Notes on Poems by Ishigaki Rin

Abstract

A witty send-up of the humorous rakugo stories that are told by a single narrator who takes all the parts. These are a traditional music hall entertainment in Japan, associated with the urban merchant culture that Ishigaki grew up in. Here, the story opens with an old man advising a younger person on how to start off as an itinerant merchant. But the young one is so poor he has almost nothing to sell and is ultimately reduced to selling his own tears. These, however, no one will buy, so in a take-off of another rakugo story, where a merchant who has no customers ends up getting drunk on his own liquor, our hero (or heroine, it could be either, as often in Ishigaki’s poems) ends up drinking his tears himself. Behind the mordant wit is Ishigaki’s frustration with her own life at the time and her rebellion against the traditional family system.