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U.S.

Japan Womens Journal Number 32 2007


Special Issue on It Hiromi Jeffrey Angles, Guest Editor

CONTENTS

Contributors Foreword Introduction: It Hiromi, Writing Woman : Ueno Chizuko Jeffrey Angles 3 7

How to Write Womens Poetry without Being a Woman Poet: Public Persona in It Hiromis Early Poetry Joanne Quimby Poems from On Territory 2 by It Hiromi translated by Sawako Nakayasu

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Reclaiming the Unwritten: The Work of Memory in It Hiromis Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I Am Anjuhimeko) I Am Anjuhimeko by It Hiromi

Jeffrey Angles

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translated by Jeffrey Angles

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Finding Our Own English: Migrancy, Identity, and Language(s) in It Hiromis Recent Prose House Plant by It Hiromi Bibliography

Kyko mori

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translated by It Hiromi and Harold Cohen

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Contributors
IT Hiromi, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important poets of contemporary Japan. Since her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, several works of prose, and numerous books of essays. She has won numerous important literary prizes, such as the Takami Jun Prize and the Hagiwara Sakutar Prize, and has twice been a finalist for the Akutagawa Prize. She lives outside of San Diego, California, with her husband Harold Cohen and her daughters. Jeffrey ANGLES is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Western Michigan University. He is the co-editor with J. Thomas Rimer of Japan: A Travelers Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2006) and translator of the forthcoming anthology From a Woman of a Distant Land: Poetry of Tada Chimako. He is at work on two new book manuscripts: a study of representations of love between men in Taish- and early Shwa-period literature, and a volume of translations of It Hiromis poetry. Harold COHEN, born in Britain, is an artist whose work appears in the Tate Collection and many other museums around the world. He is the author of the program Aaron, an ongoing research effort in artificial intelligence that involves programming a computer to make original works of art. He lives in Encinitas, California, with his wife It Hiromi and their daughters. Sawako NAKAYASU was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived mostly in the U.S. since the age of six. She has published several books of poetry, including Nothing Fictional but the Accuracy or Arrangement (She (Quale Press, 2005), So We Have Been Given Time Or (Verse Press, 2004), and Clutch (Tinfish, 2002). She is the editor of the journal Factorial, which regularly features Japanese poetry in English translation. Kyko MORI is an assistant professor in the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She is working on a book project entitled Detecting Modanizumu: Shinseinen (New Youth) Magazine, Mystery Fiction, and the Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism, 19201950. Joanne QUIMBY is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is completing her dissertation on approaches to sexuality, performance, and embodiment in the work of contemporary Japanese women writers. Much of the research for this article was conducted while she was a Graduate Research Fellow at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. UENO Chizuko, a University of Tokyo professor of sociology, is one of Japans most prominent scholars of womens studies. She has authored or contributed to several dozen books that have set the direction of contemporary feminist thought in Japan. Among her many projects is a series of essays produced jointly with It Hiromi and published as Noro to saniwa (The shamaness and her interpreter, 1991).

Foreword
Ueno Chizuko

It Hiromi is a unique woman poet without compare or competition in contemporary Japan. It is my great delight to begin this special issue on her works with this emphatic sentence, as I believe she deserves every word. In order to understand exactly how incomparable and unique she is, we need to look at the history of Japanese modern poetry, however briefly, to locate her works in the context of literary tradition. Japan had a long history of short poetry, especially tanka or waka (literally, Japanese short songs), comprised of thirty-one morae (in the internal pattern 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7), and haiku, which consisted of the first part of a tanka, with seventeen morae (5, 7, and 5). Though these poetic forms originally developed from Chinese traditional sonnets comprised of combinations of five and seven syllables, these rhythms of five and seven, once established, have influenced the ways that Japanese have read and written poetry for centuries. As Japan began modernizing, poets challenged these rhythmic constraints, assuming that new ideas and sentiments could not be placed in old vessels. They tried to escape from traditional forms, as if they were a prison restricting their language and thought. Some went so far as to refuse any form at all. The result was what was called free poetry in the new style (shintaishi), but in fact, the poets of this sort of work merely pressed themselves into uncomfortable corners as they searched for a type of experimental avant-garde poetry that might reveal a high degree of sophistication. These authors were isolated, read only among small circles of people with similar interests. In this way, modern poetry developed into lines of letters to be read, not to be narrated or recited. The result was a loss of voice, and as the popular audience for modern poetry disappeared, the phonetic nature of poetry fell by the wayside. Another inextricably linked development was the masculinization of modern poetrya gendering of Japanese poetry (like the whole of literary history) as specifically
2007 by Jsai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, Jsai University

