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Material Girls
| Article
# : |
20320 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
1,888 Words |
| Author
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John Whittier Treat
John Whittier Treat teaches Japanese literature at the
University of Washington. He is the author of several works on
atomic-bomb literature, including Pools of Water, Pillars of
Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji (University of Washington
Press, 1988). |
A few years ago the distinguished critic--and poet himself--Makoto Ooka wrote an essay deploring the state of contemporary poetry in Japan, a country whose artistic repute worldwide owes a great deal to the sublime accomplishments of its poets and their verse. From the earliest near-epic poetry of the eighth-century Hitomaro to the often-aped haiku of Basho and Takuboku in more modern times, the succinct subtlety of Japanese literature and indeed Japanese aesthetics in general have been well represented at home and abroad by poets: The sound of the frog as it jumps into the pond may in fact be Japan's most prized--surely the best known--contribution to world literature. But Ooka worries about the future. Dismayed by the advent of a younger generation grown affluent at the apparent cost of its cultural soul (a soul that prided itself, after all, on its spare and elegant poverty), Ooka, along with other intellectuals who came of age in the fifties and sixties, now complains that the triumph of the values of a compliant mass society over those of the intellectual and artistic elite sadly heralds the loss of any opportunity for Japanese culture to be critical, or even simply self-reflective. At fault, ironically, is postwar Japan's very own remarkable success. "One fact concerning the rapidly expanding Japanese economy seems undeniable," Ooka declared. "It has produced a large class of younger people who are hedonistic and affirm the present while avoiding any social and political responsibilities."
Ooka's prime example of the artistic nadir of the new generation of Japanese poets is the astoundingly successful former high-school teacher Machi Tawara. Born in Osaka in 1962, Tawara's debut 1987 collection of tanka (the traditional thirty-one syllable poem also known as waka or literally "Japanese poetry") was oddly entitled Salad Anniversary (a phrase taken from a poem that commemorates the day her boyfriend complimented her cooking but nonetheless sold an unprecedented near three million hardcover copies. As a consequence Tawara was catapulted into celebrity status in Japan, and her work ever since has continued to prove extremely popular, particularly among teenage girls. Part of the reason is doubtlessly the fact that her poems are encompassed in the most basic and everyday Japanese vocabulary, not in the arcane and largely lost language of the classical period. Another reason, too, is that Tawara's poetry does not address the standard elevated themes of either traditional Japanese poetry (the change of seasons, for example, or the beauty of Mount Fuji) or its twentieth-century avant-garde successors, both increasingly difficult for young Japanese today to appreciate. Instead Machi Tawara talks the plain talk of the girls she taught in high school until quite recently, talk of boys and clothes and shopping
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