A New Voice in Romantic Poetry

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2023-06-30

This material was published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices in the text reflect the original publication.

This is a prose translation. The poems and song lyrics quoted below remain in their original languages, including the existing English lines.

A New Voice in Romantic Poetry: The World of 高鳥奈緒

Seishu Hamano, President of the Japan Romanticism Society

I. Walking the Castle Ruins

This young woman is a child of suffering, swelling small things until they might burst at any moment.

I must care for her; I must encourage her.

With such concerns, I urged her to publish her own poems. Love poems arrived soon afterward. Who is the person you love? Is it all right to write this much? Untroubled by my worries, she writes and writes.

Setback upon setback.

奈緒 confesses.

Yet she cannot help writing of her self-destructive feelings. Even if she lives on, how is she to live from here? Is there any choice but to move toward an unseen world? She does not say even this to me, and her confidences always break off halfway.

Something drifts beneath the surface.

Perhaps even the love affair now in progress brings more suffering than anything else. In 奈緒's puzzling accounts, a puzzling family also appears and disappears. I suggested composing a ballad-like song with a virtuoso saxophonist who graduated from a long-established music college. But she hesitates, saying that communication with the saxophonist is not going well.

高取奈緒¹ has an appeal diametrically opposed to my own stubbornly ordered life in scholarship and the arts. She is a wealthy man's daughter, and her beloved car is a bright red Fairlady. “I've come as far as Enoshima today.”

With her lover, of course.

Do as you please.

Her home is in Nanpeidai, Shibuya… That makes sense, then.

Even nowadays there is a butler. There is a head chef. Naturally, the maids' skirts have nineteenth-century Victorian flares.

She drives along the Shōnan shore. Her driving is alarming. “I went to Hakone yesterday.”

“Oh, really…” I say as I receive the next poem. “If I come nearby, may I contact you?” “But I won't sit in the passenger seat.” “That's all right, that's all right.” Her averted eyes are sad.

As I listened, I found myself vaguely remembering my mother.

Had my mother been like this when she was young?

Takatori Castle, famous as a mountain castle: a ruined castle with broken roof tiles scattered everywhere. In the early Shōwa years my mother worked as a pharmacist in a pharmacy in the courtyard of a nearby physician's house, belonging to someone called 石.

Still very young, enduring rigorous days of training.

During breaks, my young mother slipped away to climb to Takatori Castle's ruins.

Her companion, I was told, was a young man studying humanities at the Second Higher School.

People in Takatori talked: a romance like 『愛染かつら』 between the son of a wealthy pharmaceutical merchant and a pharmacist. But this ardent love vanished with a marriage meeting with a young businessman who had come all the way from Osaka to the foot of Takatori Castle.

He was my father. “They say he's the president of a munitions factory. You'd be his second wife, but he's very rich. They say he fell for you when he saw you dancing kagura at Kashihara Jingū.”

So said the mistress of the clinic in the old established house.

She immediately had a photograph taken beside the garden lantern, whether or not she knew of Mother's first love, acting as if she knew nothing. “She got everything ready for me: a chest of drawers, a complete bridal outfit, hairpins, clothes, white tabi and a fan. After that, I had no choice but to go to your father,” Mother said.

Would 高鳥奈緒 follow the same path…?

My mother, who loved singing, had apparently really wanted to join Takarazuka.

She loved songs. To the ruins of Takatori Castle for what would be their last meeting.

When I was still in elementary school, Mother quietly confided this to me, her only child. After I became a university student, and during the time when I was teaching high school, I drove her to the ruins of Takatori Castle.

“Here—this is where I lived.”

Where she pointed was simply a field. A chief retainer's official residence had stood there, she said. At the Restoration, the retainer moved away, and the families of Confucian scholars from the domain school, with nowhere to go, rented space in the vacant house. Even revered as professors of a domain school, they became pitiable when times changed.

When I told this story at the office of 『三田文学』, I was urged to make it into an essay. It appeared under the title 「光のえんすい」. On the drive home from Takatori Castle, when the headlights were switched on into the darkness, the scenery ahead emerged sharply in a cone of light. Only that was real; outside it, everything flowed past without being noticed. That is how the past crumbles away.

My mother, granddaughter of a professor at the Takatori domain school, must have grown up with the pride of Confucian learning despite poverty after the Restoration. She too had secret meetings with a beloved. The scene I saw with her among the castle ruins scattered with broken tiles still remains vivid in my mind. Yet forty years have already passed since her death. My body too will eventually collapse and end. When it does, the scene in the cone of light and my mother's romance will disappear as well.

High above, birds soar…

高鳥奈緒 has no way of knowing about my mother, still less about the meeting of a young man and woman at Takatori Castle in ancient Nara.

Yet today, too, birds soar high in the sky.

As though they knew the thread of the heart linking the life-thread of the poet 高鳥奈緒 to my mother's youth.

II. Love in the Imperial Palace

Nara's days as the capital are long past. Even the days when its cherry blossoms scented Kyoto's imperial palace gave way to the Kamakura age, the age not of 奈緒 but of the much-loving Princess 式子. The feelings of love do not change. Unable to bear the pain of concealment, she wrote:

　　玉の緒よ　絶へねばたへね　永らへば
　　　　忍ぶることの　弱りもぞする

In the age of the Shin Kokinshū, this gifted woman is said to have loved 定家, a master of waka. “The thread of life” means, of course, life itself. This love is painful; if only she died, she would no longer have to endure such anguish. She feels this because she is almost crushed by the conventions surrounding the court. The cruelty of others' eyes; fear of punishment brought on by slander. Amid countless prejudices, even remaining true to pure love is difficult.