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male. Iida Yko has persuasively described how the modernization of Japanese literature involved a masculinization, even though reading had previously been a handy pleasure for both women and children.1 From this time on, literature (including poetry) became a worthy pursuit for mena pursuit to which mature adult men might dedicate their entire existence. Why talk about masculinization? Because women were excluded from this process, sometimes through their own complicity. Women poets have been less likely to forget the phonic nature of poetry. They are concerned about voices and songs. They remained on the outside of highbrow circles of modern poetry, and so they were less likely to follow the trends developed by their male contemporaries.2 Modern Japanese women poets have established their own traditions quite separate from their male counterparts. Among them are Kaneko Misuzu, Ibaraki Noriko, Ishigaki Rin, Tomioka Taeko, and the author on whom this special issue focuses, It Hiromi. Tomioka, whom It admires a great deal, draws her vocabulary and rhythms from the traditional theater of kabuki and bunraku. Both are forms of premodern musical theater that involve strong elements of song, dance, and oral tradition. Its work has often shown the influence of medieval narrative and religious chantsforms of public performance that have strong elements of narration. It draws her nourishment from a long tradition of Japanese colloquial language, and she has even translated a collection of old tales of the extraordinary into the colloquial language of contemporary Japanese.3 Its poetry writing is unique in both its content and form. Her writing is specifically female in content because she writes about the body, skin, menstrual blood, pregnancy, giving birth, and so on. All of these works reflect the bodily experiences of being a woman, but her individuality does not allow an easy reconciliation with her femininity, which she has struggled with since her youth. She sticks to the surface of the body, writing about skin, hair, nail, spotsall those anomalies that occur on the boundaries of the self, those things that mark the interface between the body and the external world. Sex, or, more directly, intercourse, takes place on this surface, blurring the boundary between self and other. This obsession with the boundaries of the body prevents her from soaring up to the unearthly metaphysical extremes of her male colleagues. Her struggle with femininity, which in some cases even takes a violent form, struck a strong chord with contemporary female readers, especially among feminists. I confess I am one of those readers enamored with her work. Through the elaborate acts of narrative performance in her poetry, It transforms herself into an abusive mother, an unfaithful lover, a destructive wife, and a cruel daughter.

Ueno Chizuko

When she kills her child in the famous poem Kanoko-goroshi, translated by the poet Sawako Nakayasu in this special issue, it sounds as though this act of poetic narration might have saved her from the actual act of infanticide. The excessiveness of her aggressive expression keeps her from excessive damage to herself. I am tempted to call her writing private poetry, after the definition of private novels (shi-shsetsu) by Irmela HijiyaKirshnereit.4 The reason is that she writes about her own personal, private experiences, and so her audience can follow the course of her life and family crises as she gets married, divorced, remarried, and so on. Here the form and style help. Borrowing voices and rhythms from old traditional narratives, she successfully transforms her own personal tragedies into the universal suffering of everyday life. This is exactly the function accorded narrative in traditional cultures. Here and there throughout the world, in Iraq and Afganistan, in Korea and Japan, there are traditional poetic forms into which people pour new ideasideas sometimes critical of politics, sometimes satirical of wealth and desires, sometimes expressing anxiety and hopes for the future. The history of literature involves not just the development of new forms but the revival of traditional forms through the influx of new ideas, thus renovating them in new and idiosyncratic ways. It has achieved this renovation in unprecedented ways. Her migration to an Anglophone community and her marriage to a British artist living in California have led to new developments in her writing. Separation from the world of the mother tongue could prove fatally frustrating for many poets, even if the move to another country was their own choice. It, however, is different. Surrounded by neighbors who do not speak her language or read her Japanese writing, she takes advantage of this disadvantage by writing in ways that introduce an English quality to her Japanese and a Japanese quality to her English. Her style has become an interactive blurring of linguistic boundaries, not unlike the writing of Tawada Yko, the Japanese woman poet and writer who lives in Germany. As a result of these linguistic explorations, we now have a new, unprecedented style of Japanese writing which has never been seen before. We must appreciate the pain and frustration that It has experienced in nonJapanese speaking communities since these experiences have so greatly enriched the Japanese linguistic space. Despite all the homage I am paying to Its writing, I cannot help but wonder whether or not English translation can successfully transfer the charm of her writing, though I am reminded of how fascinated she was with writing from the Anglophone

