Ito Hiromi

U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal

Number 32 2007

Special Issue on It! Hiromi

Jeffrey Angles, Guest Editor

CONTENTS

Contributors

Foreword Ueno Chizuko 3

Introduction: It! Hiromi, Writing Woman Jeffrey Angles 7— 序論: 伊藤比呂美：女を書く女

How to Write “Women’s Poetry” without Being a “Woman Poet”:Public Persona in It! Hiromi’s Early Poetry Joanne Quimby 17— 女性詩人にならずに女性詩を書く：初期作品の中の作られた伊藤比呂美像

Poems from On Territory 2 by It! Hiromi translated by Sawako Nakayasu 42— 『テリトリー論２』より（英訳）

Reclaiming the Unwritten: The Work of Memory in It! Hiromi’sWatashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I Am Anjuhimeko) Jeffrey Angles 51— 口碑の再生：伊藤比呂美の「わたしはあんじゅひめ子である」における記憶の機能

“I Am Anjuhimeko” by It! Hiromi translated by Jeffrey Angles 76—「わたしはあんじゅひめ子である」（英訳）

“Finding Our Own English”: Migrancy, Identity, and Language(s)in It! Hiromi’s Recent Prose Ky!ko µmori 92—じぶんの英語を探して：伊藤比呂美の小説にみる移動／移住・アイデンティティー・ことば

“House Plant” by It! Hiromi translated by It! Hiromi and Harold Cohen 115—「ハウス・プラント」（英訳）

Bibliography 164

Contributors

ITµ Hiromi, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important poets of contemporary Japan. Since hersensational debut in the late 1970s, she has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, severalworks of prose, and numerous books of essays. She has won numerous important literary prizes, such asthe Takami Jun Prize and the Hagiwara Sakutar! Prize, and has twice been a finalist for the AkutagawaPrize. She lives outside of San Diego, California, with her husband Harold Cohen and her daughters.

Jeffrey ANGLES is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Western MichiganUniversity. He is the co-editor with J. Thomas Rimer of Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion(Whereabouts Press, 2006) and translator of the forthcoming anthology From a Woman of a DistantLand: Poetry of Tada Chimako. He is at work on two new book manuscripts: a study of representationsof love between men in Taish!- and early Sh!wa-period literature, and a volume of translations of It!Hiromi’s poetry.

Harold COHEN, born in Britain, is an artist whose work appears in the Tate Collection and manyother museums around the world. He is the author of the program “Aaron,” an ongoing research effortin artificial intelligence that involves programming a computer to make original works of art. He livesin Encinitas, California, with his wife It! Hiromi and their daughters.

Sawako NAKAYASU was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived mostly in the U.S. since the age ofsix. She has published several books of poetry, including Nothing Fictional but the Accuracy orArrangement (She (Quale Press, 2005), So We Have Been Given Time Or (Verse Press, 2004), andClutch (Tinfish, 2002). She is the editor of the journal Factorial, which regularly features Japanesepoetry in English translation.

Ky!ko µMORI is an assistant professor in the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department atHamilton College in Clinton, New York. She is working on a book project entitled “DetectingModanizumu: Shinseinen (New Youth) Magazine, Mystery Fiction, and the Culture of JapaneseVernacular Modernism, 1920–1950.”

Joanne QUIMBY is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of Comparative Literature and East AsianLanguages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is completing her dissertation onapproaches to sexuality, performance, and embodiment in the work of contemporary Japanese womenwriters. Much of the research for this article was conducted while she was a Graduate Research Fellowat Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.

UENO Chizuko, a University of Tokyo professor of sociology, is one of Japan’s most prominent scholarsof women’s studies. She has authored or contributed to several dozen books that have set the direction ofcontemporary feminist thought in Japan. Among her many projects is a series of essays producedjointly with It! Hiromi and published as Noro to saniwa (The shamaness and her interpreter, 1991).

© 2007 by J!sai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, J!sai University

Foreword

Ueno Chizuko

It! Hiromi is a unique woman poet without compare or competition in contemporary

Japan. It is my great delight to begin this special issue on her works with this emphatic

sentence, as I believe she deserves every word.

