Sunday, December 2, 2001		Books

Musing of a Stone
by Sochi Ogie. Translated from the Japanese by H.Kuka Zawa & Kevin H.Leahy.

SINCE I have had opportunities some years ago to consider the sui generis character and style of Japanese poetry, I am returning to the theme in a mood of passing nostalgia. It was in the World Poetry Conference of 1990 in Seoul, South Korea, where I had come face to face with some of the leading poets of the Mangloid lands of the Buddha.

The volume under review is of course, in tune with the Japanese mores and moorings going back to distant millennia. Traces of the Samurai culture of valour are now a thing of the past in their new poetry which presents contemporary and complex problems of existence in an "Americanised" world. Sochi Ogie’s verse reflects this painful dilemma in a characteristic signature and address.

A disarming simplicity which hides the profoundest truths of life and society reminds me of the Japanese cunning or craft evolved with the passage of time. Poetry, though universal in its magic and essentialities, also keeps acquiring new forms, style and idiom to stand up to the changing world reality. Much of Japanese new poetry is in free verse, but it hides its subtleties in simple metaphors. Chiefly, it is now the poetry of "the small gods", a poetry of the little, the small and the obscure that carry the huge burden of unbearable contingencies.

The Samurai values — of valour in arms, of harakiri for the nation’s honour, or of falling on one’s poisoned sword in moments of love’s failure and of other creature pains — are remotely there in negative echoes, but the new Japanese poet in general has thrown overboard the baggage of heedless sacrifices. Life’s riches and intensities are to be enjoyed within one’s constraints and circumstances.

Sochi Ogie’s verse then veers round these small orbits of life and is content to do so. The reticence and the silent energies which characterise his poetry remain there to create new harmonies. No extravagances, no medieval craftsmanship or ornateness, etc. In poem after poem, we see life’s significant insignificances keep the muses on course. It is not really a repudiation of Japanese culture or heritage, but a way of keeping it out of the line of a divided vision.

The title poem, "Musing from a stone" serves, in a manner, to become the central vision of the volume under review. This is how it opens: "This is truly boring/ No one spares me a glance/ When someone runs into me./ They give me a boot, and that’s the end of that/ it’s all I can do to get a snort of disgust out of them./ How absurd." The concluding stanza brings the arguments round to a decision thus: "I am just a plain old stone/ Nothing more/ Nothing less/ With no redeeming features/ Just lying there an unsightly little fellow."

The absurdity of rootless existence and the meaning of an obscure destiny now form the nucleus of many a poem. And the poem to follow is, no wonder, entitled "The song of existence". "Is there any design in life?/ Or, is it only an absurd accident in a howling wilderness of nothingness?" For instance, the title of the poem is indicated in the miseries of the dialectics of daily encounters.

Or, examine the concluding stanza from "The distant mountain": "I stand there absentmindedly/ And leave/ The dark time that I’ll soon face./ On top of the mountains."

In the fast changing Japanese society one has to adjust oneself to the new culture as the poet affirms in a poem called "Adaptation". "That is all the law of life,/ of Darwin’s, and of God’s!" In "Night of the Suberi-Hiyu" the subtlety of style is subsumed in the manner itself: "Stab the lukewarm night with a blade/ And cold water/ Comes dripping down/ Like soles/ From the slender moan."

Much of Ogie’s poetry is vegetal though it lacks the intensity of Theodore Roethke’s poetry. For instance, the dirt that breathes, the dung and the loam create a metaphysic of metaphors, and we begin to get hooked to both the old and the new at once, echoes, footfalls, voices from the deep.

In a really quintessential poem, "Self-Portrait" the leit motif of the volume is summed up, so to speak. This is how it opens: "I wonder if it’s the real me/ That I see/ Isn’t it a virtual image/ I drew while looking in the mirror?".... "That’s how, with self-portraits/ They don’t talk, don’t wink."

So here is a poetry of deeply existential concerns except that the whole argument is advanced in a low key. This existence left an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon brooding over nothingness in the end. But the nothingness of our poet is really a nothingness, a void...an obscure, wayside stone to be kicked about without any protest from the victim.

Is this the "absurd" of the smaller gods? Who knows? While perusing these pages, I began to think of the Freudian and Jungian side of things. The dreams and the distempers, the repressed and the submerged, "the racial unconscious", etc., and this led me to Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry; a strong and great poet feels a deep urge to throw off the burden of heritage of the earlier poets who were still fuming in his blood.

Earlier T.S. Eliot had pontificated that great poets "steal", while others only "imitate". As it happens, I came to know Professor Bloom fairly well during our stay as collegues at New York University in 1988-90 and I had a chance to enlarge the argument with him. So does Ogie, representing the dilemma of the modern Japanese poet, share such a view? Perhaps not. But God’s ironies are endless. The Samurai past is gone for ever, but the new world of commercial Japan, while a great success, has still to find its new culture in a fast-changing world. A culture of beauty and compassion.

Ogie has been writing poetry for over three decades, and he is not sure if he still knows the answer. The search of the quest is the thing: the rest is irrelevant in a way. Yes, the quest abides.