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world even early in her career. Even before her move to America and her marriage to a man from Britain, she was deeply attracted to the narrative poetry of Native Americans. She read Native American songs and poems primarily in English translation because their own voices and languages had started dwindling into obscurity so long ago. Translation does not destroy the appeal of Native American narratives. After all, they did convey their messages to her. If that is the case, why cant we expect that translating her works into English will deliver the attractiveness of her works to Anglophone audiences today?
Notes 1. Karera no Monogatari (Their manly narratives) provides a provocative revision of modern literary history from a feminist literary standpoint, focusing primarily on Natsume Sseki and his male audience. Iida Yko, Karera no monogatari: Nihon kindai bungaku to jend (Their manly narratives: Modern Japanese literature and gender), (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 1998). 2. There are a few exceptions among male poets. Tanikawa Shuntar is among them, but his popularity has earned him the opprobrium of other poets. 3. It Hiromi, Nihon no fushigi na hanashi (Strange tales from Japan), (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2004). 4. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996). Hijiya-Kirshnereit is also the German translator of It s work. See Irmela HijiyaKirschnereit, Seiyoku to shiteki szryoku: Doitsugo ken ni okeru It Hiromi (Sexual desire and poetic creativity: It Hiromi in the German-speaking world), Gendai shi tech 48, no. 6 (June 2005): 6871.

Introduction It Hiromi, Writing Woman


Jeffrey Angles

The 1970s saw a fundamental transformation in the ways that Japanese society talked about womens bodies, thanks in large part to the advances of feminism. The rise of feminist discourse encouraged women to speak about their experiences, desires, and bodies, stating that to do so was a significant social and political act. As a result, there emerged an entire generation of writers willing to examine issues central to womens lives. Shiraishi Kazuko (1931 ), one of Japans most important poets of the 1960s and 1970s, lauded the 1980s as an era of revolutionary change in Japanese womens poetry as poets, inspired by feminist rhetoric, began to describe the experience of womenespecially the themes of sexuality, pregnancy, and erotic desirewith a frankness rarely seen in the past.1 A figure whom many, including Shiraishi, mention as one of the foremost voices of this new generation of poets is the Tokyo-born writer It Hiromi. Born in 1955, she came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of dramatic collections that transformed the ways people were writing poetry in Japan. In a recent collection of contemporary poetry, the poet Kido Shuri introduced Its contributions with the following words of praise:
The appearance of It Hiromi, a figure that one might best call a shamaness of poetry (shi no miko), was an enormous event in post-postwar poetry. Her physiological sensitivity and writing style, which cannot be captured within any existing framework, became the igniting force behind the subsequent flourishing of womens poetry (josei shi), just as Hagiwara Sakutar had revolutionized modern poetry with his morbid sensitivity and colloquial style.2

2007 by Jsai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, Jsai University

