at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City and Friedman offers the following explanation of the method:

 

we decided to have everyone in the workshop writing in the same place for an extended time period. Everyone anonymously contributed a piece of writing, which someone else in the group used as the basis for composing a new work. The “originals” were then discarded and the afternoon proceeded with everyone continuing to write works inspired by the reworkings of reworkings of reworkings. (Kane 199)

 

Because the work was collaboratively produced, none of the writers was credited with the authorship of a specific piece. Yet by the second issue many writers resisted this lack of attribution. Mayer notes that

 

it was hard to get people to do it [i.e., publish without attribution], because they didn’t want to lose their identity. Someone came up to me. . . and said to me “Is anyone going to know what part I wrote?” I said, “No, I don’t think so.” This was a big problem for this writer. (Kane 200-01)

 

Even authors whose techniques actively undermine the authority of the writer, such as William S. Burroughs with the cut-up method he borrowed from Brion Gysin, and Kathy Acker with her piracies and appropriations, earned a degree of fame that was more than a little ironic. For the foreseeable future, Barthes’s and Foucault’s meditations on the irrelevance of the author represent a distant horizon or perhaps even an unattainable ideal of a mode of reading in which the text is freed from the potentially limiting function of the author.

 

The case of Araki Yasusada provides one strategy for getting beyond the authorial. Yasusada was born in Kyoto in 1907 and moved with his family to Hiroshima in 1921. After studying Western Literature at Hiroshima University, he became involved with Soun, or Layered Clouds, an avant-garde haiku group. In 1936 he was conscripted into the Japanese army and served as a clerk in the Military Postal Service during the Second World War. Yasusada was stationed in Hiroshima and his wife Nomura and daughter Chieko were both killed in the atomic bombing; his daughter Akiko succumbed to the effects of radiation sickness less than four years later. Yasusada himself died of cancer in 1972 and after his death his son discovered manuscripts that in the early 1990s were published in translation in journals in North America and Europe.

 

Yasusada would almost certainly have earned posthumous fame–except that he never existed. Shortly after the poems began to garner widespread praise, some readers began to notice holes in his putative biography, many of which were chronicled by Marjorie Perloff. For instance, Hiroshima University wasn’t established until 1949 and “Western literature” was never a course of study. Yasusada reads Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs in 1967, five years before it was published; with the Soun group, he studies the poetry of Paul Celan in the 1930s although Celan’s first book was published in 1952, and in German, which Yasusada did not read. So if Yasusada never existed, who wrote the work? Suspicions fell on Kent Johnson, a poet and translator who acted as intermediary in the publication of the poems (and who holds the copyright on them). Johnson denied authorship, claiming the work’s actual creator was Tosa Motokiyu, who had been listed as one of the translators; however, Johnson added that Motokiyu was the pseudonym of an unnamed writer who was now deceased: a kind of literal death of the author, if Motokiyu had in fact been “real.” Many people who had praised Yasusada’s work now denounced it as a hoax. Arthur Vogelsang, editor of American Poetry Review, claimed that Yasusada’s work was “essentially a criminal act” (qtd. in Nussbaum 82). Others still supported the work and in 1997 Roof Books published Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. Doubled Flowering clearly demonstrates that Yasusada could not be dismissed as a mere hoax: in addition to the striking emotional range of the poems, which move between poignant meditations on the deaths of his wife and daughter, to fragments that show the influence of European and North American avant-gardes, to shopping lists and Zen exercises, the questions the text raises about the continuing role of the author even after his or her ostensible death are so pointed that Yasusada is obviously more than a prank.

 

For his part, Johnson became a tireless promoter of Yasusada’s work, suggesting that Araki Yasusada is a “heteronym” along the lines of those created by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Pessoa, who developed at least seventy-two heteronyms, each of which had a distinctive style, insisted they were not merely aesthetic masks for aspects of his own personality. Instead, he claimed they

 

should be considered as distinct from their author. Each one forms a drama of sorts; and together they form another drama . . . . The works of these three poets constitute a dramatic ensemble, with careful attention having been paid to their intellectual and personal interaction . . . . It is a drama in people instead of in acts. (3)

 

For a number of reasons, this works as an especially good description of the ways in which Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords operates. The text is supposed to be a collection of letters written by Yasusada in English to a mysterious correspondent named Richard, but in part it focuses on Tosa Motokiyu. In Doubled Flowering, the poems, letters and drafts are so rich that it is almost possible to “believe” in Yasusada in the way we believe in a character in a film or play, but the notes in Also, With My Throatmake that more difficult, if not impossible. Almost every letter features end notes from Motokiyu, in which Motokiyu enacts (or simulates) his role as editor. However, most letters include an additional set of notes written by Kent Johnson and (ostensibly, at least) Javier Alvarez, Johnson’s shadowy and perhaps non-existent co-editor. This second set of notes frequently comments on Motokiyu’s. For instance, a letter dated 7 May 1926 reads:

 

Dear Richard,

What was there before your birth?

