Sakutaro Hagiwara & His Iceland – 5 Poems

Ivan Klein
April 2016

Onchi’s Portrait of Hagiwara

He’s not quite squared around, but there’s enough of him to see that his

face is a veined map of abandonment, dissipation, exquisite longing.  – Of too

much alcohol, cocaine, morphine to too little effect in killing the pain of a soul

forever homeless.

What’s the use of these paper scraps,

I’ve now lost everything

he wrote in a piece included in his short lyric masterpiece The Iceland.  The cast-

off husband left to care for two young daughters is quoted by his translator,

Hiroaki Sato, as calling the spirit that animated the work best summed up in

what’s contained in the word “scream.”

But the eyes staring at nothing and everything beyond the ken of

portraiture seem to know in and of themselves that at least the truth of the heart

has been written and will stand.

White-Faced Woman

Hagiwara is not yet thirty years old when he writes to fellow poet and

confidant, Hakushu Kitahara, of what he describes as nearly his last day on

earth.  He had been on a bender, had an awful nervous reaction afterwards and

then has “terrible memories of the lips of a faintly white-faced woman,” who

laughed at him after intercourse for his drunken language and behavior.

Humiliated, his nerves shot, he smashes his head repeatedly against a

 wooden post and thinks he’s going mad.

A question as to whether this is memory or hallucination, or hallucination

based on memory, or a ghostly Oedipal dream of mother nightmare blanco

rejecting her lover-son and coldly tearing him from the arms of Morpheus.

–That son who had written that a married woman could best enjoy sex

with her husband when she was aware of her mother-in-law’s “mean, watchful

eye peering from behind the sliding paper-door.” – That momma’s boy in the

mold of the archetypal poète maudit, Baudelaire, of whom Sartre wrote “He had

such a violent horror of himself that we can regard his life as a long series of self-

inflicted punishments.”

Mystery Trains

Trains deeply affected the soul and imagination of this Japanese poet like

the great southern bluesmen to whom he is linked by temperament and the

impulses of the heart.

1) “Farewell”

The train is in the station, snorting, chomping at the bit,

ready to rumble, ready

“… to cross the border

beyond the distant signals and the iron road.”

The helpless passengers submit to its

terrifying powers, its rampant enthusiasms.

A student of Schopenhauer, Hagiwara slingshots that awful engine of

power and will, greater than that which our own poor struggling selves possess;

catapults it through black space and time, illuminated only by its cyclopean eye.

Departures                             Separations

Breakups

It tramples hearts and souls in its unappeasable

rush

to locate    the very stations,

of the unknowable

2) “At A Night Train Window”

The train is oh so dark,

The fireflies everywhere,

the moonless night impregnable.

The great terrifying question of his and mankind’s

Futurity grows within him and bursts forth

As the engine thunders down the track:

“where, where, is my night train going?”

3) “Returning To My Hometown”

Like a stray dog stripped of its shadow

by the cold-blooded sun

Is the poor wretch bereft

of life’s hometown.

“The past links to the valley of desolation

The future faces the shore of despair”

His will in the world broken, he is conveyed along

the tracks to the wasteland’s last stop.  All his love’s in vain.

Just like deepest Rob’t Johnson indigo.  – The train leaves him in

the station, leaves the stranger, the drifter behind.  It recedes from sight.  His

love’s gone, all his love…. He’s come from nowhere, come to nowhere

… It’s all, all in vain