"Please
feel free to write about me and about my poetry…
It would be a great pleasure for me (and my
poetry)
if my readers gain something and speak about
it."
September 2009:
Akehiro Shirai has a calm and
respectful demeanor. I gather this from his response
when I asked to write about the poetry he has
been publishing in Tokyo since 2002. Shirai is
39 years old, with a wife and a toddler daughter.
As a poet, essayist, and photographer, his schedule
is packed with readings and events-for example,
last February he collaborated with ceramic artist
Takuya Sudo for an exhibition at the Misuzudo
Gallery in Tokyo's Chiyoda district.
Shirai's mother is from Okinawa,
and he grew up listening to her dialect. One day,
Shirai was walking along a cape on Hateruma (the
Okinawan island that forms the southernmost inhabited
point of Japan), and the poems just came to him
by themselves. Shirai asked a traditional print
shop to do a letterpress printing of the poetry
on very fine paper. Sudo, Shirai's college buddy,
created pottery inspired by the themes but not
meant to correspond to any one poem in particular-the
collaboration was much more organic than that.
Shirai's calm demeanor
is reflected not only in his speech but in his
use of the kana syllabic script which produces
softer visual lines and sounds than the logographic
characters of kanji. Although many Japanese-speaking
poets use kana, they sometimes end up sounding
childish or monotonous. Shirai, however, has a
sense of balance that makes his poems the finest-like
a field of powder snow and a steam of water, untouched.
For The Charles River Journal,
Shirai has given me permission to translate
a poem from his latest collection, Kusamakura
("In the Sleeves"). Shirai and his wife
share a deep-rooted trust. This could be a reason
why his mostly kana-based works-like
this poem-are mature and sharp even while Shirai
maintains his life-is-a-gift demeanor.
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to Index of Despatches | Back to the Table of Contents for Number 2
About our Correspondent
Jay (Toshibumi) Otsuka lives in Kanagawa, Japan.
He has been writing and translating with the Boston
Poetry Union since 2007. |
