Kazuko Shiraishi has died aged 93. She was, to my mind, the most significant Japanese poet of her generation. She was a modernist, outsider poet who got her start in Katsue Kitazono’s avant-garde “VVOU” poetry group, which led Shiraishi to publish her first book of poems in 1951, a book packed with vivid and surreal imagery. A first book of her poems translated into English by several writers was edited with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth, who also translated several of her poems.

Here is Rexroth’s introduction to that book – Seasons of Sacred Lust – first published in Japan in 1968 and by New Directions in 1975:

“Kazuko Shiraishi is certainly the outstanding poetic voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan. And there is cer­tainly no woman poet of this kind anywhere near as good else­where in the world. Joyce Mansour in France is far inferior and Lenore Kandel in the United States equals her only in one or two poems. Her work has a fierceness and an exaltation that makes most of her Western colleagues in disaffiliation seem positively mellow. In the final analysis of course, what makes her preeminent is sheer poetic ability. If you hear her read aloud, with or without jazz accompaniment, you know that, even if you don’t speak a word of Japanese, Shiraishi is the last and the youngest and one of the best of the generation of the Beats in America, the Angry Young Men in England, Voznesensky in the U.S.S.R.

Shiraishi has often been compared to the novelist of ex­treme alienation Osamu Dazai or to Celine, but there is a most decided difference. Dazai and Celine were corrupted and even­tually destroyed by their alienation. Shiraishi, like Henry Miller, is a remarkably clean liver. She doesn’t take drugs, even alco­hol, nor smoke either marijuana or the more dangerous to­bacco. She stays up late, goes to discotheques and jazz clubs and loves to dance—hardly very vicious vices. Although sex enters into many of her poems and she has the reputation of being a very erotic poet, as a matter of fact her sexual life and attitudes differ little from those of any other liberated young woman in any of the major capitals of the world and it is very far from the random promiscuity of the hippie generation. Again, in this, she resembles Henry Miller. It’s not just a moral difference. Shiraishi simply believes in keeping herself efficient as spokeswoman and diarist of what the French call the “métier.” In this she resembles the great modern prose writer of the similar world of two generations ago, Nagai Kafu and Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), the erotic writer of the métier of genroku—the brilliant period at the turn of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.

Similar, perhaps, but vastly changed. Kafu wrote of the last of the pleasure quarters of disintegrating Tokyo, the aging geisha and lonely prostitutes of seedy Shimbashi and the poorly paid actresses of the cheap theaters and satirical theater restaurants of Asakusa where he himself, even in old age, often acted. Saikaku wrote of a world of secular splendor.

Shiraishi’s métier is something else. Modern Tokyo in the third quarter of the twentieth century is the international megalopolis pushed to the extreme. One cannot say to the ultimate, for God knows what the ultimate may be. Shiraishi does not write of the ukiyo, The Floating World, now utterly gone, but of a maelstrom, a typhoon, in which lost men and women whirl through toppling towers of neon. Shiraishi’s Tokyo is straight out of Dante, but Paolo and Francesca seem only to get together for a moment to realize estrangement. Music—jazz and rock—and poetry provide something resembling values. Sex only seems to ease the pain and fear.

Poetry read to jazz had only a brief popularity in America. It was ruined by people who knew nothing about either jazz or poetry. Japanese, young and not so young, people have an astonishing musical knowledge of jazz and Shiraishi is certainly the best poet ever to use the form. Her poetry can be soft and sweet at times, but mostly it has a slashing rhythm read in what she refers to as her “Samurai movie voice.” Her effect on audiences is spectacular. There is the secret of Shiraishi as a person and poet. She is a thoroughly efficient performer, and her poetry projects as does that of very few other poets anywhere. Her peers are Dylan Thomas and Voznesensky. She is also a woman of spectacular beauty.

Translation of Shiraishi presents very considerable problems. First, Japanese doesn’t sound anything like American. A series of short lines beginning with “I” sounds nothing like the Japanese beginning “watashi.” Second, a translator must be hip, able to identify with this special world of Outsiders and familiar with their special languages in both Japanese and English. It’s no job for squares or straights. This selection is the work of five people who constantly consulted one another. The principal initial translator of these poems was Ikuko Atsumi, a close friend of Shiraishi’s, who herself writes poetry in both Japanese and English, assisted by John Solt of whom the same may be said. The translations were then revised by the American poet Carol Tinker, and by Yasuyo Morita and by me. I also translated several additional poems.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Born in Vancouver in 1931, Shiraishi was taken to Japan by her parents just prior to World War 2, and when I met her in Iowa City in 1970/71 – where we were both on an International Writers’ Program – she told me that she had felt alienated from Canadian society because she was seen to be Japanese, and then alienated from Japanese society – because she was seen to be Canadian. Mutually estranged, poetry became her nation. She was a pioneer of performance poetry who might be likened to the late Christopher Logue here in the UK (a poet who has never been accorded his due, in my opinion).

John Solt went on to publish another volume of his translations of Shiraishi’s poetry – Burning Meditation and other poems – which came out in 1991 in Japan, published by Pink Sand Studio and in 2017 – Yumiko Tsumura brought out more translations of Shiraishi in a New Directions Poetry Pamphlet (number 23) entitled Sea, Land, Shadow. Both these books contain stunning poetry.

Kazuko Shiraishi’s daughter Yuko Shiraishi is an internationally known artist who exhibits with the Annely Juda Gallery and has shown her work in Japan and elsewhere around the world.

MONKEYS

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“It doesn’t matter that we will never become human beings.

It doesn’t matter that we still have tails.

We don’t care if we never

Become God or Philosophy.

It’s enough that we love each other.”

Said the monkeys as they shimmied and danced

And talked of love in tail language,

Like deaf and dumb language.

On the other hand,

Male and female human beings today

Are always saying,

“We can’t find love.

We can’t believe in it.”

That’s because they don’t have any tails,

So their empty souls wander

In a fog of insincerity.