Introduction by Lloyd Haft, Wild Strawberries 1995
‘Fuyuko’ means ‘winter child’. What an appropriate name for the author (or should we say the ‘intermediary’, the ‘transmitter’?) of those poems, in which the sudden warmth of rebirth seems to emerge so spontaneously, on page after page, out of practically nothing – out of a few bare lines strung like twigs over the white page. In our European culture, in which Fuyuko’s Japan-born body has dwelt for many years, winter is traditionally a time of cold and dark and waiting, but also of nativity and incarnation – of desperate promise come suddenly true in breath and blood. But one need not be Eastern or Western, man or woman, child or wizened, to be gladdened and convinced by the strangely exact music and strength of these seemingly so modest poems. Doesn’t everyone’s ‘I’ recognize ‘In my hand/ a homeland called/ acorn’? Fuyuko’s message is that wherever one stands, the spirit is always ready to start living all over again. In her own words:
"......
Here always
always yes is reborn
Let me have a cup of coffee
while the sun shines
only for me"
As Fuyuko continually reminds us, ends are so often also beginnings. In the title poem of this collection, ‘I’ve come to tell you of dead angels/ But wild strawberries slip off my fingers,’ though the rational mind be burdened with its ‘words’ in which ‘we perish,’ somehow the fingers continue to bring the ever-returning bright fruits of vitality. Through their color and light and nearness, forms found in nature resonate with their kindred contours in the human heart and limbs. A frying eggplant – the ‘autumn aubergine’ – communicates a bluish radiance as it dances to the ‘small fire’ of ‘longing’. The sight of a yellow pumpkin reminds me of the ‘burning’ in my body that I can not quench’.
The poignant succession of the generations is often in evidence, but in Fuyuko’s world the mothers and fathers do not just pass away, they pass on – to a deeper level of continuation and renewal. A mother’s face may suddenly reappear years later as her ‘death mask’ is mirrored on the white surface of a fresh potato in her daughter’s kitchen. And even when the face is gone, nothing of the person is lost. After her death, ‘my mother’s paper doll’ is ‘passed on to a stranger’.
Born in Tokyo in 1943, after completing her college education Fuyuko went first to America and then, years later, to the Netherlands where she has lived since 1970. Her first tanka was published in Japan in 1984, the following year she won the Asahi Shimbun Tanka Prize. Her first collection, 'Dandelion Songs', was published in 1987. In 1992 she was awarded the Asahi Shimbun Haiku Prize. Here in the West, though known to a select few as a poet, thus far she has mostly been known and loved as a human being. In both her poetry and her life, she has been successful in observing traditional forms – being a mother, teaching school children, writing in the centuries-old haiku and tanka formats. Her way of honoring the forms, however, is entirely her own. Though she usually writes originally in Japanese, her English poems are not mere translations. Very rightly, in shaping her English tanka and haiku, she is more concerned with the intrinsic emotional rhythm of the poem than with slavish imitation of the traditional syllable count. I am sure many other readers will agree with me that her lines and cadences go beyond the merely original to ring with the unmistakable authority of rightness. (Once in a while her knowledge of Dutch leads her to coin a livelier word in English than the one we already had. Doesn’t a ‘dunerose’ sound saltier, closer to the sea, than a ’burnet-rose’?)
It is a pleasure and a privilege to have been asked to introduce these poems, with such spare branches but such deep roots, which owe their powers and imprimatur not to last night’s cultural supplement or to the pretentious convolutions of the latest literary theories, but to something simpeler and more difficult – to the poet’s long search, and long wait, for the living moments in which time and meaning, passion and insight, come together in the suddenly seen image, the suddenly spoken music of their marriage.
The poignant succession of the generations is often in evidence, but in Fuyuko’s world the mothers and fathers do not just pass away, they pass on – to a deeper level of continuation and renewal. A mother’s face may suddenly reappear years later as her ‘death mask’ is mirrored on the white surface of a fresh potato in her daughter’s kitchen. And even when the face is gone, nothing of the person is lost. After her death, ‘my mother’s paper doll’ is ‘passed on to a stranger’.
Born in Tokyo in 1943, after completing her college education Fuyuko went first to America and then, years later, to the Netherlands where she has lived since 1970. Her first tanka was published in Japan in 1984, the following year she won the Asahi Shimbun Tanka Prize. Her first collection, 'Dandelion Songs', was published in 1987. In 1992 she was awarded the Asahi Shimbun Haiku Prize. Here in the West, though known to a select few as a poet, thus far she has mostly been known and loved as a human being. In both her poetry and her life, she has been successful in observing traditional forms – being a mother, teaching school children, writing in the centuries-old haiku and tanka formats. Her way of honoring the forms, however, is entirely her own. Though she usually writes originally in Japanese, her English poems are not mere translations. Very rightly, in shaping her English tanka and haiku, she is more concerned with the intrinsic emotional rhythm of the poem than with slavish imitation of the traditional syllable count. I am sure many other readers will agree with me that her lines and cadences go beyond the merely original to ring with the unmistakable authority of rightness. (Once in a while her knowledge of Dutch leads her to coin a livelier word in English than the one we already had. Doesn’t a ‘dunerose’ sound saltier, closer to the sea, than a ’burnet-rose’?)
It is a pleasure and a privilege to have been asked to introduce these poems, with such spare branches but such deep roots, which owe their powers and imprimatur not to last night’s cultural supplement or to the pretentious convolutions of the latest literary theories, but to something simpeler and more difficult – to the poet’s long search, and long wait, for the living moments in which time and meaning, passion and insight, come together in the suddenly seen image, the suddenly spoken music of their marriage.