The Complete Poems of Kisaburo Konoshima - 2009

Translated into English by David Kei Callner

From the time I was child, as far back as I can remember, I felt a vague admiration for poetry. This was probably due to hearing people in my house speak of the poets Saigyo, Ryoukan, Ono No Komachi and others. On long winter nights the elderly would sit around the irori (the sunken hearth), engrossed in such conversation while they drank tea and snacked on tsukemono (pickled vegetables). 

In the spring of my fifteenth year I left my birthplace. Unable to give up my childish dream for “Studying under adversity to rise up in life”, a slogan that was in vogue during the Meiji period, I pressed my father and brothers and got them to raise, or practically bleed out what was then four yen. Putting the money in a light-blue money belt that my elder sister had sewn, I fastened it to myself and ventured from my remote village of Hokuno, near the source of the Nagara river in Gifu prefecture, for Tokyo. 

There were occasions during my early life of wandering that I tried composing something like waka, but I did not write them down or save them and now I do not remember a single one. Strangely, though I have forgotten all of my poems from those times, I remember clearly the extremely immature lines I made while I was still in the country. Even now at seventy-seven years old, the places where I got the ideas for the poems rise vividly in my inner eye. Here are the three of which I speak:

いついつと待ちし楊貴妃さくら花今をさかりと咲き匂ひけり

“When O when?” - waited I - the Yokihi cherry flowers

now in full bloom - the blossoms fragrant

ひばり鳴く野辺はうすうす暮れそめて花よりひびくいりあひの鐘

Dusk falls slowly over the fields - skylarks sing

from amongst the flowers - the evening bell 

風そよぐ若葉十里の遠方に白雪みゆる加賀の白山

Beyond ten miles of wind-swept verdure

white snow - Mount Haku of Kaga

The first poem is from the second or third grade of elementary school, when I was eight or nine years old I believe. At school I was taught that poems consisted of thirty-one syllables, arranged 5-7-5-7-7 and divided in two forms, upper and lower. I came home to find the young double-flowered cherry tree at a corner of the garden before my house flocculently blossoming in all its glory. My father had told me it was a Yokihi cherry tree. I immediately tried to make a poem as I had been taught. That was my first effort at what is called poetry. 

The other two poems are from two or three years later. In Japan’s farming villages there was practically no reading material for children, so these two poems may seem a bit grown-up, influenced, no doubt, by the adult periodicals which I read avidly whenever I could get my hands on one.

It was exactly twenty years ago, shortly after the end of the abominable Second World War, that I became a member of Chou-on and began to compose poems on a fairly regular basis. Since joining Chou-on I have received the truly thorough and considerate instruction of Mitsuko Shiga. Yet despite that instruction, the improvement of my poetry has been exceedingly slow, resulting from a lack of innate talent. Truly embarrassed by Mitsuko Shiga’s generosity, I thought I was still unworthy of a collection.

Now I have attained a full seventy-seven years of age, the so-called Kiju (seventy-seventh) birthday. While rejoicing at this blessing, I look back on a life of seventy-seven years and think it seems both long and short, and a life with a considerable amount of commotion. 

Setting aside the proficiency of my poems as poetry, I consider them as a record, written fragmentarily and subject to the emotion of excitement from certain times and incidents over a long and eventful life. In that sense, as a Kiju commemoration, I have come to believe that it would not be wholly meaningless to gather a collection as a present to my seniors, my kindred, and my friends, all from whom I constantly receive kindness.

I humbly offer my gratitude.

Kisaburo Konoshima

July, 1970 - New York