The princess's feelings connect to 九条武子 and 白蓮 in later times, but also belong to the world of the contemporary Romantic poet 高鳥奈緒.

「忍れど色に出でにけり我が恋は」 belongs to the same current. Reaching the medieval age, it becomes 近松's 『冥土の飛脚』, then passes to 紅葉's 『金色夜叉』, continuing unbroken to the present. Like 『白蛇伝』, it clings to Japanese women.

If we place 高鳥奈緒's poems at its leading edge, everyone will understand. Bound by ties she cannot shake off, the deeply considerate 奈緒 cannot sever her feelings.

I cannot help hearing an overlap with the songs of parting and rain by 淡谷のり子, the great prewar star of slow ballads, and suggested that she should certainly make them into songs like 淡谷's. Thinking about it, I am a selfish, bad fellow. 星野哲郎, lyricist of 「みだれ髪」, the first song released for ひばり's return to the stage, was my companion in conversations about life for just a few years before his death. He too, like 高鳥奈緒, was a being like a bird wheeling in the void beyond a cliff.

　　憎や恋しや　塩屋の岬
　　投げて届かぬ　想いの糸が
　　胸にからんで　涙をしぼる

I hear leaking through the telephone line that the thread of 高鳥奈緒's heart, too, snapped late last night. Yet there is nothing I can do. Surely she will not become tangled in a bottom trawl crossing the offshore shallows…?

高鳥奈緒's poetic feeling is a thread of the heart dancing in broken intervals, battered by raging waves at the remotest cliff. In terms of the Meiji and Taishō climate, she is less the strong-willed, protesting 晶子 than a reincarnation of 山川登美子, always losing and weeping in the victor's shadow, sheltering in a Western-style house in the small domain of Obama and crying alone toward the sea.

This kind of grief and resentment, carried by female singers from 八代亜紀 and テレサテン to 秋元順子, boils and seethes within 高鳥奈緒's breast.

III. The Emergence of 高鳥奈緒

Thus 高鳥奈緒 appeared like a comet in the contemporary Romantic literary world.

The intensity of her passions and the frightening entanglement of them capture even the heart of the prose writer 河内裕二.

Yet I think this is not her first emergence.

I once brought 奈緒 into my short story 「父の宿」.

That was already twenty years ago.

The inn really exists in Matsuzaki, Izu.

Originally a village headman's house, the building from the Tenpō era is known to those who know.

「父の宿」 begins with the protagonist's father revealing a night long ago when he secretly stayed in Izu's Matsuzaki with a woman he loved: a hidden page from the elderly father's life. Troubled by that single night, the protagonist too spends a night in the same room with a woman he loves. Unexpectedly, late that night, they encounter the tragic scene at the end of the collapse of an unfamiliar couple's relationship; the couple have happened to stay at the same inn.

I do not claim that the feelings of 奈緒 as she witnesses this are exactly those of the real poet. Yet the double image of tangled love in this fiction irresistibly overlaps with the world of 高鳥奈緒's poetry. This is what it means to be beyond words.

Another couple, with no connection to them, reaches a crisis. Drawn into that vortex, the man and woman at daybreak superimpose their own figures upon the wife sinking beneath water that reflects scattered lights in a dark abyss, as though within the deepest recesses of 高鳥奈緒's poetry.

Our country's Romantic poetry begins with 「みだれ髪」, the herald of its first Romantic literary movement, and springs from the surge of a Japanese Romantic age in which youth, liberation and pressure alternately tormented the individuals 鳳晶子, 登美子 and 昌子. As they grew older, strange events occurred, such as 与謝野鉄幹 turning to politics, and there were even signs of self-destruction. In our Society, there is sometimes a sense that literature's stronghold has been handed over to the unfeeling, insensitive practical realism that realism invokes. But I want to say that this is nothing more than the realists' conceit.

There is no literature apart from romance.

The weight of logic that suppresses passion is not literature.

Look at 高鳥奈緒's poetry.

Let your heart be scorched by the blaze of hot human passion, so long on the verge of extinction.

　翔ぶのよ、夜空を　　　高鳥奈緒
　
　いつから想像の翼を落としたの？
　あなたが幼い頃、背中に持っていた想像という翼
　大人になったら想像の翼はもういらないの？
　大人だからなおのこと、想像の翼で自由にはばたけるのに
　もっともっと自在な自分になれるはず
　あなたの背につけて想像の世界に翔びたいのよ、わたしは…
　Fly, fly, fly…
　Away over the rainbow…
　沢山の誤解、ほんの些細なことで傷つきひっそりと飛ぶわたし
　水溜りに雨の波紋
　湖にさざなみ
　心は翼の先端よ、ほら、ほら、湖のきらめきを浴びて
　心無い言葉いちいち反応して翼が揺れる
　でも立て直せるんよ、少し離れて自分を
　心の避難所は永遠のネバーランド。　(June 28, 2023)

1. Translation note: this occurrence is written 高取奈緒 in the source; elsewhere it is 高鳥奈緒. Both original forms are retained without supplying an unverified reading.