In order to understand exactly how incomparable and unique she is, we need to

look at the history of Japanese modern poetry, however briefly, to locate her works in the

context of literary tradition. Japan had a long history of short poetry, especially tanka or

waka (literally, “Japanese short songs”), comprised of thirty-one morae (in the internal

pattern 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7), and haiku, which consisted of the first part of a tanka, with

seventeen morae (5, 7, and 5). Though these poetic forms originally developed from

Chinese traditional sonnets comprised of combinations of five and seven syllables, these

rhythms of five and seven, once established, have influenced the ways that Japanese have

read and written poetry for centuries. As Japan began modernizing, poets challenged

these rhythmic constraints, assuming that new ideas and sentiments could not be placed

in old vessels. They tried to escape from traditional forms, as if they were a prison

restricting their language and thought. Some went so far as to refuse any form at all. The

result was what was called “free” poetry “in the new style” (shintaishi), but in fact, the

poets of this sort of work merely pressed themselves into uncomfortable corners as they

searched for a type of experimental avant-garde poetry that might reveal a high degree of

sophistication. These authors were isolated, read only among small circles of people with

similar interests. In this way, modern poetry developed into lines of letters to be read, not

to be narrated or recited. The result was a loss of voice, and as the popular audience for

modern poetry disappeared, the phonetic nature of poetry fell by the wayside.

Another inextricably linked development was the masculinization of modern

poetry—a gendering of Japanese poetry (like the whole of literary history) as specifically

4 U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal No. 32, 2007

male. Iida Yºko has persuasively described how the modernization of Japanese literature

involved a masculinization, even though reading had previously been a handy pleasure for

both women and children.1 From this time on, literature (including poetry) became a worthy

pursuit for men—a pursuit to which mature adult men might dedicate their entire existence.

Why talk about masculinization? Because women were excluded from this process,

sometimes through their own complicity. Women poets have been less likely to forget

the phonic nature of poetry. They are concerned about voices and songs. They remained

on the outside of highbrow circles of modern poetry, and so they were less likely to

follow the trends developed by their male contemporaries.2 Modern Japanese women

poets have established their own traditions quite separate from their male counterparts.

Among them are Kaneko Misuzu, Ibaraki Noriko, Ishigaki Rin, Tomioka Taeko, and the

author on whom this special issue focuses, It! Hiromi.

Tomioka, whom It! admires a great deal, draws her vocabulary and rhythms from

the traditional theater of kabuki and bunraku. Both are forms of premodern musical

theater that involve strong elements of song, dance, and oral tradition. It!’s work has

often shown the influence of medieval narrative and religious chants—forms of public

performance that have strong elements of narration. It! draws her nourishment from a

long tradition of Japanese colloquial language, and she has even translated a collection of

old tales of the extraordinary into the colloquial language of contemporary Japanese.3

It!’s poetry writing is unique in both its content and form. Her writing is specifi-

cally female in content because she writes about the body, skin, menstrual blood,

pregnancy, giving birth, and so on. All of these works reflect the bodily experiences of

being a woman, but her individuality does not allow an easy reconciliation with her femi-

ninity, which she has struggled with since her youth. She sticks to the surface of the body,

writing about skin, hair, nail, spots—all those anomalies that occur on the boundaries of

the self, those things that mark the interface between the body and the external world.

Sex, or, more directly, intercourse, takes place on this surface, blurring the boundary

between self and other. This obsession with the boundaries of the body prevents her from

soaring up to the unearthly metaphysical extremes of her male colleagues. Her struggle

with femininity, which in some cases even takes a violent form, struck a strong chord

with contemporary female readers, especially among feminists. I confess I am one of

those readers enamored with her work.

Through the elaborate acts of narrative performance in her poetry, It! transforms

herself into an abusive mother, an unfaithful lover, a destructive wife, and a cruel daughter.

Ueno Chizuko 5

When she kills her child in the famous poem “Kanoko-goroshi,” translated by the poet

Sawako Nakayasu in this special issue, it sounds as though this act of poetic narration

might have saved her from the actual act of infanticide. The excessiveness of her aggressive

expression keeps her from excessive damage to herself. I am tempted to call her writing

“private poetry,” after the definition of “private novels” (shi-sh!setsu) by Irmela Hijiya-

Kirshnereit.4 The reason is that she writes about her own personal, private experiences,

and so her audience can follow the course of her life and family crises as she gets

married, divorced, remarried, and so on.

