Hisashi Miyazaki (Kame-san)

(click photos to enlarge)

This will come as a shock to many of you, but I have to tell you that our dear friend and colleague, Hisashi Miyazaki, passed away suddenly of a respiratory infection (not corona) in Takatsuki, Osaka last Friday, 3 September, aged 80. He was only ill for two days. Hailstone Haiku Circle members will know him as a former assistant editor of the Icebox, a judge of the Genjuan Haibun Contest, and he was still serving on the Hailstone Committee helping to make decisions for our group. He is irreplaceable and will be hugely missed. Our hearts go out to his wife, Keiko, and the rest of the family. He was co-organizer of a forthcoming event in Takatsuki to be held on October 17th and we will have to redesign it as a Hisashi 亀さん (Kame-san) Memorial event. The character with which ‘Hisashi’ is written means ‘turtle’. Mr. Turtle.

Hisashi was born in Dec. 1939 in Osaka. He read biology at Kobe University and joined their Mountaineering Club, a passion he still had well into his seventies. He also loved fishing and haiku. He led several Hailstone Autumn Haikes. He became a Doctor of Pharmacy and worked as a research scientist testing new drugs in the Dainippon Seiyaku labs. After retirement, he did freelance medical translation work. His translation skills were to the fore in several haiku projects, too, most notably perhaps, the recent Japanese version of the Cottage of Visions haibun anthology, entitled イヌピアット語のレッスン, Inupiat Lessons, 2019. He also published an entertaining haiku collection in Japanese entitled 未来書房 The Future Bookstore, 2003, and a fine haibun collection オロロロの丘 Zigzag, 2010.

He co-edited our Hailstone anthology, Seasons of the Gods, 2007 and did the Japanese translations we published in Enhaiklopedia, 2005. He was responsible for bringing his Japanese haiku teacher, Nenten Tsubo’uchi onto the judges’ panel for the Genjuan Contest for four years. Above all, perhaps, he was that happy man who always made others feel relaxed and improved everything effortlessly… ‘light’ in all his dealings.

– R I P –

Three of his haiku, in Hisashi’s own English translations, from The Future Bookstore:

a snake creeping ………………….. temptation ………………………………….. deliquescence
up the stone mound — …………… on the mountain top: ……………………… of a manganese salt —
translation in progress ……………. to step onto ………………………………… August’s end
………………………………………. the spring rainbow

The past three months

.. The rainy season continued until the beginning of August this year.

………………………… though the rain stopped
………………………… the wind roars at night:
………………………… lingering rain front

.. During that long rainy season, I received sad news. One of my cousins had passed away. When I was a little girl, he was kind enough to take care of me, playing chess and Hanafuda. The memory stays with me, emerging today into this deep foggy morning.

………. dense fog
………. even the castle mountain
………. loses its frame
 

.. Then the severely hot summer came in. But no matter how hot it was, the spread of COVID-19 did not ease.  

………………………… meaningless
………………………… as a symbol of the winter,
………………………… facemasks

.. Everyone faithfully wore those masks, feeling almost choked in the middle of the summer.  

………. a dry fallen leaf
………. stuck in the scorching asphalt,
………. patience with pride

.. Recently, a huge typhoon passed by. It has made us feel that we may now have taken a step back down the stairs. 

………………………… one degree Celsius
………………………… I can tell the difference
………………………… late summer room

 

 

New Icebox Theme & Genjuan 2021 Guidelines

Some of you might have noticed that for a few months now, the Icebox seems to have lost Archives, Categories and the Poll from our right sidebar. Our server WordPress has told us that it is because the theme we have been using these past 12 years is beginning to break up and we should change to a new one. Please don’t be surprised to find Icebox looking different at the end of this month! It will be revamped, though all content will be preserved.

The Guidelines for next year’s Genjuan International Haibun Contest can now be read here https://hailhaiku.wordpress.com/genjuan-international-haibun-contest-2021-guidelines/ or via the page link above. (To return to the top page after reading, just click the Icebox title photo of hailstones on wood.) Please note that entries will not be accepted before Dec. 1, only 2 max., and that they must be submitted in the body of an email. This is to suit the Covid circumstances we live in and our new Officer, Junko Oda, but will no doubt also make it easier for most of you to submit! The three judges remain the same as last year.

Himuro

外は夏あたりの水は秋にして内は冬なる氷室山かな　（藤原良経）

The air about, that of summer;
its flowing stream water
has an autumnal feel:
but beneath the ground, Mt. Himuro
is winter to its core
…………………….. (waka by Fujiwara Yoshitsune)

Being admin. ed. of a haiku space that goes by the name of the “Icebox,” I’m always on the lookout for Himuro Jinja (ancient Ice-hut Shrines) … and, so far this year, I’ve managed to visit two.