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The comparison between It and Hagiwara Sakutar (18861942), one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century Japanese poetics, suggests the importance of Its contribution to modern Japanese letters. Many writers and critics share this high appraisal. Just recently Minashita Kiriu, the young winner of the eleventh Nakahara Chya Prize for poetry, remarked to me that It Hiromi was nothing less than a goddess of poetry (shi no megami) inspiring an entire generation of young writers, including Kiriu herself.3 As Ueno Chizuko notes in the foreword to this special issue of the U.S.Japan Womens Journal, Its work is strikingly original in both style and content. Even her earliest works, published in her early twenties, show that It had embarked on a lifelong battle against the relatively circumscribed and artfully worded language that has, for most of the twentieth century, shaped how people write poetry in Japan. Its early work does not partake of the terse, suggestive, elevated, and sometimes stilted style that formed the writing of the poetic mainstream since at least the time of the symbolist-inspired experiments of translator Ueda Bin (18741916) and poet Kitahara Hakush (18851942). Instead, much of her poetry is narrated in extended, sometimes even unwieldy passages of relatively colloquial text. It was, of course, not the first Japanese poet to experiment with colloquial poetry. As early as the second decade of the twentieth century, a group of poets close to Kawaji Ryk (18881959) jettisoned classical language and traditional metrical patterns of five and seven morae for colloquial free verse. What makes Its poetry so different from that of other writers is not just her rejection of classical metrical patterns. She also makes extensive use of registers of diction that have been excluded from the poetic mainstream: childish vocabulary, womens language, vulgar expressions, and even profanity. Her poems so skillfully capture the idiosyncrasies of spoken language that they often give the illusion that they are pouring directly from the mouth of some narrator onto the page. Not coincidentally, many commentators have described It as a shamaness (miko) who uses the medium of language to conduct ideas into language from some mysterious place deep within. Where this deep within is thought to reside depends on the commentator. Some describe Its work as an exemplar of Cixiouss criture fminine, stemming from somewhere deep within the body itself, while others speak of her writing as tapping into the cultural unconscious of Japan, or perhaps even womanhood as a whole.4 In any case, It has embraced the metaphor of poet-as-shamaness. In 1991, she collaborated with Ueno Chizuko on an important collection of essays and poetry,

Jeffrey Angles

which the two likened to the collaboration between an Okinawan shamaness (noro) and the person who interprets the shamanesss utterances for the outside world (saniwa).5 Also, as I point out in my contribution to this issue, It explicitly plays out this metaphor in her long narrative poem Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjuhimeko, 1993), in which she takes a record of a spirit possession from a shamaness early in the twentieth century and uses it as the point of inspiration for a dramatic new myth. The fact that It draws so often upon spoken language for her poetic vocabulary does not mean that her poems are not carefully constructed or artfully worded. Many of her works, especially her earlier poems, show a dense and sophisticated logic that reveals an erudite mind at work. The poet Ishii Tatsuhiko has described her work as organic, arguing that despite her relatively straightforward vocabulary, her poems are constructed with such a deliberate structure that each phrase seems to contribute significantly to the whole, much like a cell contributing its own unique function to the workings of the entire organism.6 Through her refusal to give in to the restrictions that twentieth-century Japanese institutions of poetry placed on what could be considered poetic, It has consistently challenged dominant concepts of poeticity and, in the process, pointed out the inadequacy of more mainstream poetic styles to embody contemporary experience. As Joanne Quimby notes in her article, which begins this special issue, in 1982 the publisher Shichsha inaugurated a series of critically lauded anthologies entitled The Present State of Womens Poetry (josei shi no genzai) that helped establish the contours of the new wave of womens poetry. The series featured a number of rising stars, such as Isaka Yko (1949 ), Hirata Toshiko (1955 ), and Shiraishi Kko (1960 ), who would later become fixtures in late-twentieth-century poetic history. The first book in the series was Its Aoume (Unripe plums), a combination of free verse and almost story-like fragments of prose.7 Despite their informal, conversational lightness, Its writing deals with weighty subjects, ranging from the authors impressions of Auschwitz to explicit invocations of masturbation and the scopophilic fascination with death. In these poems, one also finds traces of Its growing passion for feminist psychological theory. As Its reputation as a woman poet (josei shijin) grew, she took increasing exception to her position within the literary world, believing that by subsuming her writing under the broad category of womans poetry, the publishing industry was simply lumping her in with a broad array of female writers and obscuring the differences among them. In a roundtable discussion published in 1985, she remarked she was not happy that her work had been grouped with that of poets such as Isaka Yko simply because their