Here the form and style help. Borrowing voices and rhythms from old traditional

narratives, she successfully transforms her own personal tragedies into the universal

suffering of everyday life. This is exactly the function accorded narrative in traditional

cultures. Here and there throughout the world, in Iraq and Afganistan, in Korea and

Japan, there are traditional poetic forms into which people pour new ideas—ideas some-

times critical of politics, sometimes satirical of wealth and desires, sometimes expressing

anxiety and hopes for the future. The history of literature involves not just the development

of new forms but the revival of traditional forms through the influx of new ideas, thus

renovating them in new and idiosyncratic ways. It! has achieved this renovation in

unprecedented ways.

Her migration to an Anglophone community and her marriage to a British artist

living in California have led to new developments in her writing. Separation from the

world of the mother tongue could prove fatally frustrating for many poets, even if the

move to another country was their own choice. It!, however, is different. Surrounded by

neighbors who do not speak her language or read her Japanese writing, she takes

advantage of this disadvantage by writing in ways that introduce an English quality to

her Japanese and a Japanese quality to her English. Her style has become an interactive

blurring of linguistic boundaries, not unlike the writing of Tawada Y!ko, the Japanese

woman poet and writer who lives in Germany. As a result of these linguistic explora-

tions, we now have a new, unprecedented style of Japanese writing which has never been

seen before. We must appreciate the pain and frustration that It! has experienced in non-

Japanese speaking communities since these experiences have so greatly enriched the

Japanese linguistic space.

Despite all the homage I am paying to It!’s writing, I cannot help but wonder

whether or not English translation can successfully transfer the charm of her writing,

though I am reminded of how fascinated she was with writing from the Anglophone


world even early in her career. Even before her move to America and her marriage to a

man from Britain, she was deeply attracted to the narrative poetry of Native Americans.

She read Native American songs and poems primarily in English translation because

their own voices and languages had started dwindling into obscurity so long ago. Transla-

tion does not destroy the appeal of Native American narratives. After all, they did convey

their messages to her. If that is the case, why can’t we expect that translating her works

into English will deliver the attractiveness of her works to Anglophone audiences today?

Notes1. Karera no Monogatari (Their manly narratives) provides a provocative revision of

modern literary history from a feminist literary standpoint, focusing primarily on Natsume S!sekiand his male audience. Iida Yºko, Karera no monogatari: Nihon kindai bungaku to jend" (Theirmanly narratives: Modern Japanese literature and gender), (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai,1998).

2. There are a few exceptions among male poets. Tanikawa Shuntar! is among them, buthis popularity has earned him the opprobrium of other poets.

3. It! Hiromi, Nihon no fushigi na hanashi (Strange tales from Japan), (Tokyo: Asahishinbunsha, 2004).

4. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shish!setsu as Literary Genreand Socio-cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University,1996). Hijiya-Kirshnereit is also the German translator of It!’s work. See Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Seiyoku to shiteki s!z!ryoku: Doitsugo ken ni okeru It! Hiromi” (Sexual desireand poetic creativity: It! Hiromi in the German-speaking world), Gendai shi tech! 48, no. 6(June 2005): 68–71.

© 2007 by J!sai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, J!sai University

Introduction

It! Hiromi, Writing Woman

Jeffrey Angles

The 1970s saw a fundamental transformation in the ways that Japanese society talked

about women’s bodies, thanks in large part to the advances of feminism. The rise of

feminist discourse encouraged women to speak about their experiences, desires, and bodies,

stating that to do so was a significant social and political act. As a result, there emerged

an entire generation of writers willing to examine issues central to women’s lives. Shiraishi

Kazuko (1931– ), one of Japan’s most important poets of the 1960s and 1970s, lauded the

1980s as an era of revolutionary change in Japanese women’s poetry as poets, inspired by

feminist rhetoric, began to describe the experience of women—especially the themes of

sexuality, pregnancy, and erotic desire—with a frankness rarely seen in the past.1

A figure whom many, including Shiraishi, mention as one of the foremost voices

of this new generation of poets is the Tokyo-born writer It! Hiromi. Born in 1955, she

came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of dramatic collections

that transformed the ways people were writing poetry in Japan. In a recent collection of

contemporary poetry, the poet Kido Shuri introduced It!’s contributions with the following

words of praise:

The appearance of It! Hiromi, a figure that one might best call a “shamaness ofpoetry” (shi no miko), was an enormous event in “post-postwar poetry.” Her physi-ological sensitivity and writing style, which cannot be captured within any existingframework, became the igniting force behind the subsequent flourishing of “women’spoetry” (josei shi), just as Hagiwara Sakutar! had revolutionized modern poetrywith his morbid sensitivity and colloquial style.2


