The life and work of poet Yasuhiro Yotsumoto is a testament to the conviction and omnipresence of poetics, profuse in every aspect of human life. In nearly twenty volumes of poetry and criticism, he has interrogated, in verse and prose, the reality and abstractions of family, romance, corporate fiscal structuring, Japanese linguistics, culture both global and insular, a struggle against cancer, and, in doing so, has revealed something essential about poetry as it coheres with all other ideas and facts. Having displaced himself from Japan by the means of an extremely successful career in business—something he calls his “real” job, despite every indication in his manner of speaking that he considers it a mere occupation—Yotsumoto has lived in Munich since 1994, and at the time of our meeting, has just begun a very tedious and significant transition back into Japanese daily life and society.
Despite meeting all the qualifications for a writer defined by (self-imposed) exile and exodus, Yotsumoto has cultivated a significant reputation in Japanese letters. As editor of the admired literary quarterly Beagle, host of the poetry podcast Poetry Talks, Japanese national editor of Poetry International, and diligent translator of poets ranging from Li Bo to Simon Armitage, he admitted casually, without any pretension or arrogance, that he is now considered somewhat of an insider (a word that he would go on to elaborate upon) within literary circles. We conversed in English, which he professed that he is able to “speak for about two hours, then the battery runs out and I start speaking nonsense.”
I met him on the very day the state of emergency—enforced within Japan due to the COVID-19 epidemic—was due to be lifted. In Yamashita Park, plentiful with roses and the bare shoulders and legs emblematic of spring-turning-summer, we ate ice cream cones overlooking the waters of Tokyo Bay. The conversation was peppered with his generous laughter, silences full of thought, and interruptions typical of the world, busy and vivid, brilliantly alive.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s impressive to be able to balance—what I imagine to be—a very heavy workload on your day job with such a prolific poetry career.
Yasuiro Yotsumoto (YY): That’s right. I wouldn’t be able to do that if it was prose—novels, or something. But poetry is okay; I can finish it before breakfast every morning. And I write everyday.
XYS: I find that most Japanese writers have this very regulated schedule.
YY: Well, I always wanted to keep this balance. It was a challenge I put upon myself, the balance between “real life” and writing. And I made that conscious decision as I graduated from university, that I could take a very cultural job—copywriter, or something—but I somehow decided not to do that, and instead I pursued two separate worlds.
XYS: Mutually exclusive.
YY: Well, mutually exclusive in terms of lifestyle, but my first book was about corporate finance theory. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and got my MBA in corporate finance in my twenties, and I wrote a book of poetry by applying such theories of the Black-Scholes option model, etc., to describe Japanese society at that time—which was peaking economically, and everyone was sensing that the burst of the bubble was not so far away, yet we kept going and going and going. That was an overlap. So I had always been an outsider amongst Japanese poets; I live outside [of Japan], and I write about things that have never been touched before. I try to bring in this kind of prosaic, very banal, everyday subject into the domain of poetry.
XYS: That makes a lot of sense, because I read in a previous interview that you didn’t engage with poetry in a very concrete way until you moved to America, becoming involved with English-language poetry, and what you’re saying coheres with the American tradition of observation, and that daily practice of using “unpoetic” things.
YY: That’s right. Well . . . when I was in Japan, I was also writing poetry in Japanese, but I couldn’t crack into this thing that I was really interested in. I felt like I was just touching the surface, and I didn’t know what it was, and somehow, when I kept some distance between myself and Japanese society after moving to the US, I guess I figured it out, and it was this sense of reality. Not a poetic reality, but the reality that everyone in this nation is feeling without articulating—which I dislike, you know, most of the time. That’s why I left. But this Japanese “air” and way of doing things, and the sentiment that dictates both political and economic reality, all of those murky concepts that are difficult to put into words—I had to find many different ways to crack into it. So the topic was one thing, but I think I needed to cut up this natural bond between myself and the Japanese language by moving out of its sphere, and immerse myself into American culture and into English.
XYS: So this it, you’re talking about the kind of underlying structure that rules daily Japanese life? Like, I find that Japan is governed by a lot of imaginary constructs and rules . . . Is that what you were trying to solve?
YY: It’s part of it, yes.
XYS: In America, when modernist poetry arrived, language simplified; do you feel like your language also changed?
YY: In the early days, my language was pretty narrative, so it was easier to translate into English or other languages, as opposed to my recent works. Though, it was never simple, because when I wrote my first book, I used a lot of corporate jargon, and the language was alienated from everyday language, but it was also never poetic language. It was more utilitarian: applying corporate terms in the context of metaphor. But at a certain point, I shifted to a more personal approach, and I began to examine my childhood and my personal relationships. You know, it’s an orbit. Writing for a long time, you go very far from poetry and literature and into everyday life, then you go very much into the personal sphere of yourself, your dreams, and your language becomes private and less approachable, and it’s a different challenge.