At the first, not far from Todaiji in Nara City, you can have your fortune told by sanctified ice. You pick your fortune from a box, but it looks blank until you place it onto the block of ice before the worship hall. Then the words come through …

Close by the second shrine, what is perhaps the original Himuro Jinja (at Fukuzumi in Tsuge-mura, near Tenri), there’s an ancient-style 氷室 himuro still used for ice storage till the summer, …

… though they no longer provide ice to the Emperor, as they used to back in Nintoku’s time (early Kofun Period). As a sacred place, the shrine itself is said to go back 1,600 years. The ice, cut as blocks from a nearby pond in winter, is stored underground beneath the hut’s ‘floor’. It is further insulated with bundles of straw.

神秘そも人にはとかじ氷室守（蕪村）

A veritable mystery,
yet he’s not about to let the secret out —
the ice-hut guardian
……………………..  (Buson)

Considering Sōseki’s「京に着ける夕」”Kyō ni tsukeru yūbe” as a haibun

In the first part of Natsume Sōseki’s account of a visit to Kyoto in the spring of 1907, the author and his hosts run their rickshaws ever further north. At the same time, Sōseki and his thoughts rush onwards across the psychological terrain of memory and conjecture, a palimpsest of his summer visit many years before with his poet friend and mentor Masaoka Shiki, of his current early-spring visit without him, and of the cultural and literary associations of Kyoto he has accrued over a lifetime. Even when he is at last in bed at his host’s residence in the woods of Tadasu no Mori, near Shimogamo Shrine, his mind is still in motion:

In the middle of the night, the eighteenth-century clock on one of the staggered shelves in the alcove above my pillow chimes in its square rosewood case, resonating like ivory chopsticks striking a silver bowl. The sound penetrates my dreams, waking me with a start; the clock’s chime has ended, but in my head it rings on. And then this ringing gradually thins out, grows more distant, more refined, passing from my ear to my inner ear, and from there into my brain, and on into my heart, then from the depths of my heart into some further realm connected with it—until at last it seems to reach some distant land beyond the limits of my own heart. This chilly bell-ring perfuses my whole body; and the ringing having laid bare my heart and passed into a realm of boundless seclusion, it is inevitable that body and soul become as pure as an ice floe, as cold as a snowdrift. Even with the silk futons around me, in the end I am cold.

A crow cawing atop a tall zelkova tree at daybreak shatters my dreams for the second time. But this is no ordinary crow. It doesn’t caw in the usual mundane way—its call is twisted into a grotesque cackle. Twisted too its beak, into a downward grimace, and its body hunched over. Myōjin, the resident deity of Kamo, may well have imposed his divine will to have it caw like that, so as to make me all the colder.

Shedding the futons, shivering still, I open the window. A nebulous drizzle thickly shrouds Tadasu no Mori; Tadasu no Mori envelops the house; I am sealed in the lonely twelve-mat room within it, absorbed within these many layers of cold.

Spring cold—

Before the shrine,

The crane from my dreams

[Original haiku: 春寒（はるさむ）の社頭に鶴を夢みけり]

The fact that this piece consists of prose narrative concluding with a single haiku, and hence is technically a haibun, means we can see it as a tribute to Sōseki’s haiku mentor, who had died four years before. One of the work’s strongest themes, loneliness, is perhaps counterbalanced by a note of optimism in the 季語 kigo of the concluding haiku, the crane, which is associated with winter. The crane is a migratory bird that comes south to Japan to overwinter but then heads north again in spring. Sōseki’s Kyoto remains inescapably cold during his visit, but it is the cold of early spring. Here, at the end, the crane has roused itself, as if from the author’s dream, and stands before the shrine ready to be on its way. Winter is coming to an end, and taking its place is the promise of regeneration. Even as he complains bitterly of the cold, and of the parallel loss of his warm friendship with Shiki, Sōseki is perhaps also acknowledging the healing power of time. If the crane represents Shiki’s spirit, Sōseki is acknowledging that it once spent time with him as the corporeal Shiki, but will now move on, as too must Sōseki.

(The above commentary and translation are adapted from my book Translating Modern Japanese Literature, which was published in 2019 and is available from the publisher, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, or on sites such as Amazon. If you are interested in obtaining a copy at a discount, please contact me directly at donovanrichardn [at] hotmail.com.)

a bird… a bird haiku – to raise funds for Indian labourers made redundant by Covid-19

.. Long an admirer of his unassuming, timeless haiku, many of which I had read in Presence magazine, I had sought out K. Ramesh at the Krishnamurti Vasanta Vihar in Chennai in Dec. 2014 on a visit with my wife to Tamil Nadu. We had walked together through the wooded grounds talking of haiku. Sentinel of / a soft forest shower — / mongoose on the wall. This was the verse I had sent him from our memorable stroll.