The comparison between It! and Hagiwara Sakutar! (1886–1942), one of the most

distinctive voices in twentieth-century Japanese poetics, suggests the importance of

It!’s contribution to modern Japanese letters. Many writers and critics share this high

appraisal. Just recently Minashita Kiriu, the young winner of the eleventh Nakahara

Chºya Prize for poetry, remarked to me that It! Hiromi was nothing less than a “goddess

of poetry” (shi no megami) inspiring an entire generation of young writers, including

Kiriu herself.3

As Ueno Chizuko notes in the foreword to this special issue of the U.S.–Japan

Women’s Journal, It!’s work is strikingly original in both style and content. Even her

earliest works, published in her early twenties, show that It! had embarked on a lifelong

battle against the relatively circumscribed and “artfully” worded language that has, for

most of the twentieth century, shaped how people write poetry in Japan. It!’s early work

does not partake of the terse, suggestive, elevated, and sometimes stilted style that formed

the writing of the poetic mainstream since at least the time of the symbolist-inspired

experiments of translator Ueda Bin (1874–1916) and poet Kitahara Hakushº (1885–1942).

Instead, much of her poetry is narrated in extended, sometimes even unwieldy passages

of relatively colloquial text. It! was, of course, not the first Japanese poet to experiment

with colloquial poetry. As early as the second decade of the twentieth century, a group of

poets close to Kawaji Ryºk! (1888–1959) jettisoned classical language and traditional

metrical patterns of five and seven morae for “colloquial free verse.” What makes It!’s

poetry so different from that of other writers is not just her rejection of classical metrical

patterns. She also makes extensive use of registers of diction that have been excluded

from the poetic mainstream: childish vocabulary, women’s language, vulgar expressions,

and even profanity.

Her poems so skillfully capture the idiosyncrasies of spoken language that they

often give the illusion that they are pouring directly from the mouth of some narrator onto

the page. Not coincidentally, many commentators have described It! as a “shamaness”

(miko) who uses the medium of language to conduct ideas into language from some

mysterious place deep within. Where this “deep within” is thought to reside depends

on the commentator. Some describe It!’s work as an exemplar of Cixious’s écriture

féminine, stemming from somewhere deep within the body itself, while others speak of

her writing as tapping into the cultural unconscious of Japan, or perhaps even woman-

hood as a whole.4 In any case, It! has embraced the metaphor of poet-as-shamaness. In

1991, she collaborated with Ueno Chizuko on an important collection of essays and poetry,

Jeffrey Angles 9

which the two likened to the collaboration between an Okinawan shamaness (noro) and

the person who interprets the shamaness’s utterances for the outside world (saniwa).5

Also, as I point out in my contribution to this issue, It! explicitly plays out this metaphor

in her long narrative poem Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjuhimeko, 1993), in

which she takes a record of a spirit possession from a shamaness early in the twentieth

century and uses it as the point of inspiration for a dramatic new myth.

The fact that It! draws so often upon spoken language for her poetic vocabulary

does not mean that her poems are not carefully constructed or artfully worded. Many of

her works, especially her earlier poems, show a dense and sophisticated logic that reveals

an erudite mind at work. The poet Ishii Tatsuhiko has described her work as “organic,”

arguing that despite her relatively straightforward vocabulary, her poems are constructed

with such a deliberate structure that each phrase seems to contribute significantly to the

whole, much like a cell contributing its own unique function to the workings of the entire

organism.6 Through her refusal to give in to the restrictions that twentieth-century Japanese

institutions of poetry placed on what could be considered “poetic,” It! has consistently

challenged dominant concepts of poeticity and, in the process, pointed out the inadequacy

of more mainstream poetic styles to embody contemporary experience.

As Joanne Quimby notes in her article, which begins this special issue, in 1982 the

publisher Shich!sha inaugurated a series of critically lauded anthologies entitled The

Present State of Women’s Poetry (josei shi no genzai) that helped establish the contours

of the new wave of women’s poetry. The series featured a number of rising stars, such as

Isaka Y!ko (1949– ), Hirata Toshiko (1955– ), and Shiraishi K!ko (1960– ), who would

later become fixtures in late-twentieth-century poetic history. The first book in the series

was It!’s Aoume (Unripe plums), a combination of free verse and almost story-like

fragments of prose.7 Despite their informal, conversational lightness, It!’s writing deals

with weighty subjects, ranging from the author’s impressions of Auschwitz to explicit

invocations of masturbation and the scopophilic fascination with death. In these poems,

one also finds traces of It!’s growing passion for feminist psychological theory.

