Japanese American literature

Eric Kamau Gravatt

At the Bowery Poetry Club in New York SUN April 19, in celebration of “Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines of the American Experience _ Short Fiction from Then to Now,” an anthology compiled and edited by ISHMAEL REED with CARLA BLANK,
YURI KAGEYAMA reads with ERIC KAMAU GRAVATT, TERUYUKI KAWABATA and HARUNA KAWABATA.

YURI KAGEYAMA has a book of poems “Peeling” (I. Reed Press). Her works are in many literary anthologies _ “Y’Bird,” “Pow Wow,” “San Francisco Stories,” “On a Bed of Rice,” “Breaking Silence: an Anthology of Asian American Poets,” “Greenfield Review,” “Beyond Rice,” “River Styx,” “Other Side River,” “Yellow Silk,” “Stories We Hold Secret,” “MultiAmerica,” “Obras.” She has read with Ishmael Reed, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Geraldine Kudaka, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Russel Baba, Seamus Heaney, Shozu Ben, Al Robles, Winchester Nii Tete, Keiji Kubo, Yumi Miyagishima. Her son Isaku Kageyama is a “taiko” drummer in Amanojaku in Tokyo. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Cornell University, and has an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

ERIC KAMAU GRAVATT has played with Freddie Hubbard, Albert Ayler, The District of Columbia Youth Symphony, Roberta Flack, Horiuchi Makoto, Sonny Fortune, Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, Donald Byrd, Carlos Valdez, Booker Irvin, Woody Shaw, Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell, Hank Mobley, Kikuchi Masabumi, The Milwaukee Symphony, Jimmy Heath, Donny Hathaway, Sam Rivers, Khalid Yasin, Andrew White, Tony Hymas, Paquito D’Rivera, George Mraz, Ravi Coltrane, Stanley Clarke, Pharoah Saunders, The McCoy Tyner Big Band, Gary Bartz, Bobby Hutcherson, James Carter, Terrance Blanchard, Wallace Roney, Donald Harrison, Charnett Moffett. He tours with his own band Source Code and with McCoy Tyner. Wayne Shorter calls him “The Weather Report drummer who was the all-around hippest one.”

TERUYUKI and HARUNA KAWABATA are on their honeymoon. Their band Cigarette She Was performs at the numerous “live houses” in Tokyo. Their hippie-like music scene is part of what inspired YURI to write her story in “Pow-Wow” _ “The Father and the Son.” They have been performing poetry together with other Tokyo musicians, including Winchester Nii Tete, a percussionist from Ghana, under YURI’s project called The Tokyo Flower Children. Haruna fell in love with not only Teru but also the kpanlogo, a drum from Ghana, during college. The couple also work on films, CDs and posters, and are often featured in art festivals in Japan. Teru also makes cell-phone music downloads, and Haruna works at a major Japanese coffee-shop chain.

Haiku (compiled)

From Yuri to Yuri _ Japanese Womanhood Across Borders of Time
A Contemporary Renku Poem (a work in progress)
(13)

HAIKU

ステンドグラス
ひかりを染める
妻のゆび

stained glass
nudging color into light
my wife’s fingers

春の朝
ピンクが爆発
シフォン舞う

spring morning
pink explodes
chiffon whirls

なき孫が
小皺に霞む
化粧水

dead grandchild
a blurring thought lost in wrinkles
skin lotion’s smell

田んぼにも
見える砂漠の
地平線

rice paddies
you can see it
a desert horizon

浜名湖に
沈め忘れる
父の虐待

at Hamanako
forgetting burying
beatings by my father

桜ちり
ここにいます！と
どぶによむ

sakura petals
falling, write “I am here!”
into the ditch

So I’ve put all the haiku together that I wrote recently. In two parts, they are my segments for the work-in-progress poem “From Yuri To Yuri,” a collaboration with Yuri Matsueda.
The first part of the series.

Haiku Revised Again

ちる桜
ここにいます！と
どぶによむ

sakura petals
falling, write “I am here!”
into the ditch

Bowery Poetry Club

Photo by Annette Dorfman.
I am reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York: ISHMAEL REED HOSTS READING OF HIS NEW ANTHOLOGY, POW-WOW.