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work had appeared in the same series.8 Instead, she insisted on being recognized as a poet without the delimiting adjective woman that might pigeonhole her work. At the same time, however, her writing gravitated increasingly to issues of the feminine body, sexuality, and motherhood. By the mid-1980s, when she published Teritor ron 2 (On territory 2, 1985) and Teritor ron 1 (On territory 1, 1987), she had given birth to her first child, Kanoko.9 (She would eventually have three children: two with her first husband, Nishi Masahiko, a scholar of minority literature, and one with her second husband in America.) Her experience of motherhood led her to begin probing the meaning of the mother-child relationship, the demands that motherhood places on the mothers sexuality, and the psychological ramifications of pregnancy and childbirth. In fact, so many poems in these volumes describe pregnancy and childcare that many people, both inside and outside the literary world, began calling her by the sobriquet shussan shijin, or poet of childbirth. Even today, the poems about motherhood from the two volumes of Teritor ron remain some of her most famous work, appearing more often in anthologies and the analyses of literary scholars than almost all her other work combined. One common goal of these and other early poems is to reexamine the experiences of women with a fresh eye. By rejecting clichs about motherhood, womens sexuality, and the relationships between women and their families, It looks anew at the complicated psychological processes at work in the relationships between women and the people around them. For instance, her poems written after her first childs birth are not simple paeans to motherhood but an incursion into the dark, hidden recesses of the maternal mind. Kanoko-goroshi (Killing Kanoko), newly translated in this issue, is probably Its most famous poem to date.10 It is written in two parts, side by side, that represent the juxtaposed voices of two people. One voice, clearly that of a woman, describes the experience of postpartum depression and her desire to commit abortion or infanticide, while the other, written from an external point of view, describes the suicide of a young mother named Hiromi. Within both voices, the words Congratulations on your destruction (horoboshite omedet gozaimasu) repeat and overlap, creating recurring, almost hypnotic cadences that parody the congratulatory message a young mother hears repeatedly upon becoming pregnant or giving birth. Its poem reminds readers that becoming a mother can involve darker, more complicated feelings than are usually acknowledged, as the mother puts her own life on hold to take care of her new charge. The fragmentary poem Kanoko no shisshin o naosu (Healing Kanokos rash) also deals with the implicit conflict between mother and child in its descriptions of the repetitive motions of a mother

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caring for a parasitic infant who monopolizes her thoughts and sucks the nutrients from her breasts. The fact that the poem breaks off with the words the remaining has been abridged (ika shryaku) suggests that, like the poem itself, this conflict is never entirely resolved. In these and other poems, It shatters the image of the mother as loving caregiver, which even now continues to hold an important place in the cultural imagination. It is as much a performance artist as a poet. Much like Shiraishi Kazuko, who during the 1960s performed her work to jazz accompaniment, and Nejime Shji (1948 ), who in the 1980s became known for his dramatic and amusing style of reading, It believes that literature has too long been divorced from the voice. Many of her pieces are meant to be read aloud as much as to be read on the page, and through the 1980s she developed innovative ways of performing her work. For instance, when reading Kanokogoroshi, she plays a recorded version of one of the two voices while reading the other aloud. The result is a complicated interplay of two voices, each describing the experience of motherhood and postpartum depression from a different angle. When giving performances of Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru, she sits on the floor like a shamaness and raps on a drum, table, or the floor to punctuate the narrative and draw attention to the rhythms she has carefully embedded in the text. In the late 1980s It became eager to leave her first husband and change her surroundings, so she set her sights on America as a place to give herself a new start.11 One reason It was interested in America in particular was her growing passion for Native American poetry, which she had first encountered a few years earlier in the translations of Kaneko Hisao.12 The poetry she read in Kanekos translations struck her as representing the origin of all poetry, and she became interested in trying to use contemporary spoken language to write poetry in a mythological mode.13 Her interest in Native American poetry eventually led her to the work of Jerome Rothenberg, the avant-garde poet who had published several key collections of Native American poetry and helped make ethnopoetics a major force in contemporary American poetic circles. By the time she decided to go to America, It was already employing the mythological quality, repetition, and parallelism she found in those works in her own writing. In 1990 It met Rothenberg when he visited Japan, and in 1991 she traveled with her two daughters to the University of California at San Diego, where he was teaching.14 The sojourn in California was a turning point in Its life. She quickly settled into life in America, making friends and building a life, although her somewhat rudimentary English meant that she maintained a strong sense of being a resident alien in a foreign environment.