As It!’s reputation as a “woman poet” (josei shijin) grew, she took increasing

exception to her position within the literary world, believing that by subsuming her writing

under the broad category of woman’s poetry, the publishing industry was simply

lumping her in with a broad array of female writers and obscuring the differences among

them. In a roundtable discussion published in 1985, she remarked she was not happy that

her work had been grouped with that of poets such as Isaka Y!ko simply because their


work had appeared in the same series.8 Instead, she insisted on being recognized as a poet

without the delimiting adjective “woman” that might pigeonhole her work.

At the same time, however, her writing gravitated increasingly to issues of the

feminine body, sexuality, and motherhood. By the mid-1980s, when she published Teritorî

ron 2 (On territory 2, 1985) and Teritorî ron 1 (On territory 1, 1987), she had given birth

to her first child, Kanoko.9 (She would eventually have three children: two with her first

husband, Nishi Masahiko, a scholar of minority literature, and one with her second husband

in America.) Her experience of motherhood led her to begin probing the meaning of the

mother-child relationship, the demands that motherhood places on the mother’s sexual-

ity, and the psychological ramifications of pregnancy and childbirth. In fact, so many

poems in these volumes describe pregnancy and childcare that many people, both inside

and outside the literary world, began calling her by the sobriquet shussan shijin, or “poet

of childbirth.” Even today, the poems about motherhood from the two volumes of Teritorî

ron remain some of her most famous work, appearing more often in anthologies and the

analyses of literary scholars than almost all her other work combined.

One common goal of these and other early poems is to reexamine the experiences

of women with a fresh eye. By rejecting clichés about motherhood, women’s sexuality,

and the relationships between women and their families, It! looks anew at the compli-

cated psychological processes at work in the relationships between women and the people

around them. For instance, her poems written after her first child’s birth are not simple

paeans to motherhood but an incursion into the dark, hidden recesses of the maternal

mind. “Kanoko-goroshi” (Killing Kanoko), newly translated in this issue, is probably

It!’s most famous poem to date.10 It is written in two parts, side by side, that represent the

juxtaposed voices of two people. One voice, clearly that of a woman, describes the expe-

rience of postpartum depression and her desire to commit abortion or infanticide, while

the other, written from an external point of view, describes the suicide of a young mother

named Hiromi. Within both voices, the words “Congratulations on your destruction”

(horoboshite omedet! gozaimasu) repeat and overlap, creating recurring, almost hypnotic

cadences that parody the congratulatory message a young mother hears repeatedly upon

becoming pregnant or giving birth. It!’s poem reminds readers that becoming a mother

can involve darker, more complicated feelings than are usually acknowledged, as the

mother puts her own life on hold to take care of her new charge. The fragmentary poem

“Kanoko no shisshin o naosu” (Healing Kanoko’s rash) also deals with the implicit

conflict between mother and child in its descriptions of the repetitive motions of a mother

Jeffrey Angles 11

caring for a parasitic infant who monopolizes her thoughts and sucks the nutrients from

her breasts. The fact that the poem breaks off with the words “the remaining has been

abridged” (ika sh!ryaku) suggests that, like the poem itself, this conflict is never entirely

resolved. In these and other poems, It! shatters the image of the mother as loving caregiver,

which even now continues to hold an important place in the cultural imagination.

It! is as much a performance artist as a poet. Much like Shiraishi Kazuko, who

during the 1960s performed her work to jazz accompaniment, and Nejime Sh!ji (1948– ),

who in the 1980s became known for his dramatic and amusing style of reading, It!

believes that literature has too long been divorced from the voice. Many of her pieces are

meant to be read aloud as much as to be read on the page, and through the 1980s she

developed innovative ways of performing her work. For instance, when reading “Kanoko-

goroshi,” she plays a recorded version of one of the two voices while reading the other

aloud. The result is a complicated interplay of two voices, each describing the experience

of motherhood and postpartum depression from a different angle. When giving perfor-

mances of Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru, she sits on the floor like a shamaness and raps

on a drum, table, or the floor to punctuate the narrative and draw attention to the rhythms

she has carefully embedded in the text.

