A Poet Stares Death in the Face

There’s a poet who lives in Kumamoto. For the sake of this book, let me call her Tasogare-san.

She had made a career of listening to the voices of the dead and incorporating them into her work. I read her for the first time soon after moving to Kumamoto, when my daughters were still nursing. I was used to Kumamoto dialect by then. She wrote in dialect, but still, there was something different about the way she used the language. It was like her voice had congealed directly on the page—I’d feel her voice go right through me, sinking into my flesh. In her poetry, the living and dead intermingled, you might think someone is alive but they’re dead, and people who ought to be dead are alive—meanwhile, everyone eats, sleeps, defecates, has children, falls sick, and the seasons go by.

Some time passed before we ever spoke on the phone. In the middle of our first conversation, she said something that surprised me. Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you look a lot like me.

I remembered her saying this when I visited her home, meeting her for the first time. She greeted me at the door with messy hair and a wild expression, as though she had just trapped and eaten a bloody little animal. She wasn’t young, but I still was. I thought we looked nothing alike at first, but later, catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror near her front door, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like she’d suddenly turned into a young woman. I gasped and stared. Did I have any relatives in Kumamoto? Could we be related? I knew we weren’t, but that’s how much alike we looked.

Over the next few years as I shuttled back and forth from Kumamoto to California and California to Kumamoto, always on the run, the poet and I made time to get together. There was something in her voice, language, face, and figure that brought back floods of feelings from the past. I was so charmed by her that I felt as giddy as a child. When I grew up, I wanted to be just like her.

I’d thought of death as the end of life so often, but it had never occurred to me that everyone who dies is experiencing it for the first time. There’s not a single soul alive who has died and knows how to do it just right. For that matter, no one’s ever died a bad death and lived to tell about it either. “I screwed up last time, but this time I’ll get it right” —nope, that’s not how it works.

Once upon a time, when I didn’t know things, I’d buy study guides with titles like The Idiot’s Guide to Basic Math or How to Read the Classics. When I got pregnant, I bought Pregnancy and Birth for First-Timers and Lamaze Technique for Dummies. I participated in workshops, learned about giving birth and breathing technique, I practiced breathing in and out—hee-whooo, hi-hi-whoooo—until I got it down. I studied how to be pregnant just as I’d always studied whenever I wanted to learn something.

First, I wanted to know how our bodies work.

Lamaze taught me that instead of using the term “labor pains,” we should say “contractions.” Pain is subjective, and willpower can help us to control it. We also shouldn’t close our eyes during contractions. You should stare pain directly in the face—if you don’t, the pain will be even stronger.

Okay, but what about death?

Is there some other, more objective word we can use to refer to it? What transformations take place in the body when someone dies? What do people feel at the critical moment?

Once your heart stops working properly, your body stops expelling liquid, and fluid builds up in your lungs, then breathing becomes difficult, and you experience shortness of breath, you feel pressure on your chest, you begin to experience fear, wondering if you’re dying, and you begin to pant—haa haa haa haa (Am I going to die?) haa haa haa haa (Am I going to die?) haa haa haa haa (Am I going to die?).

But at the moment of death, are you aware or not?

If you are, do you experience suffering?

What can you do to ease suffering?

Breathing techniques won’t work. To breathe that way, you need willpower, and people lack the mental capacity for that when their energy is draining away. So what else can you do?

Drugs, I suppose. But I didn’t know about them either. What kind of drugs are there? How do they ease the suffering? What side effects do they have?

Those are the kinds of things I wanted to know.

I started reading books about death from both East and West. I studied how people understood death, how they’ve talked about death.

One reason was because I wanted to talk with Tasogare-san about her own feelings about death. She’d been aging rapidly for several years and was suffering from severe Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. She’d become disabled, unable to stand on her own. I realize that saying this might invite misunderstanding—she wasn’t on death’s doorstep exactly. Things hadn’t gone that far, but given her illness and infirmity, I doubt a single moment went by when she wasn’t looking at the very real prospect of her own demise. In short, I wanted to talk about death with someone who was facing it straight on.

Honestly, I wished I could’ve talked about death with Mom and Dad. But I couldn’t. It was by trying to avoid looking at death square in the eye that Mom and Dad had survived so long. They avoided the subject, leaving them simply waiting, suspended in midair. I had the feeling that if I asked them about their real thoughts, they’d fall apart. That would be a terrible thing to do, cruel even.

So I decided to talk to Tasogare-san instead. She wouldn’t beat around the bush. For decades, she’d been communing with the dead, interacting with them through poetry. I also suspected I might be the only person she could really tell what death’s approach feels like—after all, we look alike, and I’m as persistent as she is. (Let me share a secret. Writing poetry is all about persistence, and nothing else.)