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She returned to America several times on a three-month-long tourist visa, but when her visa was about to expire, she would return to Japan temporarily, then go back to the States. This began a series of transpacific trips between Japan and California. At one point, however, she did overstay her visa, causing a series of legal difficulties that she eventually solved by marrying her partner at the time, the artist Harold Cohen. (A naturalized citizen originally from Britain, Cohen is an artist who has gained international recognition for his experiments with artificial intelligence. He is the author of a program called Aaron, which involves teaching a computer to produce original artwork. Aarons work appears in numerous prominent museums, including the Tate Gallery in London.)15 Since the mid-1990s It has lived in Encinitas, a quiet city near San Diego, with Cohen, her two daughters with her first husband, and her third daughter whom the new couple had together. The change of setting led to several significant changes in her writing, in terms of both genre and theme. As Kyko mori remarks in her reading of Its recent work, It turned to longer, freer forms of prose after settling in California. Her already prodigious output of essays increased and she began writing novellas, both because she was tired of the strictures of poetry and because she felt prose was better suited to exploring her new experiences as a migrant. Her novella Hausu puranto (House plant), published in 1998 and translated here for the first time, was nominated for the 119th Akutagawa Prize, and the following year she published Ra nnya (La nia), which was nominated for the 121st Akutagawa Prize.16 It followed these with other pieces, including the novella Sur riro japanzu (Sree lil Japaneez, 2001) and the short story Monsn gden (Monsoon garden, 2002).17 In all these works of fiction, It applies her signature colloquial style to create engaging and challenging works that explore some of the many facets of modern migrancy: the legal difficulties of the immigration system, the experience of being a transplant in a new environment, the linguistic isolation of recent arrivals, the implications of that isolation for self-expression and identity, and the linguistic hybridization that results. It refracts these issues through her awareness of womens issues, writing articulately about the subaltern status particular to female migrants, especially those whose inability to speak English condemns them to silence. More recently, It has returned to poetry, publishing the long narrative poem Kawara arekusa (Wild grass on a riverbank), a tour de force that continues her interest in the experiences of migrants but incorporates many of the stylistic innovations, thematic elements, and mythological modes of storytelling seen in her work throughout the years.18

