June 22, 2024, 10:49 a.m.

Plate, bottle, net

Stuff

Without boring you with the details, in the not quite three weeks since I returned from a four-day trip to New York(•) I have been beset in body and spirit, so in lieu of an edition of STUFF I offer you the following lines of Masaoka Shiki’s (1867–1902). Masaoka — Shiki was his style or pen name — contracted tuberculosis in his early twenties and spent much of his life in bed, convalescing. His work is full of sounds overheard, out of view: dusk chorus, people returning from a New Year’s party, a baseball game.(°)

ibiki ari
sara mo tokuri mo
kaya no soto

there is snoring
plate, sake bottle
outside the mosquito net(°°)

(Summer 1893)

(•) From Berlin, via Amsterdam. I don’t recommend traveling this way.

(°) His style, Shiki, is a coded reading of the Japanese for Lesser Cuckoo, hototogisu, ordinarily written 時鳥. Among the other ways of formulating hototogisu in kanji is 子規, the least-marked onyomi reading for which is shi ki.

(°°) Compare Watson’s rendering, Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems (Columbia UP, 1997), p. 25.

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