I also played a lot with language itself, but it’s not like I just went from one stone to another and in totally different directions. Now that I’m sixty, and I’m looking back, it seems as though I was travelling in a circle, and everything seems somewhat related; even though the obvious subject matters differ, the same approach is there. And at the same time, I got to know more poets and editors in Japan, despite always living outside of it. But if you keep doing the same thing for thirty years, you begin to gain a reputation.
So now, I feel like an insider, and even a long-timer.
XYS: Can you talk more about this bilaterialism, this inside-outside division in the Japanese poetry scene?
YY: The poetry in Japan has this history of—well, it was a hundred and fifty years ago that Japan opened up the country, and western influences, including a different poetics, came in. Do you know what poetry is called in Japanese?
XYS: 詩 (shi).
YY: Yes, so up until the end of the Edo era, when we said shi, it meant Chinese poetry. And Japanese poems were tanka or haiku, and they were called either 歌 (uta), now song. And it was only then, around the nineteenth century and in the context of westernization, that the current concept of shi, as spoken language or freeform verses, became recognized. So it was a rather new phenomenon until fascism came in the 1920s and ’30s, when all of a sudden, almost every poet went under the oppression of this regime, and started to write poems in praise of war, or the emperor.
But what’s shocking to me is not the topic, but the way they wrote—the style of the poems became completely old-fashioned, returning to written language and all this 5-7-5 rhythm, as if nothing had changed in the past hundred years. They returned to the good old Japanese-fighting-against-Western-civilization.
Then, the current poetry scene that started at the end of 1945 was an antithesis to anything that happened during wartime; anything old-fashioned was bad, and poetry must have political ideology, and emotion should not dominate the poem, because look at what emotion did to the poets! They were all swayed by emotion, intoxicated in this 5-7-5 and ended up praising the emperor and invading all these Asian nations. Poets have to be awake. Poets have to be a force of resistance. That was a very dominant sentiment in 1945 until 1960 or so. And I was born in 1959, so I kind of supported it, and I think we need to learn about it.
But the downside was that they failed to write about the personal, which was looked down at, or to deal with poetic expression. Everything traditional was denied, including the heritage of Japanese literature, the art of collaboration, like 連歌 (renga) . . . And it was only in the seventies that such concepts were allowed to be discussed and brought back into the poets’ toolboxes.
Then came the age of postmodernism, which were mostly the French literature scholars in the eighties and nineties who were head-heavy, as opposed to having a down-to-earth approach. So the compounded effect of political ideology in the fifties and sixties and the postmodernism wave in the eighties and nineties sort of isolated the general populace, and poems were considered something difficult to understand—something a really smart person writes for themselves. At least that was the impression I had when I was eighteen, and that was part of the reason I chose to have a “real” job.
But I kept writing, and decided to work out of this system in Japan. After that, I started to put myself back into this closed system by writing poems which were easier for ordinary people to understand, and dealing with the same reality that they live in, and writing in a more general media than a highbrow literature magazine. Overall, it was not successful at all—even though I was given a lot of chances and had some responses, it never became a wide phenomenon. It didn’t move on to change anything in the poetry scene.
Yet, as I was saying, now I feel that I’m inside the system, and in-between, I’ve changed, but also, Japanese society went through quite a fundamental change. So, I think this concept that I thought I needed to fight against . . . failed by itself in a sense. In another sense, it is still very much there, and I think it will continue to thrive in this male-dominant society, but, at the same time, it’s getting tired . . . old.
XYS: So in terms of your ideas about the poetic evolution, Japan will always be burdened by its history, right? Like, it will always be referenced by the terms of its past.
YY: Well, it’s only referenced by outsiders. That’s the problem. Japanese people are living in the constant moment of the present. Our motto, as Japanese, is to wash away everything with water. We love water! We’re the bathing people, the 銭湯 (sento) people. Wash it away. The sense of history is very, very weak. It’s a floating world, and you’re on this boat, and everything goes by.
XYS: So in your vision of Japan, it’s very disconnected from its history.
YY: Yes. Yes. Otherwise, why is Abe still here?
XYS: Ah. Well, I think it’s because Japanese people in general are apathetic about politics.
YY: Apathy is another aspect of this disconnection.
XYS: Yes, because since you brought up this intense political occupation in Japanese modernist poetry, now that Japan is relatively . . . stable in terms of a nation, it has resulted in this very widespread—not necessarily apathy—but ambivalence about politics, where people don’t feel as though they have agency. Is this something you see as an issue in poetry?
