Writing Fukushima #4 Iitate Village: A New Site of Poetry

Autumn in the air —

such love for a mother in

that poem, sun warmed

(mi ni shimu ya hahakoi no ku ni hi no sashite)

※mi ni shimu: The feeling, as autumn deepens, of the season's coolness permeating one's body.

The morning after Basho and his apprentice Sora left Sukagawa and stayed at an inn in Fukushima, they went to see the famous Mojizuri Ishi, or Dyeing Rock. A poem pillow (utamakura*) in the village of Shinobu, the rock was the inspiration for many poems of love.

Far north

in Shinobu

they dye with a rock

and leaves — such crazy

hues — who dyed me crazy

with love, this dying?

It was not me!

(michinoku no shinobu mojizuri tare yue ni midaresomenishi ware naranaku ni)

By Minamoto Toru

Minamoto Toru, an inspector general sent from Kyoto, then the capital, had an affair with Torajo, a rich man's daughter, but the time came for him to leave his post and return to the capital. Believing they would meet again, Torajo prayed for a hundred days at the Mojizuri Kannon shrine, but no tidings came. At the peak of her despair, she happened to look at the Dyeing Rock, and saw the face of her beloved Toru reflected there. Just then, the riddling poem above arrived from Kyoto. The phrase "Shinobu mojizuri" (translated as "Shinobu....leaves") refers to a method of dyeing silk which involved laying it on a speckled stone taken from the Abukuma River and then rubbing shinobu-gusa, forget-me-not grass, over it. Shinobu was the village known for this special randomly dyed silk. When Basho visited the Shinobu Dyeing Rock, which had originally been on top of the hill, it had been thrown down into the valley and was turned over, so that its speckled surface faced the earth. The village children explained that their elders had thrown it down there because they were angry that sightseers tramped through their fields on their way to try their hand at dyeing on the famous rock.

At Mojizuri (Mochizuri) Kannon, we visited the Dyeing Rock. A huge, moss-covered boulder, it must be about two or three meters in diameter. It is also called the Kagami Ishi, or Mirror Rock. As the oral legend of Torajo spread, the villagers must have come to see if the face of their own beloveds would be reflected there too. One can quite imagine how one might see a face in a randomly dappled surface. The fervent wish to meet painted the face of their beloved one on the rock.

After visiting the thousand year old poem pillow, I visited Iitate Village, whose inhabitants had to flee en masse after the nuclear accident. In July of last year, the village, which had been wholly classified as a Deliberate evacuation zone, was reclassified part by part to Zone preparing to lift the evacuation directive, Habitation-restricted zone, or Difficult-to-return zone, depending on how much radiation remained. Ten years ago Iitate Village, which had chosen "Love" as the guiding concept in building up its image, asked people to submit haiku on the topic of "Love" and using local granite erected over 250 poem stones in the Ainosawa area (Ainosawa is a homonym for Lake of Love). I was involved as the selector and I remember how it felt reading those poems about family, lovers, and the dead. Touched by summer breezes and with the chirping of birds and the rustle of the trees in my ears, one forgot the everyday hustle and bustle and was able to recover some of the vital things that we have almost lost. Now almost no one comes to visit this park of poetry.

Mother is a hundred

years old — getting scolded by

her, warms me up

(hyakusai no haha ni shikarare atatakashi)

The room — just as it

was when she was there —

her rattan recliner

(arishi hi no heya sono mama ni tōneisu)

From the haiku stones on "Love" at Iitate Village

The day when I attended the unveiling ceremony of tha haiku stones with Mayor Norio Kanno, Mitsugoro Bando, and Akemi Masuda came back like a dream. Now it was late autumn at Ainosawa and too quiet to remember love.

As poem pillows have endured throughout all the natural disasters and changes in the world, I persist in believing that in the same way Iitate Village will someday achieve a full recovery and with it become a new poem pillow, carrying on the ancient poetic tradition.

* utamakura

"Generally, a place that had inspired poetry and was believed to be still capable of inspiring new poems." (Donald Keene, "Seeds in the Heart")

Haiku and text: Madoka Mayuzumi

Translation: Janine Beichman

Photo credit: Fukushima-Minpo Co., Ltd.

First publication: 12 November 2013, Fukushima-Minpo Newspaper

Photo caption: Ainosawa, Iitate Village