What was there after your death?

Who or what is it, at this moment, that is reading?

How can we have the apricot blossoms perfuming the whole world?

I am sincere,

Araki Yasusada (Motokiyu 5)

 

Motokiyu’s note on this letter reads: “in our opinion, as editors and translators, this is the most mysterious and beautiful of all the letters” (5). The first person plural indicates that Motokiyu is speaking with his fictional co-editors, Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin, but is he himself fictive? To Motokiyu’s note, Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez respond: “as the editors of the ‘editors,’ we don’t necessarily concur, but that would be, of course, neither here nor there” (5). Their note amounts to a kind of passive-aggressive pulling of rank: Johnson and Alvarez don’t explicitly contradict Motokiyu, et al., but as “editor of the editors” they reserve the right to do so. At the same time, some of the notes apparently don’t have a reference (e.g., note 1 on page 32 and note 6 on page 33). The notes both emphasize and denigrate the roles of the various authors. Far from enacting their deaths, Also, With My Throat offers a proliferation of heteronymic authors and editors in a sort of drama that simultaneously highlights and undermines the different forms of authority that occur in an edited collection of poetry. Furthermore, the “ten thousand swords” in the book’s title echo the daggers that sometimes indicate footnotes. These notes become a way of cutting gaps into the text, slicing spaces within both the notes and letters through which the readers can become producers of meaning along with the authors and editors, even if those authors and editors are fictive.

 

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Also, With My Throat is its use of a non-standard and halting English that is both disorienting and often strangely beautiful. The language doesn’t resemble anything a non-native speaker might write; instead, it seems to intentionally avoid “yellowface” in favor of a richly fractured syntax in which the infelicities are strikingly felicitous:

 

Are you that man in an ocean’s center whom is screaming there is no water? Right or wrong, you must swim, even if swimming is not. Are you that man whom is holding a pipe in smokeness so dreamy? Right or wrong, stripped bare of its pipeness, even, you must smoke, even if smoking is not. More or less, Dogen Zenji said so. But my grammar makes the lover’s eyes fall out. (12)

 

In spite of the reference to Dogen Zenji (whom a footnote identifies as the founder of a sect, Soto Zen) the section seems less a Buddhist meditation than a tapestry of western sources. The man “screaming there is no water” seems to rework the famous line from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “Water, water, every where,/ nor any drop to drink.” The reference to the pipe echoes René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”[1] While Magritte’s painting emphasizes the essential division between the painting and what it purports to depict, Yasusada’s letter is more nuanced: Yasusada both is and is not “real,” since Yasusada-as-heteronym remains as actual as any literary character. The note from Motokiyu states that the last line is from Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra; in fact, as Johnson and Alvarez indicate in their own note, it is from the poet Jack Spicer’s 1965 lectures in Vancouver.[2] The text first presents an all-too-familiar stereotype of Japan as a mystical other, then undermines that stereotype by revealing that the source of this “Eastern” wisdom is actually American. The pastiche of sources in Yasusada explicitly works against any n otion of authenticity; as Yasusada says in Doubled Flowering “I believe, very frankly, that all writing is quite already passed through the voices or styles of many others” (77).

 

Also, With My Throat performs a similar move in a letter that appears to be a haibun, a series of haiku with interspersed prose sections. One section reads:

 

(One night, in the prefecture of Kanda, I urined [sic] into some flowers of peony. The wind came and took my urination in a small spray to my geisha beside me. “I liked it,” said she. Thus I shivered and looked at the luminous moon.) (14)

 

This passage borders on parody: the passive geisha who enjoys being urinated on, the peonies, the moon, and the prefecture all seem to endorse aesthetic, racial, and misogynist stereotypes of Japan. Those elements are given further weight when in a note Motokiyu claims that “This is truly a beautiful passage,” and when in a note to that note Johnson and Alvarez add, “Indeed it is” (14). However, Johnson and Alvarez also indicate that the image is in fact lifted from the American poet Jack Gilbert. The title of the poem (which they don’t specify) is “Textures”:

 

We had walked three miles through the night
When I had to piss. She stopped just beyond.
I aimed at the stone wall of a vineyard,
But the wind took it and she made a sound.
I apologized. “It’s all right,” she said out
Of the dark, her voice different. “I liked it.” (Gilbert 88)

 

The fact that the image of the geisha comes from an Anglo-American poet helps to undermine the poem’s orientalisms, although not completely. Yasusada’s poem seems intentionally awkward, as if the stilted language were supposed to highlight the absurdity of the images. (One can also see a crude pun in the word “peony,” which further deflates the passage.) Still, the deflation of racist stereotypes does not negate the fact that they are presented in the first place. That’s one of the reasons that reading Yasusada’s work is fundamentally disturbing: the texts never offer anything like a moral or ethical position from which to examine these prominent questions of race, gender, and history.