YY: Yes, absolutely. On one hand, in terms of artistic achievements, I think we are making very steady progress. The writing technique is now very sophisticated. But I think overall, this sophistication of artistic technique and artistic sensitivity is going in the direction of the personal. And the element of poetry as an action of resistance is lacking now. I’m very much interested now in the type of poet—not only in Japan but outside as well—who tries to cultivate resistance—not only on a political dimension, but in such a way that the art and politics are intertwined inseparably. And oftentimes it questions the very base of the political situation, which is our consciousness, and our consciousness is made partly of languages, or the way we use languages. So some poets question that language, question our consciousness, and somehow, it makes you become aware of how reality is, which includes political and economic reality as well as psychological human reality.
XYS: So do you feel like you are actively more interested in contemporary poets who address political themes?
YY: Yes, but not in an 1950s propagandist way. I am an editor of this poetry magazine called 季刊びーぐる (Beagle Quarterly), and the latest issue features the Hong Kong poets. I spent just a week in Hong Kong in November last year, but it was a very intense and special week, just before the local elections. I met many poets, some of whom are trying to do more or less the same thing as I was just talking about—not writing propaganda but trying to question the whole system and the way of being in a deeper dimension of language and consciousness itself. So I’m very proud of this latest issue, introducing them and asking the Japanese poets and critics to contribute their share.
XYS: It seems as though you have a tendency to explore the individual via the telescope of larger questions.
YY: Yes. In the past, I’ve translated traditional Taoist poetry, Dante, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Blake, Emily Dickinson . . . all as a kind of reckoning with myself and my identity. It’s an experiment of how I could relive those poems as a contemporary Japanese poet. My goal is that—if my uncle, as someone who never reads poems, read them, he would think that I wrote them, as a twenty-first century man.
XYS: You want to expose the universality of these poems.
YY: Right, so what I did, in the case of the Chinese poems, I showed the original text—which every Japanese person can get some sense of—alongside an authentic and formal way of reading in Japanese, it’s called 書き下し文 (kakikudashibun), that follows the Chinese characters in Japanese language, by putting some hiragana here and there, and assigning numbers that denote which characters come first or second in Japanese . . .
XYS: So you kind of have to make a roadmap through the sentence to ascribe it to a Japanese grammar.
YY: Yeah, and I pair them with a little essay that talks about how this poem relates to me. Then, I made my own translations, in which I can take liberties, making jumps or leaps, transforming it, sometimes referring to other Japanese poems. So when the reader follows the sequence, they have the original text, the very formal way of interpreting it, and also how a contemporary poet reacts to it, how he relives it with his own language and words with the spirit of this poem written a thousand years ago.
XYS: Would you call these translations, or interpretations?
YY: It’s very mixed, but I always showed something that gives a more authentic translation element to the readers, and then a little interpretation with critical or creative translation. Overall, my idea, or my aim, is to prove to the people that some poetry never ages. That you can always experience it as a very present, very alive experience.
XYS: Do you make an effort to distinguish the voices between them, then? Does William Blake sound very different from Emily Dickinson in these translations, or do they sound the same?
YY: Well, I think they all tend to sound the same; it’s my voice. When I translated Emily Dickinson, the Japanese has this distinct gender difference, right? Men always say boku or ore, and women say watashi, and the ends of sentences are also different. So sometimes I translated Emily Dickinson as ore.
XYS: Consciously, or instinctively?
YY: A bit consciously. As what I was trying to capture was not Emily Dickinson as a woman who lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but this soul itself, which is free of gender or age, free of time.
XYS: And gender has a hierarchy, right? So translating women with a male language unfortunately gives it more authority. This distinction seems unavoidable.
YY: Right. Although, one of the few things that makes me happy about Japan is that when it comes to poetry, it’s always women who are doing good things. Men try to catch up.
XYS: But you’re a big Shuntaro Tanikawa fan.
YY: Yes, he’s half woman.
XYS: Please explain.
YY: Well, he doesn’t have his own self. He can be anything; he’s the ultimate medium. Inside him is a boy and a girl, an old man, a tree and a cloud, the volcano, some chimpanzee . . . He just shifts from one to another, so a lot of his poems are written in the voice of women or children.
XYS: He adapts to the truth of whatever he’s writing about.
YY: The negative capability, as John Keats called it.
A good poet, even a man, in Japan, have to learn a lot from women poets. There’s history in that, because in the Heian era, the age of The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, all the palace rituals were in the Chinese language, and all of that was violently shaken when some emperor started to take interest in Japanese verses, which were waka and tanka. Probably because it was beautiful women who were writing them.
Then men had to study and learn about the tanka, and it was revolutionary. At that time, women took the upper hand of the national poetry, and this national poetry and Chinese poetry always had a tense relationship, and the swing between nationalism and a more open, cosmopolitan mindset went back and forth, back and forth, so much so that at the beginning of Meiji era, this 文明開化 (bunmei-kaika), when Japan opened up the nation to the rest of the world, some of the very Japanese tanka poets, from the tenth century, were under very severe attack.