.. He had later (2019) written to me that he was to visit Kyoto, and we had planned to go together to Rakushisha. Circumstances changed, however, and he had had to cancel his trip, assuring me that he would come to Japan at a future time.

.. Most recently, in an email, he told me of his concern for the many labourers made redundant in TN by the Covid-19 epidemic and of how he and his daughter, Anita, had just made a book of haiku and photos of birds (all by Ramesh) and had just launched it on Amazon: here. It is only available in Kindle digital form and costs $3.49. Profits will be used to support local labourers with no income.

I downloaded my copy just now! The book is beautiful. Here are a couple of Ramesh’s bird haiku from within it:

Vedic chants… / a heron glides to a rock / in the misty lake

daybreak…. / a farmer taps the goose’s head / on the way to the barn

Please support this worthy project.

Bilingual Complex – a new book

Hailstone Haiku Circle member, Kyoko Norma Nozaki, has recently published a book, Bilingual Complex – Essays & Notes featuring English Haiku, ISBN 9784779514296, pub. Nakanishiya Press, Kyoto, 90pp, B6 size, ￥2,000. In it, she writes of her grandparents (Japanese immigrants in Hawaii), parents (father, a Nisei American; mother, a Japanese who emigrated to marry him); herself (born and educated in California, later a Prof. Emer. at Kyoto Sangyo Univ. specializing in Nikkei studies) and her family today. The book is sprinkled with haiku from S.E. Asia, Japan, America, Germany and elsewhere.

Acorns scattered / All over the herb garden– / Immune from the nuclear plant?

January 3rd– / Promising prosperity, / A flurry of snow

Lettuce fields gone– / The Silicon Valley / Covered with California smog

今日からは日本の雁よ 楽に寝よ（一茶）From today / You are a Japanese goose, / So relax and sleep in comfort (Issa, quoted in the author’s research note, ‘On Immigration’)

“The process of writing this book”, Kyoko divulges in her Afterword, “has made me aware once again that I am a product of two cultures …. and my thoughts naturally shift between the two very different languages: the ambiguity of Japanese and the preciseness of English.”

For further details or purchase go here: http://www.nakanishiya.co.jp/book/b492956.html

Secrets Shared

Back in May 2005, Hailstone had once organized an internet kukai (haiku tournament) in real time using phone/fax/email from Osaka, hooking up with Martin Lucas’ Roses group in Manchester: perhaps a world first?

7 June 2020 saw Hailstone’s first live online meeting – a rodokukai (reading meet) on Zoom, hosted by David McCullough in Kyoto. Thirteen were present at the two-hour meet, with another four contributing work (one from Florida, another from Mexico). It was good of Genjuan judge, Sean O’Connor, to get up and join us from Ireland at 7:30am! Using the share-screen facility, we were all able to see the work as it was introduced: this included haiku sequences, senryu, haibun, and haipho. The theme, chosen by Tito, was ‘Secrets and Discoveries’, a rich vein to mine from our lockdown days, when many were finding new meaning in things natural and close at hand.

苗代や短冊形と色紙形  （子規） photo by Tito

The rice seedling beds: / some the shape of tanzaku,  / others like shikishi (Shiki)

April shutdown: / solitudinous silence (Ursula Maierl)

opossum, too / exits / its sheltering abode / to cross the green lawn (Sydney Solis)

up a hill in early morning / stretch to grasp at the sky – / song of bush warbler (Akihiko Hayashi)

Onion stalks / outgrown by weeds… / the field in motion (Branko Manojlović)

haipho by Hitomi Suzuki

morning sun / shines in through / the pine and the maple (Noriko Kan)

anxious times – / the cries of newborn lambs / throughout the night (Sean O’Connor)

Frogs croak, begging for rain / Humans, secluded, pine for others – / Invisible corona virus (Reiko Kuwataka)

All the dreams I have / Secret under the strawberry moon – / Midsummer night hills (Masako Fujie)

Today— / tongues of deer / curl around / fallen magnolia petals (Tito)

Every morning you greet me, / Periwinkle (日日草) — / embodiment of Japanese name (Kyoko Nozaki)

Today’s fourth online class – / beneath buttoned-up shirt, / my cut-down shorts (Richard Donovan)

haipho by Akira Kibi

Music of baby sparrows / Resounds among the buildings — / The silent city center (Mayumi Kawaharada)

Red lanterns turn on / in barren, silent streets — / longing for shamisen (Peter MacIntosh)

my cup of tea / this is how you learn / to keep silent — / one sip at a time (Sergio Negrete)

Beneath the sparrow’s egg / a scrap of moss — / distant birdsong (David McCullough)

Screen Doors 網戸

Screen doors start sliding as temperatures rise, relieving indoors of heat, keeping papers from fleeing and birds and insects at bay, partially filtering the air let in, and casting a fine blur, a moiré, over the view outside.