In the late 1980s It! became eager to leave her first husband and change her

surroundings, so she set her sights on America as a place to give herself a new start.11 One

reason It! was interested in America in particular was her growing passion for Native

American poetry, which she had first encountered a few years earlier in the translations

of Kaneko Hisao.12 The poetry she read in Kaneko’s translations struck her as represent-

ing “the origin of all poetry,” and she became interested in trying to use contemporary

spoken language to write poetry in a mythological mode.13 Her interest in Native American

poetry eventually led her to the work of Jerome Rothenberg, the avant-garde poet who

had published several key collections of Native American poetry and helped make

“ethnopoetics” a major force in contemporary American poetic circles. By the time she

decided to go to America, It! was already employing the mythological quality, repeti-

tion, and parallelism she found in those works in her own writing.

In 1990 It! met Rothenberg when he visited Japan, and in 1991 she traveled with

her two daughters to the University of California at San Diego, where he was teaching.14

The sojourn in California was a turning point in It!’s life. She quickly settled into life in

America, making friends and building a life, although her somewhat rudimentary English

meant that she maintained a strong sense of being a resident alien in a foreign environment.


She returned to America several times on a three-month-long tourist visa, but when her

visa was about to expire, she would return to Japan temporarily, then go back to the

States. This began a series of transpacific trips between Japan and California. At one

point, however, she did overstay her visa, causing a series of legal difficulties that she

eventually solved by marrying her partner at the time, the artist Harold Cohen. (A

naturalized citizen originally from Britain, Cohen is an artist who has gained interna-

tional recognition for his experiments with artificial intelligence. He is the author of a

program called “Aaron,” which involves teaching a computer to produce original

artwork. Aaron’s work appears in numerous prominent museums, including the Tate

Gallery in London.)15

Since the mid-1990s It! has lived in Encinitas, a quiet city near San Diego, with

Cohen, her two daughters with her first husband, and her third daughter whom the new

couple had together. The change of setting led to several significant changes in her writ-

ing, in terms of both genre and theme. As Ky!ko µmori remarks in her reading of It!’s

recent work, It! turned to longer, freer forms of prose after settling in California. Her

already prodigious output of essays increased and she began writing novellas, both

because she was tired of the strictures of poetry and because she felt prose was better

suited to exploring her new experiences as a migrant. Her novella Hausu puranto (House

plant), published in 1998 and translated here for the first time, was nominated for the

119th Akutagawa Prize, and the following year she published Ra nînya (La niña), which

was nominated for the 121st Akutagawa Prize.16 It! followed these with other pieces,

including the novella Surî riro japanîzu (Sree lil’ Japaneez, 2001) and the short story

Monsºn g"den (Monsoon garden, 2002).17 In all these works of fiction, It! applies her

signature colloquial style to create engaging and challenging works that explore some of

the many facets of modern migrancy: the legal difficulties of the immigration system, the

experience of being a transplant in a new environment, the linguistic isolation of recent

arrivals, the implications of that isolation for self-expression and identity, and the

linguistic hybridization that results. It! refracts these issues through her awareness of

women’s issues, writing articulately about the subaltern status particular to female migrants,

especially those whose inability to speak English condemns them to silence.

More recently, It! has returned to poetry, publishing the long narrative poem Kawara

arekusa (Wild grass on a riverbank), a tour de force that continues her interest in the

experiences of migrants but incorporates many of the stylistic innovations, thematic

elements, and mythological modes of storytelling seen in her work throughout the years.18

Jeffrey Angles 13

In 2006 this work won the Takami Jun Prize, awarded each year to an outstanding and

innovative collection of poetry. Even more recent is her narrative poem Koy!te songu

(Coyote song, 2007), which involves motifs borrowed from Native American poetry, and

Toge-nuke (The thorn-puller, 2007), a long and fantastic narrative, written in alternating

prose and poetry, about the “thorn-pulling” statue of Jiz! located near It!’s former home

in Sugamo, Tokyo.19 In September 2007, this work won the fifteenth Hagiwara Sakutar!

Prize, given each year to an innovative work of literature by the city of Maebashi.

