A BLUE ROAD IN THE NIGHT
Voyage in the blue night
Some years ago, never mind how many exactly, I had a really good thing going with painting, writing and research. A Gallery in Kurobe, a small city up the coast from Toyama where I live, was planning an exhibition around a poet — Fuyuji Tanaka (1894-1980) who lived in and wrote about Kurobe. Somehow the curator had heard of my painting and asked me to contribute something — she gave me a small brown book of his poems in Japanese of which I could understand absolutely nothing, I carried it around asking my wife, her friends, strangers and once some teenagers in an English lesson 1 to translate bits of just give me the gist of random pages. On the internet I found some works translated, here are seven poems from Poetry magazine and a very helpful end notes explanation of the figure in the first poem
I tried to read about Japan at that time, poetry magazines and movements, about Kurobe and this region, Hokuriku. It was a great time for printing stuff out at work and then reading it on the train, all the poetry groups and their magazines reminded me of Bolano novels, but it wasn’t very clear to me how to make some paintings yet
Luckily the curator, Mariko, started to translate the poems in book for me, like the one above, and i started to get a sense of the book and his work. I made lists of nouns and other lists of plants and birds, these translations were immensely helpful. I printed them all off at work and carried around a folder and read and write a bit in between my day job or in the evening. Then a few times when I had a free day I would take the train to one of the stations in Kurobe and take a long walk up towards the mountains through the rice fields, past old houses and huge new supermarkets and then following one of the rivers back towards the sea. I took a lot of photos, the ground was all brown and green and red and rusty, people were making fires and drying out vegetables. I picked up stones and listened to a little music or to some podcasts about the news and the faff of the world then.
My memory of that time was that it was suddenly slightly hopeful that something actually good could happen in politics, in the very narrow sliver of the world I read about regularly, something might change 2.
Life out of balance
This was all in the autumn, I was anxious to visit Kurobe as often as I could before the snow came, but that was the only winter anyone can remember where it didn’t snow in this region of Japan, in January the trees were bare and grass was all yellow and brown and strange — it seemed pretty sad to think about what Fuyuji san would have made of it, the regular order of small things happening throughout the year being such a constant in his poems. Koyaanisqatsi I thought to myself, a word I can think but not say or spell, I know it means life out of balance though, for some reason it was one of a few videos I was allowed to watch as a child.
If you want to remember you better write down the names
One night while searching online I found a reference to a James Kirkup translating some of Fuyuji’s poems, I think in a book called Burning Giraffes, I spent a long time trying to find a pdf and failing, James Kirkup seemed a really interesting person, Id still like to read his books on Japan especially. Another poet who I read about was Mitsuharu Kaneko who wrote something called the shark or sinking shark, a political attack on the government of the late 1920s in Japan. Every once in a while Id get some more pages of translations of poems from Mariko and Id read a bit more and do some paintings.
I made quite a lot of paintings that were part of that group of work. Somewhere near the end I saw people on twitter talking about a new very long Bob Dylan song about the JFK assassination, something I couldn’t believe was actually real and then once I heard it I couldn’t believe how much I loved it. I listened to it on the seafront after taking all the work to gallery and seeing the beautiful art Yukako Kashiwai and Satoshi Oka — The two other artists in the show. That was around the time the schools all closed suddenly and Corona was all over the news, there was a few months delay and then the show opened in the spring, everything was totally different in Kurobe, wild colors in the gardens and on the water, birds were everywhere.
That spring came late — but it comes all together at once — becomes lively
1
it was a really good time in fact, they both knew quiet a lot about Japanese poetry of different periods and we tried translating some famous haikus in different ways.
2
a year or so before this, in the summer while cherries were being sold in the super markets here, I cycled to a kindergarten listening to the BBC News live as the election results were called in the UK, ultimately Jeremy corbyns labour party didn’t form a government but for a few days and that afternoon especially it seemed very close to being real.