Beyond the screen door
Blues, yellows in a vase
A sky of cloud

Gasping curtains
Suck to the screen door
Sudden breezes

A small whiff of
A neighbor’s cigarette
A screen door slams

from the Icebox inbox – 46

Tito asked me to make the final selection as an editor this time. The short comments after the poems are all mine. …. Sosui (Nobuyuki)

Sunset…
I walk alone on the beach, the twilight deep on my eyelashes covering my face. Suddenly, I come across seashells, big and small. I sit flat on the wet sand… waves having just receded.

dark night
stars guide
the boatmen ….. Lakshmi Iyer, Kerala

(Ed. comment – Haibun excerpt: I did a bit of trimming in the prose to avoid over-excitement.)

almost spring . . .
a cuckoo starts
haltingly ….. Kanchan Chatterjee, Jharkhand

(This poem expresses our feeling well when we can hardly wait for the coming spring.)

Emergency extended –
school children in line too
at the food bank ….. Yoshiharu Kondo, Shiga

(What a pitiful scene! I feel this poem is the best among the poems submitted this time.)

Hare silhouetted
sharing the hillside
where I rest ….. Jane Wieman, Wisconsin

(This poem is peaceful and conveys the feeling of oneness of the universe. It would be nice, though, if we knew the time of the day.)

shimmering orange needles –
distant towers dance
in the fading sun ….. Albie Sharpe, New South Wales

(This poem describes a beautiful evening scene when everything looks different from what we normally know. I like the image and wording of the last two lines.)

feeling I just heard
a turtle’s whisper in the garden:
stay-home afternoon ….. Hisashi Miyazaki, Osaka

(This poem is imaginatively stimulating, but I wonder what exactly HM heard in the turtle’s whisper.)

summer morning
a skim-milk sky spills
over the sea ….. Joanna M. Weston, British Columbia

(A beautiful description of the sky, although I am not sure what it might predict. Is it a sign of another hot day or of a storm gathering far away?)

The Path of Birds: Kyoto Isshu Trail — Part II

May 17.

Five of us met, carefully masked, to walk the eastern section of the Kyoto Circuit Trail, from Fushimi Inari to Keage. With an end to the lockdown in sight more people were out, but the approach to Fushimi Shrine still quiet.

… Sparrow-meat stalls*
… closed by the Virus:
… sparrows celebrate   (Tito)

Japanese visitors shared friendly, if slightly cautious, smiles as we walked through the shrine grounds.

… Vermilion-faced foreigners
… trooping down
… the wrong torii tunnel   (Richard)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Climbing past myriad shrines, fox statues and altars to the gods, we wound our way over Mount Inari.

… Known to steal even
… the shrine’s lighted candles,
… crows in a spring wood    (Tito)

At Sennyuji we passed through an area of many imperial tombs, including the grave of Komei. His son, the Emperor Meiji, penned the following:

⽉の輪のみささぎまうでする　袖に松の古葉もちりかかりつつ
Tsukinowa no misasagi mode suru　sode ni matsu no furuha mo chiri kakari tsutsu
… Here at Ring of the Moon Cemetery
… I visit the ancestral tombs
… and onto my sleeves
… ancient pine needles
… are falling, falling*

For a while, we skirted the edge of the city before climbing onto the hills that rise above Kiyomizu Temple.

… treetop birds —
… even their laughter
… keeps a safe distance    (David)

The day ended with a visit to Himukai Daijingu, the Sun-Facing Shrine, a source of holy water that once helped to ward off a ninth century plague.

… At the foot of Himukai Shrine–
… a white cockerel*
… clucking under my caresses    (Richard)

Notes:
*Fushimi Inari is famous for its stalls selling grilled sparrows;
*falling pine needles indicates early summer;
*cockerels are sometimes kept at Shinto shrines dedicated to the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

Haipho for Kaze-no-Ryokosha

On Feb. 11, Tito and I attended a travellers’ luncheon party in Osaka held by 風の旅行社, at which there was a traveller’s fashion contest and a travel photo contest. There were about 35 attendees at the Silk Road restaurant in Juso, each allowed to enter just one ‘work’. Both of us entered a haipho to display in the impromptu exhibition. Tito’s (apparently using a photo taken by Kazue Gill in Nepal on 1 May 2019, the first day of Japan’s new imperial period) won 4th place. Here they are. Click on each one to enlarge.