Given the transpacific trajectory of It! Hiromi’s own life, there is perhaps no forum more

appropriate than the U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, produced jointly on both sides of the

Pacific, for this special issue on her work. It is the hope of the editors and contributors

that this special issue will begin the process of exploring the rich field of It!’s writing,

which has garnered far too little critical attention in the West, despite her large presence

in the world of Japanese literature. Throughout It!’s career, she has shown an almost

uncanny ability to anticipate the kinds of themes that would be of major importance to

literary and cultural theorists. Her works present a provocative web of tightly knit themes

that range from motherhood to migrancy, from language’s role in identity formation to

life on the fringes of society. The critical articles included here explore the thematic

concerns in various stages of It!’s career and give a sense of the evolution of her work as

she has moved in new and different directions over time.

Because so little of It!’s work is available in translation, this issue departs from the

practice established in past issues of U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal and includes not just

critical articles but also new translations of original works. The first selection consists of

two of It!’s most dramatic and frequently anthologized poems from Teritorî ron 2, trans-

lated by It!’s friend and fellow poet Sawako Nakayasu. Although some of these poems

have appeared in translation previously, these are the first that are actually based on It!’s

original text from 1985. (Other translations of “Kanoko-goroshi” were based on a later

version of the text, which presents the poem in a radically different fashion on the page

and gives a mistaken impression of how the poem works.) The second is a full translation

of Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru, a work that It! performs relatively often in her public

readings but that has until now not been available in a full translation. The third is her

novella Hausu puranto, translated by It! Hiromi herself, with the help of her husband

Harold Cohen. This translation is not a slavish reflection of the Japanese original, first

published in the journal Shinch! (New tide) in 1998. Instead, it is perhaps more accurate


to think of it as a new work since It! made many minor changes to diction and content

while rendering it into English. As Ky!ko µmori explains in her article in this issue, one

of It!’s goals in rewriting this story herself was to help forge a new interlinguistic style

that is more conducive to expressing the idioms, style, and order of her thoughts than

standard English literary style, which, as a non-native speaker, she finds foreign and

confining.

AcknowledgmentsI extend my thanks to the contributors who submitted their work for this special issue, and to SallyHastings and Jan Bardsley, who provided the opportunity to publish this work in the U.S.–JapanWomen’s Journal. Also, I am grateful to the publishers Shinch!sha and Shich!sha for agreeing toallow us to include the translations of works originally published with them. Most of all, I thankIt! Hiromi herself for the many forms of support she provided as I edited this issue, includingpermission to print the new translations of her work that appear here.

Notes1. Shiraishi Kazuko, “Hachijº-nendai to josei shi: Feminizumu und! to heik! shite”

(Women’s poetry of the eighties: Parallels with the feminist movement), Gendai shi tech! 34, no.9 (September 1991): 64–69. More than a decade before, Shiraishi had personally felt the brunt ofsociety when she published the poem “Dankon” (The man-root) in her 1965 anthology Konbanwa aremoy! (Signs of storm tonight). This poem represents a break from the phallocentric notionthat the penis is a metaphysical representation of power, connectivity, or the ultimate signifieranchoring meaning. It describes the “man-root” not as something that belongs solely to men but asan abstract, transcendental force that women can access as well; however, the Japanese tabloidindustry seized upon this poem and others to deride Shiraishi’s work as scandalous. This suggeststhat Japanese society was perhaps not yet entirely ready for frankly worded poetry by women thatdeals with sexuality in untraditional ways or dissolves sacred ideas about male privilege.

2. Nomura Kiwao and Kido Shuri, Sengo meishi sen II (Selection of famous postwarpoetry II), Gendai shi bunko tokushº han 2 (Tokyo: Shich!sha, 2001), 230.

3. Minashita Kiriu, personal interview with Jeffrey Angles, 27 June 2006.4. See, for instance, Shiraishi Kazuko, “Hachijº-nendai to josei shi,” 4–5; Ueno Chizuko,

“Moto kyoshokush! no sh!jo no ekusorushizumu” (The exorcism of a formerly anorexic youngwoman), in It! Hiromi, It! Hiromi shishº (Tokyo: Shich!sha, 1988), 143–45; Nobuaki Tochigi,“Transformational Narratives by ‘The Poet who goes into a Trance’: A Review of Hiromi Ito’sLatest Book,” trans. Yasuhir! Yotsumoto, Poetry International Web (October 2006), http://japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=7853&x=1.