But Kokinshū, the Japanese verses, was always led by we men, I think to this day. But overall, if you look around today, there are more interesting women poets in Japan than male poets.
XYS: But with many western women poets who are writing in a feminist tradition, there is a vigorous sense of injustice and acknowledgement of historic repression. Do you find there is a lack of that in Japanese women poets?
YY: Of course not, because they know that they’ve always been the better poets! There are so many examples of when the old male poets shut themselves up in the face of authority or in the face of the dominant air of that age, it was always the women poets who spoke up. So it’s them—women, rather—who have their own voice, and men tend to write in—a voice of authority, maybe, or the establishment—but not the truth of their own voice. And I think women know it.
XYS: Tell me about this project you’re working on now, the 空気の日記 (Diary of Air). I understand it’s a written acknowledgement of the COVID-19 pandemic.
YY: Yes, I was actually writing it just this morning. So, the guy who came up with this idea wanted to have a record of the people’s sentiment, I think, during this historical moment—not a journalistic record, but more of a psychological, emotional record. To me, it coincides with a very big change in my personal life, of coming from Europe to Japan, and in fact, I was lining up in a queue at Haneda airport when this invitation came through email. So I found it quite tempting to be a part of it, writing along with the other twenty-two fellow poets, and . . . This thing lasts for one year, starting this April until next, and the expectation is that it will be a book.
XYS: What did you write about this morning?
YY: I wrote about a man who hates air.
XYS: Oh, fiction.
YY: Well, it’s about me.
XYS: You hate it.
YY: Yes.
XYS: Third person?
YY: Yes. And this is the diary of air. And air, in Japan, is a very special concept.
XYS: By air, they mean aura. They mean atmosphere.
YY: Yes, not oxygen, for sure. Not air the scientific substance, but something each of us emit. But then, when it’s there, it rather dominates you. You can’t control it. And the emperor is a part of that, the homeless guy is also a part of it, it’s very democratic in that sense.
XYS: It’s a kind of exchange or negotiation we have with the world.
YY: Without being aware of it. And it’s so typical, therefore, that this guy came up with this idea of a poetic record, and to call it the Diary of Air. And air scares me, you know, the Japanese air, especially. So I wrote about it. I want to blow the air away.
XYS: What would replace it?
YY: Fresher air, I guess.
XYS: Less tainted by the emperor and the homeless guy. I would like to ask you more about this hostility you seem to have towards Japan.
YY: For me, it’s simply because . . . well . . . Japanese culture is so closed, so inward-looking, and we don’t have a clear sense of moral or justice, but rather, all of our behaviour is so that we do not offend others, so that we are not considered to be an outsider or a strange person to others.
The more peaceful society becomes, it gains the momentum of keeping the status quo, and the less intrusion we have from the outside, the more we become aware of the tiny bit of difference between us and our neighbour, the minute and almost trivial class differences become a big deal, because you keep losing a sense of the outside, so all you can see and concentrate on is the inside of your community.
But, you know, I think that poetry has a very special function in a society like that, because it encourages people to be more themselves, that there is nothing wrong with being a good citizen and keeping the city clean and safe, but if the cost of doing so is to oppress oneself, and to constantly prop up a front, poetry helps the individual to be themselves, even for a short period of time. Japanese call those kinds of poems 自由詩 (jiyushi), which literally means freedom poetry. On the surface level, it’s a free verse, as opposed to formal verse, but I think when our grandfathers’ generation called it jiyushi, there was also a nuance of free spirit, after all these years of a fixed form—not only in poetry, but in society. It was the end of the nineteenth century, and for the first time, they were introduced to the concept of freedom and the individual and romantic life. There must’ve been a tremendous sense of relief. It’s something I want to explore today.
Photo credit: Mihoko Shida
Yasuhiro Yotsumoto was born as an only child in Osaka, Japan in 1959 and grew up mostly in Hiroshima. From 1972 to 78, he attended Hiroshima Gakuin, a Jesuit school, where he learned about Christianity and the dormitory life. He moved to Tokyo in 1978 to enter Sophia University, where he met his future wife Akiko just a few days before his mother died. He received 3rd place in a university poetry contest with a sonnet dedicated to Akiko. Graduated in 1982 and moved back to Osaka for a job in a pharmaceutical company, lured by the possibility of an overseas assignment. He married Akiko in 1983 and moved to the US in 1986, where Ken and Rika were born in 1990 and 1993 respectively.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor born in Dongying, China and living in Tokyo, Japan. Her website is shellyshan.com.
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