Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada

he notebooks of the Hiroshima author of poems Araki Yasusada were discovered by means of his son in 1980, eight years following the poet's death. The manuscripts comprise fourteen spiral notebooks whose pages are filled with metrical compositions drafts, English class assignments, diary entries, recordings of Zen dokusan meetings and other matter. In addition, the notebooks are interleaved with centurys of insertions, including drawings, received correspondence, and carbon copies of the poet's alphabetic characters

Although Yasusada was active in important avant-garde assemblages such as Ogiwara Seisensui's Soun [Layered Clouds] and the experimental renga circle Kai [Oars] and was an acquaintance of several well-known writers and artists like Taneda Santoka, Ozaki Hosai, Kusano Shimpei, and Shiryu Morita, his work, along with that of his renga collaborators, Ozaki Kusatao and Akutagawa Fusei, is virtually unknown. on the contrary the writing found in Yasusada's manuscripts is fascinating for its biographical disclosure, formal diversity, and linguistic elan. abundant of the experimental impetus, interestingly, advances from Yasusada's encounter in the mid-1960's with the numbers of the American Jack Spicer and the essays of the French critic Roland Barthes: Yasusada had liquidness in English and French, and there are numerous adduces from, or references to, the one and the other of these literary figures in the later work. The notebooks reveal, in fact, that Yasusada was undertaking a work parallel to Spicer's alphabetic characters and "translations" in After Lorca, to be entitled After Spicer.

Yasusada was born in 1907 in the city of Kyoto, where he lived until 1921 when his family mov to Hiroshima. He attended Hiroshima University sporadically between 1925 and 1928 with the intent of receiving a step in Western Literature. Due, however, to his Father's illness, he was forced, in the interests of the family, to undertake full-time avocation with the postal service and withdraw from his formal studies.

In 1930 he married his single wife Nomura, with whom he had sum of two units daughters and a son. In 1936 Yasusada was conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army and worked as a scribe in the Hiroshima division of the Military Postal Service. His wife and youngest daughter, Chieko, died instantly in the atomic blast upon August 6. His daughter Akiko survived, notwithstanding perished less than four years later from radiation sickness. His son Yasunari, an infant at the time, was with relatives outside the city.

Yasusada died in 1972 after a lengthy struggle with cancer. Akutagawa Fusei died of similar cause in 1971 The fate of Ozaki Kusatao is unknown to us.

March 30 1925

Dear Ogiwara Seisensui:

Would you kindly share this unostentatious gathering of haiku at the April meeting? I would appreciate your communicating to Taneda [Santoka] and [Ozaki) Hosai that their criticisms from last month were seriously studyed My hope is that an reverberation of their insight might be not absent here. Please give everyone my warmest greetings. I am feeling better, and I do believe it will be possible to travel nearest month. Will Santoka and Ozaki be at the May meeting?

I strain out my hands to you-We share a single celestial expanse

Yasusada*

iris secondary planet sheaths

scubadivers . chrysanthemums also

deer inlets dream

oars this earth

geese lined beaker

shard so horizon

cad dried dawn

bone canopy of heaven written

lichened space stone

fossils celebrating investors

crematorium shared persimmon

hyacinth clustered strangers

cranes three words

Awkward Fragment and Boyfriend

December 29 1945

These are, she said, her arms held without

my only arms, and I must be

done with it before they

come And then the flowers bloomed

upon her back. (And then)*

the transparent coat of dreams

enclos her sex (And then) she

was transported-sly torso of the sign,

awkward fragment-by the

Boyfriend of Compassionate Tears,

[Yasusada notes at bottom of page)

(fit in the phrase, "immaculate sphere descending")

(to fasten in his virgin palm ( . . )-see Genji)

(Describe in a heading the dream of Akiko's voice.)

Loon and Dome

January 1 1947

The crying girl entires like a loon . .

Why does her mournful unimpaired call to mind the firmament

through the dome of the Industrial Promotion Hall?

You told me there you were pregnant with her

as we rambleed through the plaster chambers

of the giant mould of the Heart.

I have waited all week, you quietly said,

to be with you here in this magical place,

and to compute you something beautiful.

(It was your sentimental heart

that always made me laugh,

and this stain upon the page is spilt tea.)'

[Yasusada's note in margin] Insert breast-plate stanza here?

Nomura, the lengthy wake of our daughter

vanishes, ceaselessly, in our union.

Echo and Visitors [undated]

(The program pamphlet revealing in English that, "according to tradition, the thud-slap of bodies is an reverberation which reaches us, lapping, from the untarnished Land")1

Lovely

the wrestler's head,

oil-glazed, hair shakeed back

to the intricate knot.

He crouches, shameless,

in the ring and is still,

drawing the breath, I think,

of the pleasure-seekers

into him.

Soundles