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In 2006 this work won the Takami Jun Prize, awarded each year to an outstanding and innovative collection of poetry. Even more recent is her narrative poem Koyte songu (Coyote song, 2007), which involves motifs borrowed from Native American poetry, and Toge-nuke (The thorn-puller, 2007), a long and fantastic narrative, written in alternating prose and poetry, about the thorn-pulling statue of Jiz located near Its former home in Sugamo, Tokyo.19 In September 2007, this work won the fifteenth Hagiwara Sakutar Prize, given each year to an innovative work of literature by the city of Maebashi. Given the transpacific trajectory of It Hiromis own life, there is perhaps no forum more appropriate than the U.S.Japan Womens Journal, produced jointly on both sides of the Pacific, for this special issue on her work. It is the hope of the editors and contributors that this special issue will begin the process of exploring the rich field of Its writing, which has garnered far too little critical attention in the West, despite her large presence in the world of Japanese literature. Throughout Its career, she has shown an almost uncanny ability to anticipate the kinds of themes that would be of major importance to literary and cultural theorists. Her works present a provocative web of tightly knit themes that range from motherhood to migrancy, from languages role in identity formation to life on the fringes of society. The critical articles included here explore the thematic concerns in various stages of Its career and give a sense of the evolution of her work as she has moved in new and different directions over time. Because so little of Its work is available in translation, this issue departs from the practice established in past issues of U.S.Japan Womens Journal and includes not just critical articles but also new translations of original works. The first selection consists of two of Its most dramatic and frequently anthologized poems from Teritor ron 2, translated by Its friend and fellow poet Sawako Nakayasu. Although some of these poems have appeared in translation previously, these are the first that are actually based on Its original text from 1985. (Other translations of Kanoko-goroshi were based on a later version of the text, which presents the poem in a radically different fashion on the page and gives a mistaken impression of how the poem works.) The second is a full translation of Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru, a work that It performs relatively often in her public readings but that has until now not been available in a full translation. The third is her novella Hausu puranto, translated by It Hiromi herself, with the help of her husband Harold Cohen. This translation is not a slavish reflection of the Japanese original, first published in the journal Shinch (New tide) in 1998. Instead, it is perhaps more accurate

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to think of it as a new work since It made many minor changes to diction and content while rendering it into English. As Kyko mori explains in her article in this issue, one of Its goals in rewriting this story herself was to help forge a new interlinguistic style that is more conducive to expressing the idioms, style, and order of her thoughts than standard English literary style, which, as a non-native speaker, she finds foreign and confining.
Acknowledgments I extend my thanks to the contributors who submitted their work for this special issue, and to Sally Hastings and Jan Bardsley, who provided the opportunity to publish this work in the U.S.Japan Womens Journal. Also, I am grateful to the publishers Shinchsha and Shichsha for agreeing to allow us to include the translations of works originally published with them. Most of all, I thank It Hiromi herself for the many forms of support she provided as I edited this issue, including permission to print the new translations of her work that appear here. Notes 1. Shiraishi Kazuko, Hachij-nendai to josei shi: Feminizumu und to heik shite (Womens poetry of the eighties: Parallels with the feminist movement), Gendai shi tech 34, no. 9 (September 1991): 6469. More than a decade before, Shiraishi had personally felt the brunt of society when she published the poem Dankon (The man-root) in her 1965 anthology Konban wa aremoy (Signs of storm tonight). This poem represents a break from the phallocentric notion that the penis is a metaphysical representation of power, connectivity, or the ultimate signifier anchoring meaning. It describes the man-root not as something that belongs solely to men but as an abstract, transcendental force that women can access as well; however, the Japanese tabloid industry seized upon this poem and others to deride Shiraishis work as scandalous. This suggests that Japanese society was perhaps not yet entirely ready for frankly worded poetry by women that deals with sexuality in untraditional ways or dissolves sacred ideas about male privilege. 2. Nomura Kiwao and Kido Shuri, Sengo meishi sen II (Selection of famous postwar poetry II), Gendai shi bunko tokush han 2 (Tokyo: Shichsha, 2001), 230. 3. Minashita Kiriu, personal interview with Jeffrey Angles, 27 June 2006. 4. See, for instance, Shiraishi Kazuko, Hachij-nendai to josei shi, 45; Ueno Chizuko, Moto kyoshokush no shjo no ekusorushizumu (The exorcism of a formerly anorexic young woman), in It Hiromi, It Hiromi shish (Tokyo: Shichsha, 1988), 14345; Nobuaki Tochigi, Transformational Narratives by The Poet who goes into a Trance: A Review of Hiromi Itos Latest Book, trans. Yasuhir Yotsumoto, Poetry International Web (October 2006), http:// japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=7853&x=1. 5. It Hiromi and Ueno Chizuko, Noro to saniwa to (The shamaness and her interpreter), (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1991). 6. Ishii Tatsuhiko, Ikizuku nikutai toshite no shi: It Hiromi no ars poetica (Poetry as

