Aesthetics and the Archive: The Poetry of Mizuta Noriko

Abstract

Aesthetics and the Archive:The Poetry of Mizuta Noriko Jordan A. Y. Smith (bio) Quick testimony: within minutes of meeting Mizuta Noriko for the first time, my life changed radically and permanently, although I did not quite know it at that moment. However, this is not my story, but hers—the story of a poet who changes lives, one encounter at a time. Translating her work over the years, I feel fortunate to have worked with texts that leave indelible impressions—yet ones that somehow transform and evolve each time I reread them. As a literary scholar, Mizuta also has her own interpretations of these works. Some of them cast a certain light through these translations, and some of them she has withheld, leaving margin for whatever light these translations will cast of their own, as it were. Reading her poetry alongside her scholarship, one can see how intimately literary expression and scholarly explorations of the world can benefit from tandem efforts. If Mizuta's scholarly endeavors have contributed to our understanding of American and Japanese literature, the personal and familial experience of transnationalism, of feminism as an aesthetics, an experience, and a politics, then we can learn equally through the poems collected here. And just as her scholarly work has often brought other thinkers together in scholarly projects and symposia, her creative output is both personal and collective. Though the exemplars included here are solo-authored, she has regularly engaged in renshi or ōfukushi, co-authoring with poets from Japan and around the world. Her Carillon Street (Kariyon dōri, 2009–ongoing) has featured new and established voices in poetry from Japan, China, Korea and, again—globally. Several of these translations are published here for the first time in English. Some were presented previously in the two volumes of her poetry in English, The Road Home (2015) and Sea of Blue Algae (2016), and I will refer readers to the introductory essays therein. Tokyo Sabbath (Tōkyō no sabasu, 2015) tells the story of a sabbatical—not in the academic sense of a break from daily working routine of classes and administration [End Page 244] in order to focus on research and creative projects, but in a more anagogical sense, implying the emergence from travail—where deep rest and recuperation are needed. It is the restoration of life force in an aftermath. Mizuta's poems are often deeply intertextual, building on her readings of poetry, novels, or religious texts. Often, the relationships are subtle allusions; at other times there are more direct references. Tokyo Sabbath opens with a reference to Kafka's famous first line in The Metamorphosis, but it is the grandmother who has died. Her body awaits loved ones who will come to clean it in accordance with Japanese funeral customs, a practice that Mizuta paints as strange, even traumatic for children who participate in the ceremony. This also recalls the death of Emperor Hirohito, and the nation of Japan emerging from the long postwar into an uncertain future. Relatives and children coming to clean the body parallel how the body of the deceased emperor gathered memories of the populace of Japan: the death of a figure of great importance means that stories from the past will come back. The past is contained in the body of the dead, and this body is washed in multiple narratives. Structurally, Tokyo Sabbath reflects this in its use of multiple narrators and narrative focal points (protagonists whose vantage point determines the scope of the story being told). These narrators are the daughter (or an independent narrator seeing things from her perspective) and the daughter's three former partners. These latter three are American, Chinese, Japanese figures. They are not blood relatives of the deceased, yet go back to wash the body of the grandmother who has died. Each is called "my son in law" by the grandmother; the three men are likely former husbands or former lovers of the daughter, who has long since left the house. Although the daughter once wrote a letter home from Israel, her whereabouts are otherwise uncertain. The men associated with her revere the grandmother, a grand figure, who is lying dead; yet the narration...