More Haiku Again

田んぼにも
見える砂漠の
地平線

rice paddies
you can see it
a desert horizon

浜名湖に
沈め忘れる
父の虐待

At Hamanako
forgetting burying
beatings by my father

影のなか
ここにいます！と
八重桜

In the shadows
I am here! says
Yaezakura

Recently, I was riding the bullet train and I noticed once again how so much of Japan was farmland encased by tree-covered mountains, village after village of rice paddies, places where you would expect the Fox to come out and enchant travelers like Japanese fairy tales.
This made me think about how you can’t really see very far into the distance in Japan as you can in the US, where the horizon stretches a la “Easy Rider.”
And I thought about how that creates a village mentality in Japan, both in the good sense and the bad, how Japanese must learn to cope with everyone-knowing-everyone’s business like the rush-hour train and how that builds team work and common identity while discouraging meaningless ego trips, though sometimes at a cost to individualism.
So I was working on haiku about how you can’t see the horizon in Japan.
But then I realized you should be able to see the invisible _ if you are a poet.
The poem refers to the contrast of East vs. West, and uses that to make a statement on how seeing beyond what is there is the redeeming value of art.
My second haiku came when I passed by Hamanako, a lake that connects with the Pacific Ocean in Shizuoka Prefecture.
My father grew up around this lake, and he knew its ins and outs for going fishing on rented boats, catching crab with nets, digging for clams.
My sister and I often spent our childhood around this lake.
The lake works as a symbol of my father who was very Japanese yet also very international _ like an inland lake or bay where you could sense in the sometimes quiet and other times powerful tide its deep connection with the expansive Pacific.
The poem is about how you want to forget parental abuse because all a child wants is love, and you realize as you get older that the abuse was not about hate but more about the mental problems the parent was undergoing as an adult.
But it is never possible to forget _ or totally forgive.
So I wrote that line to purposely fudge between forgetting to bury or forgetting and burying (especially in Japanese) because it’s both.
My last poem is simple.
I noticed how flowers don’t care if anyone is looking or not.
They bloom wherever they are, merely being true to their purpose of being.
And they are always beautiful, whether anyone is looking or not.
I’m not sure if I fully communicate that nuance in that poem. It’s rather plain like a first-grader wrote it.
But that’s what I like about that one.

Reviews on Pow-Wow

My short story “The Father and the Son” is among the works in this book.
(Updated with more reviews)

Publishers Weekly says: “Reed’s selections will draw readers into American cities, suburbs, prairies and mountains with vivid, precise, at times documentary description and bold, personal questions of American identity and purpose.”

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times says in his review that Pow-Wow is “big, diverse, messy, all over the place _ just like American literature itself.”

A review from INFODAD.COM:
“This is not a book for those seeking uplift – although a close reading of its Contributors section indicates that there are more positive things in America than these individual writers choose to observe.”
To which Ishmael Reed comments:
“Thanks. The title of my next anthology will be ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ “

The Buffalo News makes the book its March editor’s pick. “I don’t think there’s been anyone remotely like him as an anthologist,” Jeff Simon writes of Reed. “It’s there, it seems to me, that his service to literature has been irreplaceable.”

Alan Caruba includes it in his March picks, describing the book this way: “A multicultural anthology, it includes a diverse group of writers sharing stories that ultimately transcend race, religions, gender and class.”

In a review in Library Journal, Gene Shaw highly recommends the book. “The United States of the 21st Century is an ocean of stories and peoples, made up of a variety of races, religions, classes, genders, languages, cultures and sexual preferences,” he comments.

“Booklist,” published by the American Library Association says the writers in the book address “what makes American life so vital and contradictory, so cruel and so cherished.” Donna Seaman says Reed and Blank have picked “molten and magical tales that dramatically explore the consequences of our attitudes toward race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality.”

And this review accuses the book of misplaced anger and inadequate quality control.
And this is Ishmael Reed’s comment on that:
“Your reviewer not only misrepresents my anthology,but Affirmative Action as well. According to the U.S.Department of Labor, Affirmative Action benefits whites the most. The guy is a literary shock jock.”

And this from January Magazine: “Pow Wow is an important book.”

POW-WOW: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience _ Short Fiction From Then to Now, edited by Ishmael Reed with Carla Blank. Da Capo Press, January 2009.

From Yuri To Yuri (continued)

From Yuri To Yuri _ Japanese Womanhood Across Borders Of Time
A Contemporary Renku Poem (a work in progress) continued from previous:
By Yuri Matsueda and Yuri Kageyama

(7)

i finally know / why being young hurts more / it’s not just we feel everything more clearly/ we don’t have as many memories / everything isn’t yet a blur/ you haven’t felt this anguish, have you, this same pain / babies/ wanted unwanted/ Cesareans, abortions, stillbirths, breech births, miscarriage/ that little baby who never was / we’re harassed on the job, molested on the train, date-raped and then raped by that stranger that criminal you despise but can barely remember his face / we lose weight and self-confidence and dreams / we can’t find a job/ we are vulnerable / hungering for love, respect, understanding / when we know better / really / that no one understands/ we watch them die, hobbled, losing their minds, decaying with cancer, bed-ridden, speechless / we stand alone when they leave / face to face/ the hole / a dirt-filled grave/ we no longer bear the waiting of that fetus growing within us / wanted unwanted / no longer thirst for love / reaching for that partner / for babies/ wanted unwanted/ we don’t remember / in/ our own death/ we can’t forget /

