短歌（抄）

In her tanka, Hayashi uses an irregular two-line form that makes translation of her poetry challenging. Since the modernization of tanka from the early 1900s, Japanese poets have experimented with writing their 31-syllable poetry in multiple lines rather than the traditional one-line format. Hayashi is no exception and uses the two-line format, usually balancing 5-7-5 syllables in the first line and then 7-7 in the next (or vice-versa). Japanese readers would intuitively parse her 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm across the line break. Medieval waka poets like Fujiwara no Teika and Saigyō invented a technique of creating two units of an abstract feeling and a concrete image using an implicit break with units of 5-7-5 and 7-7. In Hayashi's two-line tanka, the image or action of line two drifts away from the one in the preceding line, as if the camera were panning or drawing back in order to reframe the scene. I preserved her two-line format so that the reader can sense the visual flow of images and emotions as the poem shifts, allowing for a second take on the tender moments "Nanako" experiences or the luminous ones felt by the personae of "Good Morning".

Scent of Nanako is uninhibited in its eroticism. Each tanka scene lingers on the details of the lovers' bodies. These nureba ("wet scenes")—a term borrowed from kabuki—is what critic Oketani Hideaki uses to describe how Hayashi problematizes the "stage" of her dramatic tanka: "As if drawing a picture, the poet versifies a nureba. Although it seems that the sexy image is the foreground, isn't the sex actually in the background? Hayashi hides the foreground from us. In her tanka, there is always some overtone of sadness that comes before the depicted poetic scene. We hear that sad sound from its near-concealment in the foreground."<sup>1



1</sup>Oketani Hideaki, "Kaisetsu" ("Commentary") in Hayashi Amari, MARS*ANGEL, (Kawade Bunko Bungei, 1993) 187.