Lecture 2005-10-24
"A Poet in Japan"
Mr. Anthony Thwaite

At this lecture meeting, the English poet, Anthony Thwaite, read some of his poems and commented on them as he went along. He began by saying that he and his wife Ann, who accompanied him on this occasion, were celebrating their golden wedding this year, and it was also fifty years since they had first come to Japan. They had sailed to Hong Kong in a liner, and then taken a Messageries Maritimes ship to Yokohama, arriving on September 30th. Japan had been very important to them. Their first child was born here, and his first book was produced here, by Kenkyusha, in May 1957. It was a limited edition of 150 copies, each signed by the author, so they had some rarity value now.

This time he was proposing to read some of his poems on Japan. He was now on his eleventh visit to this country (the fifth with Ann), but one notable previous visit was from 1985-86, when he had come with a Japan Foundation fellowship. Up to then he had been editing Encounter, but he had got tired of it, and gladly seized the invitation to come to Japan and write poems in English. The contrast with his earlier visit was great; in the 1950s Japan had still not experienced the economic miracle, and ex-soldiers were still to be seen begging. He felt he should begin by reading one of his poems from that time, though he was not satisfied with them; they were clichéd, full of the observations made by a foreigner to whom everything was new, and some of them might even be offensive. The one he chose to read, "Not so Simple", written in 1956, he called "less bad". It had been inspired by his reading of R.H. Blyth's introduction to his book of translations of haiku, and so the poem begins, "Haiku, says the translator, is yes and no at once, Something and nothing, this and this-not made one." But his own response to this, given in a summing-up of the poem, was "'Bogus,' I quickly say, 'Nothing so simple.'"

Mr. Thwaite then moved on to another poem, "Abroad Thoughts from Abroad", written in 1985, when they were living on the campus of Tokyo Joshi Daigaku. "I am a citizen of the world," he mused, and thought of his next lectures to students on Sylvia Plath, and Hopkins and Kipling. And he finished, "This is an ironical poem about happiness. I am as happy as I could ever be. The Japanese say they do not understand irony." In his next poem, "Kanji" (1986), he gave examples of some of the kanji he saw written in various places, some of which he could understand but not pronounce, especially if they had more than one reading; what was frustrating was to see a ten-year-old reading a book with ease, while he himself was struggling! He then moved on to a different poem, "A Girdle round the Earth", which had world application. He had taught in other countries as well, such as Libya, Pakistan, and India, where he could see turbans and burnooses in the classes. He had found that Shakespeare had met with the greatest resonance everywhere, even if the students' English was not good. (In Japan, you can imagine "All's Well that Ends Well" as Kabuki, and "King Lear" as Noh.)

His next poem, "Cicadas in Japan" (1986), was written in response to the cicadas he could hear on the Joshidai campus, and he followed this with another Joshidai poem, "In the Missionaries' House". The present buildings on the campus were not so very old — they went back only to 1923 — but one could sense how, when missionaries had come back to Japan again after a gap of two and a half centuries; old strains could recur suddenly, like the sounds of something suppressed but capable of articulation. These poems were followed by a contrasting one, "Hiroshima: August, 1985". Mr. Thwaite said it was fatally easy for a foreigner to write something at Hiroshima; in his case, he was stirred to write, "We did not have to come, and yet we came. The things we saw were all the very same as we expected. We had seen them all." From this to a more cheerful poem, inspired by hearing the "yaki-imo" call while waiting at the Joshidaimae bus stop — "that sweet, pure cry".

This was followed by a final poem written at Joshidai in 1989, when he stayed for two nights in Reischauer House. He had admired Shūsaku Endō, and when they talked together it was in a mixture of English, French and Japanese. This had resulted in his being invited to come for three months on a grant. On his first night in Reischauer House something happened, which led to his writing "Cockroach Story". Prefacing it with a quotation from Leon Wieseltier in the Times Literary Supplement, "The reason for a cockroach in a story must differ from the reason for a cockroach in a kitchen", he tells of his confrontation with a cockroach, which he sloshed with a slipper. His conclusion, written in rhyme, was "A cockroach in a kitchen is the truth. A cockroach in a story may be lies. The insect was both noble and uncouth. The writer makes a life from mysteries." That same year, Mr. Thwaite stayed with a sake brewer in Aizu Wakamatsu (there he had trouble, pressing the wrong button on a super-modern toilet and releasing floods of water; his hostess went into paroxysms of laughter when he turned to her for help). He went to see the potters in the neighbouring village of Hongo, which led to his writing "Potter". He saw a potter taking clay, throwing it, spinning it round and making four pots; then he collapsed them all again into a shapeless lump of clay.

At this stage he was approached by a publisher to produce the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. ("You've lived in China — you can write a book of Chinese verse." — "But it's Japan I've been in, not China." — "OK. Make it Japanese verse.") He collaborated with Geoffrey Bownas, who would send him literal translations of poems from the Man'yōshū and the like, for him to turn into poetry, which would require repeated attempts until Bownas was satisfied. He crystallized this experience into a little poem, "After the Japanese", the theme of which was that one did not think about old age until it came.

Mr. Thwaite's final major contribution was a monologue on Natsume Sōseki, which he wrote in 1982-83. The theme of this is Sōseki's two miserable years in London, partly taken from his recorded experiences, and partly from the poet's imagination. Following this, he concluded with a short "Simple Poem".

After this presentation, Mr. Thwaite responded to a barrage of questions. In answer to the question "Did you have trouble finding the right poetic language to describe Japan?" he said that each period he had spent in Japan had stimulated him to produce different work. In the 1950s he had arrived knowing nothing and had taken on the "instant views" that were then available. In the 1980s in particular, he had been stimulated to produce an unusual amount of poetry, not all of it directly to do with Japan. By way of light relief he then read a short poem, written in 1989, that consisted entirely of gairaigo — foreign words used as Japanese. He could not speak for 2005 because he and his wife were here for only three weeks and were already halfway through. He was "worn to a frazzle" and had no time to write poetry!

To a questioner who remarked that it was a treat to hear his voice reading his own poems, and asked if he thought of how a poem would sound when he was writing, he replied that he tends to mutter to himself when writing, and "hears" a poem in his head. He felt the sound of the poem was important (though he still had to hear a consensus from the Japanese as to whether sound or writing was more important; those Japanese who inclined to "sound" added that the most important thing in poetry was "the sound of the silences"!). The reading of their works by poets had improved of late. Philip Larkin was an excellent reader, though he never gave public readings and only made recordings, and Ted Hughes also read superbly, and was more public.

How had the foreigners' perceptions of Japanese, and the reverse, changed since the 1950s? For one thing, foreigners no longer had rarity value; in the 1950s, on a visit to Lake Nojiri, he had been by boat to a small village where the children had never set eyes on a foreigner and were wide-eyed.

The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Hisaaki Yamanouchi, Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, who was one of Mr. Thwaite's first students at that university, when he had taken up the newly created post of teaching English literature. Dr. Yamanouchi said Mr. Thwaite had been a tremendous source of inspiration and information, giving him pastoral care when, suffering from depressing post-War memories, he was a melancholy sheep wandering into the forest. It was that personal experience that guided him into his eventual career. Poets had to strike a balance between the inner world and the destructive outer world. In spite of his busy life, Mr. Thwaite had still found time to write poetry. Like our own Society, with its 133-year-old history, he had been an interface between cultures.