 

As the passage cited indicates, a pronounced and complex sexuality marks many of the letters. For instance, in one undated letter, Yasusada writes “Are these bodies in some letters? Are these two tongues touching in some orchard? Who is it speaking in the dirty-talking?” (10). The first question is curious: because the text distributes authority among so many authors and editors, the letters often seem oddly incorporeal, as if they are voices (or language) without a body. Even the sexual images in this passage are disembodied: the poem mentions tongues and a “vagina-organ” but we don’t know whose, nor who is doing the “dirty-talking.” In contrast to this dismembering, a few important sections in Also, With My Throat go to the opposite extreme and offers masses of undifferentiated bodies. In the first letter Yasusada tells Richard about his girlfriend, or at least a woman he desires: “her sexual hair is a whole forest, smelling after rain falling. It is very dark within there. Bodies in piles are burning” (3). While the metaphor of sexual desire as flame is familiar, in the work of a poet who is writing in Hiroshima it inevitably evokes the atomic bomb that was dropped on that city. Lines that appear to refer to the bombing are much more common in this volume than in Doubled Flowering, in spite of the fact that these letters ostensibly date from the mid-1920s. The text seems to suggest that for Yasusada, and for his readers, there can be no “before-the-bomb.” The reason for that might be implied in a question Yasusada asks Richard: “Would you like some Hiroshima?” Because we’re reading the letters, that’s a rhetorical question, and it implicitly highlights the voyeuristic fascination with the suffering of others available in Yasusada’s work. Also, With My Throat both indulges that fascination and calls it into question: those sexualized bodies are “burning” in “piles.” This is a kind of self-conscious pornography of violence, and as readers we often catch ourselves looking.

 

The Yasusada project implicitly acknowledges that the author function remains central to our modes of reading. Also, With My Throat offers a proliferation of authors and editors, but they remain fundamentally unstable. Yasusada is obviously an invention, but is Tosa Motokiyu or Javier Alvarez? Is the “Kent Johnson” who serves as editor the same as the biological entity known as Kent Johnson, or is he a persona, just as Fernando Pessoa had an orthonym known as “Fernando Pessoa?” Instead of limiting our readings, the writers in Also, With My Throat enlarge the range of meaning in the text: as a cross-national work that evokes and critiques authority, the stereotype, racism, and misogyny, the Yasusada project remains both timely and compelling.

 

Notes

 

1. Yasusada’s “What Is the Diffirince [sic]?” which was published in Doubled Flowering, also alludes to this painting: “Is a rose is a rose is a rose the same as Ceci n’est pas une pipe?” (90). Thus a one-line poem manages to link Magritte, Stein and (in the title), Derrida’s notion of difference, a web of allusions that echoes this particular letter to Richard.

 

2. Spicer (1925-1965) is an obvious influence on the Yasusada project, especially his 1957 book After Lorca which claimed to be translations of poems written by Federico Garcia Lorca, as well as letters to the Spanish poet who had been dead for over twenty years when the volume was published. Nonetheless, the fact that “Lorca” wrote an introduction to the volume and that some of the translations are actually poems written by Spicer, indicates that in that text “Lorca” is a kind of heteronym to whom and through whom Spicer is speaking. Spicer is a major presence in Doubled Flowering: one poem by Yasusada and Akutagawa Fusei is called “Sentences for Jack Spicer Renga,” one of the final entries in Doubled Flowering is a letter from Yasusada to Spicer, and at the time of his death Yasusada was working on a volume entitled After Spicer.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Richard Howard. Aspen 5-6 (Fall/Winter 1967): n.p.
• Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
• Gilbert, Jack. Monolithos. New York: Knopf, 1982.
• Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.
• Motokiyu, Tosa. Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters in English.
• Nussbaum, Emily. “Turning Japanese: The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax.” Lingua Franca 6: 7.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “In Search of the Authentic Other: The Araki Yasusada ‘Hoax’ and What It Reveals about the Politics of Poetic Identity.” Boston Review 22.2 (1997): 26-33.
• Pessoa, Fernando. Selected Poems. Ed. and trans. Richard Zenith. New York: Grove, 1998.
• Yasusada, Araki. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. New York: Roof, 1997.