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breathing flesh: The ars poetica of It Hiromi), in Gendai shi toshite no tanka (Tokyo: Shoshi yamada, 1999), 22132. 7. It Hiromi, Aoume (Unripe plums), Josei shi no genzai 1 (Tokyo: Shichsha, 1982). 8. There It wrote, After all, that is what men see; I think its just laziness. I am me, Isakasan is Isaka-san, and were completely different. She expressed her relief that people had started to make a distinction between the two authors, and she said Isaka probably was relieved, too. Yoshimoto Takaaki, It Hiromi, and Nejime Shji, Kotoba e, shintai e, sekai e (To words, to the body, to the world), Gendai shi tech 28, no. 3 (March 1985): 57. 9. It Hiromi, Teritor ron 2 (On territory 2), (Tokyo: Shichsha, 1985); It Hiromi, Teritor ron 1 (On territory 1), photographs by Araki Nobuyoshi (Tokyo: Shichsha, 1987). 10. For commentary on this poem, see Ueno Chizuko, Moto kyoshokush no shjo no ekusorushizumu, 14445; Tsuboi Hideto, It Hiromi ron (jo) (On It Hiromi [Part I]), Nihon bungaku 38, no. 12 (December 1989): 33; Kageyama Kazuko, Tanoshii kogoroshi: Shijin It Hiromi no baai (A pleasant act of infanticide: The case of the poet It Hiromi), Shin Nihon bungaku 48, no. 10 (Autumn 1993): 5154; Leith Morton, Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 1067. 11. Some time before, It had applied for the poet-in-residence position at Oakland University in Michigan, set aside for contemporary Japanese poets to visit and teach at the university. Many important Japanese poets had occupied this position over the years, including her close friend Sasaki Mikir, who had encouraged her to try for the position. After some waiting, it did not seem that Its name was especially high in the queue, and so she began to look for ways to come to the United States with her own money. 12. Kaneko Hisao, Amerika Indian no shi (American Indian poetry), Chk shisho 472 (Tokyo: Ch kronsha, 1977). This volume has been expanded and reprinted as Kaneko Hisao, Amerika Indian no kshshi: Mah toshite no kotoba (American Indian oral tradition: Words as magic), Heibonsha raiburar 347 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000). 13. It Hiromi, e-mail to Jeffrey Angles, 15 November 2006. 14. It remains close to Rothenberg and his wife Diane. Incidentally, it was Diane who provided the inspiration for the character Claris in the novella Hausu puranto (House plant), included in this issue. 15. Cohens computer program provides the name of the character Aaron in the novella Hausu puranto (House plant), which appears in this special issue. 16. It Hiromi, Hausu puranto (House plant), Shinch 95, no. 5 (May 1998): 10049; It Hiromi, Ra nnya (La nia), Shinch 96, no. 3 (March 1999): 60105. 17. It Hiromi, Sur riro japanzu (Sree lil Japaneez), Shinch 99, no. 7 (July 2001): 636; It Hiromi, Monsn gden (Monsoon garden), in Imafuku Ryta, ed., Watashi no tanky, 21 seiki bungaku no sz 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 181204. 18. It Hiromi, Kawara arekusa (Wild grass on a riverbank), (Tokyo: Shichsha, 2005). Sections of this work have been translated as Hiromi It, From Wild Grass upon a Riverbank, trans. Jeffrey Angles, Poetry International Web (1 October 2006), http://japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/ piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=7833&x=1.

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U.S.Japan Womens Journal No. 32, 2007

19. It Hiromi, Kyote songu (Coyote song), (Tokyo: Switch Publishing, 2007); It Hiromi, Toge-nuki: Shin Sugamo Jiz engi (The thorn-puller: New legends of the bodhisattva Jiz at Sugamo), (Tokyo: Kdansha, 2007).

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