5. It! Hiromi and Ueno Chizuko, Noro to saniwa to (The shamaness and her interpreter),(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1991).

6. Ishii Tatsuhiko, “Ikizuku nikutai toshite no shi: It! Hiromi no ars poetica” (Poetry as

Jeffrey Angles 15

breathing flesh: The ars poetica of It! Hiromi), in Gendai shi toshite no tanka (Tokyo: Shoshiyamada, 1999), 221–32.

7. It! Hiromi, Aoume (Unripe plums), Josei shi no genzai 1 (Tokyo: Shich!sha, 1982).8. There It! wrote, “After all, that is what men see; I think it’s just laziness. I am me, Isaka-

san is Isaka-san, and we’re completely different.” She expressed her relief that people had startedto make a distinction between the two authors, and she said Isaka probably was relieved, too.Yoshimoto Takaaki, It! Hiromi, and Nejime Sh!ji, “Kotoba e, shintai e, sekai e” (To words, to thebody, to the world), Gendai shi tech! 28, no. 3 (March 1985): 57.

9. It! Hiromi, Teritorî ron 2 (On territory 2), (Tokyo: Shich!sha, 1985); It! Hiromi, Teritorîron 1 (On territory 1), photographs by Araki Nobuyoshi (Tokyo: Shich!sha, 1987).

10. For commentary on this poem, see Ueno Chizuko, “Moto kyoshokush! no sh!jo noekusorushizumu,” 144–45; Tsuboi Hideto, “It! Hiromi ron (jo)” (On It! Hiromi [Part I]), Nihonbungaku 38, no. 12 (December 1989): 33; Kageyama Kazuko, “Tanoshii kogoroshi: Shijin It!Hiromi no baai” (A pleasant act of infanticide: The case of the poet It! Hiromi), Shin Nihonbungaku 48, no. 10 (Autumn 1993): 51–54; Leith Morton, Modernism in Practice: An Introduc-tion to Postwar Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 106–7.

11. Some time before, It! had applied for the poet-in-residence position at Oakland Univer-sity in Michigan, set aside for contemporary Japanese poets to visit and teach at the university.Many important Japanese poets had occupied this position over the years, including her closefriend Sasaki Mikir!, who had encouraged her to try for the position. After some waiting, it didnot seem that It!’s name was especially high in the queue, and so she began to look for ways tocome to the United States with her own money.

12. Kaneko Hisao, Amerika Indian no shi (American Indian poetry), Chºk! shisho 472(Tokyo: Chº! k!ronsha, 1977). This volume has been expanded and reprinted as Kaneko Hisao,Amerika Indian no k!sh!shi: Mah! toshite no kotoba (American Indian oral tradition: Words asmagic), Heibonsha raiburarî 347 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000).

13. It! Hiromi, e-mail to Jeffrey Angles, 15 November 2006.14. It! remains close to Rothenberg and his wife Diane. Incidentally, it was Diane who

provided the inspiration for the character Claris in the novella Hausu puranto (House plant),included in this issue.

15. Cohen’s computer program provides the name of the character “Aaron” in the novellaHausu puranto (House plant), which appears in this special issue.

16. It! Hiromi, “Hausu puranto” (House plant), Shinch! 95, no. 5 (May 1998): 100–49; It!Hiromi, “Ra nînya” (La niña), Shinch! 96, no. 3 (March 1999): 60–105.

17. It! Hiromi, “Surî riro japanîzu” (Sree lil’ Japaneez), Shinch! 99, no. 7 (July 2001): 6–36;It! Hiromi, “Monsºn g"den” (Monsoon garden), in Imafuku Ryºta, ed., “Watashi” no tankyº, 21seiki bungaku no s!z! 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 181–204.

18. It! Hiromi, Kawara arekusa (Wild grass on a riverbank), (Tokyo: Shich!sha, 2005).Sections of this work have been translated as Hiromi It!, “From Wild Grass upon a Riverbank,” trans.Jeffrey Angles, Poetry International Web (1 October 2006), http://japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=7833&x=1.


19. It! Hiromi, K!yote songu (Coyote song), (Tokyo: Switch Publishing, 2007); It! Hiromi,Toge-nuki: Shin Sugamo Jiz! engi (The thorn-puller: New legends of the bodhisattva Jiz! atSugamo), (Tokyo: K!dansha, 2007).

Documents

Ito Hiromi