(8)

死は容赦なく前触れもなく

楽で
退屈しのぎに
乱暴に
消費した
時間の先に
唐突な
死があって
立ち止まると

静かな愛があった

(9)

you are my daughter
the little girl i never had
that woman asleep in my son’s arms
nursing a new life that has yet to be

but i see you are gone
leaving behind nothing
but a deep passage of time
and a shaking pool of tears

(10)

駆け上った
階段
廊下の窓をこじ開ける
煙突探して
目を凝らすも
ただ白い雲が過ぎてゆく

カラカラ積もる
珊瑚礁のよう
吹けばたちまち塵となる
風に乗ってどこへ行く
あおい空へ伸びてゆく

(11)

sky
scattered
clouds
dreams
dissipate

i fly

without wings
sky

swooping
endless

***

(12)

throw me in the seven seas
where my young breasts freeze

in the black waters

my hair

they gleam

and I float

lost in time

I am so lost in time

Poetry on Noh Stage

Photos by Ryan Bruss.
Poet Yuri Kageyama.
Percussionist Winchester Nii Tete.
Poetry at Kuraki Noh in Yokohama.
Dec. 6, 2008

Story of Miu 12

Reading at the Kuraki Noh Theater Dec. 6, 2008
with Yumi Miyagishima on violin, playing “Sleep” by Kyosuke Koizumi and Winchester Nii Tete on kpanlogo percussion.

Story of Miu 11 including links to previous entries.

I’m sitting in a stuffy waiting room, not bothering to wonder why the others _ troubled looking women of all ages and shapes _ would need to be there.
It is clear birth is not the reason we are all here, even the nurses in pale pink outfits and the feminist gynecologist with the stern voice.
I am too nervous and worried to feel shame or guilt.
I just want Miu to come out from behind the curtains where she has gone _ safe and alive and in one piece and the job done.
This is not a good feeling.
But this is all I can think.
We have all been there _ our legs open _ to remind us of what we did, not with just anyone but a man we truly loved but maybe who didn’t love us enough _ the chilly metal enters like an uncutting but unfeeling knife, merciless, guiltless, sinless until our drugged minds leave us _ start counting: one, two, three, four _ like angels who have given up.
And we feel nothing and we remember nothing.
We do not think of the baby that was, that could have been, that never was.
It is a tiny wormlike thing that must be removed like a bloody tumor because it is not a human being yet.
And I only want her to come out of there from behind the sterile curtains, safe and healthy and smiling.
I know she doesn’t want to part with this human being that never was.
She wanted it to go on and on, feeling that person inside of her.
“It’s not something to do immediately; that’s not right,” she says. She has waited a week alone. She has not told anyone.
I don’t realize this: All I am thinking about is her, not the thing that is inside of her.
But the baby who never was is that grandchild who never was, the future of the race, generations to come, who looks like your grandfather, your father, your son, the man you love, those little feet that run to you and bring snotty cheek against cheek, filled with life when you are only nearing death.
When she finally comes out of her drugged sleep, walks courageously to me in the waiting room, faking a smile, her breath smells like an old woman.

=THE END=

Short Story

Design by Annette Dorfman. Photo by Takashi Itoh.

Fifth Sunday Fiction Series Nov. 30, 2008, at Ben’s Cafe.

Poet Yuri Kageyama reads her new short story, “The Father and the Son,” in “POW-WOW: 63 Writers Address the Fault Lines in the American Experience,” edited by Ishmael Reed with Carla Blank; Da Capo Press, January 2009.

The anthology also includes Langston Hughes, Toni Cade Bambara, Alejandro Murguía and Erskine Caldwell.

Kageyama’s poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many literary publications, including “Y’Bird,” “Greenfield Review,” “San Francisco Stories,” “On a Bed of Rice,” “Breaking Silence: an Anthology of Asian American Poets,” “Other Side River,” “Yellow Silk,” “Stories We Hold Secret” and “MultiAmerica.” She has read with Ishmael Reed, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Winchester Nii Tete, Geraldine Kudaka, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Russel Baba, Seamus Heaney, Yumi Miyagishima and many other artists. She has a book of poems, “Peeling” (I. Reed Press). She is working with director Yoshiaki Tago on a film “Talking Taiko” that chronicles her readings with music. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Cornell University and holds an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.