I devised a plan to talk with her. It might be hard, perhaps even embarrassing to have the conversation, but I wanted to speak frankly and hear her thoughts. Death, well, it’s like this . . . I can’t remember if it was toward the beginning of our conversations or the end, maybe even after we were all done, but at some point, she said something that really struck me: You’ll never know about death until you try it.

She emerged shakily from the darkness at the back of her house. The scene looked vaguely familiar, then I realized I was remembering how the main character in Ukai shuffled onto the stage. Her posture, movements, and expression all reflected her obvious illness, but there was something of her in them too. Her head was shaking as she entered the living room, sat down, and turned on the electric heater behind her chair to warm the room.

We started with small talk of course. Tell me about those clothes you’re wearing. You know that shop over there? What’s good there?

We began to home in on our main topic. I mentioned a story I’d read from the Edo period. A body was spotted in a canal, and when it floated to one side, the people there prayed that the deceased would be reborn as a buddha before pushing the body back into the water. When it reached the other side, the people there pulled it out of the water and examined it. I had been surprised at how different the attitudes were on opposite sides of the same river. The poet explained, it takes incredible strength to lift a drowned body, plus, it was dangerous to drag a body onto the shore—it might spread disease and kill people.

I asked her, Do you have a religion?

She responded, I don’t really belong to any religion, certainly none of the typical ones from Europe or Asia, none of the usual Japanese sects, but I do think there’s a life force in everything.

There are lots of Buddhist-like elements in your writing. Is that just a reflection of the beliefs where you were born and raised?

Yes, because Buddhism was what surrounded me.

You don’t really use the language of Shinto.

I didn’t have Shinto around me, so it didn’t influence me—it’s not that I dislike it, it’s just that I don’t have the language to talk about the world in Shinto terms.

What if you were born in a Christian environment?

In that case, my beliefs would probably be different. Christianity is monotheistic, so the down-to-earth kind of animism that I like so much wouldn’t have been there to influence me.

The belief that Amida Buddha will take you away into the Pure Land is almost like a kind of monotheism.

During the early 13th century, when Shinran was around, he wanted to get rid of all the animistic elements in Japanese Buddhism.

So animism is what’s really important to you, right? What’s at the root of animism?

Life, the poet answered. And when I say life, I’m including all the plants and trees, all the life that fills the natural world. Starting with little things like small crabs—baby crabs, I mean—and microbes, all the way up. You know when the tide is out and you stand on the shallow shores, you can hear tons and tons of teeny, tiny voices coming from all kinds of living things around you? That’s what I mean when I’m talking about life.

What do you feel toward them? Pity?

Pity? Harmony? I’m not sure what to say, but I feel like I’m just one of many small pieces of life. In one of his poems, Kenji Miyazawa says, “Body, scatter in the dust of the sky.”

Kenji practiced Nichiren Buddhism. That’s the kind of Buddhism your family practiced too, right?

Yeah, she nodded. But you know, I feel more like dust scattered on the seashore than dust scattered in the sky.

So what do death and dying mean to the dust itself?

Just becoming dust. Do the words “come back to life” appear anywhere in that poem? Does it say anything about what happens after scattering?

No, I told her. Kenji writes about cypress trees growing darker though.

I like the prospect of settling down and resting on a reed somewhere better than just scattering in the wind.

Is that what death means? Scattering? Finding a place to settle?

That’s right. In the grass, stirred by the wind.

T

hat brought us to the 12th-century collection Songs to Make the Dust Dance. I knew that we were both fond of it, and I’d been hoping we could share our favorite poems with one another. As she put her glasses back on, the poet said, oh look! Your version is printed in such big letters, much easier to read than mine—mine’s so small you need a magnifying glass. Bending over her tiny paperback edition, she cried, oh, look, look, here’s the one.

Passing through this fleeting world
as I labor on the sea and mountains,
I am shunned by many buddhas—
what will become of me in the next life?

When I was young and wanted to die, I felt like I was being shunned by ten thousand buddhas—all the enlightened beings in the world, in other words. As a kid I often stuck up for people and argued on their behalf, but when I won, I’d feel bad. I’d criticize myself, thinking, you’re such a know-it-all! My family were dedicated Buddhist practitioners. Every time something would happen, they’d start repeating Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu—All Praise to the Amida Buddha! So even when I was getting into arguments and doing something good, I was also misbehaving, acting like a brat. I did not yet understand what was meant by the old-fashioned expression “ten thousand buddhas” but I thought, if all the enlightened beings looked down at me, they’d think I was an awful human being. Winning made me feel like a jerk, and so I hated the entire world.

When you thought it, were you imagining just one buddha or many buddhas? What did they look like? Did you have an image of them in your mind?

It didn’t matter which direction you looked,
There might be a buddha there before your eyes,
I suppose I imagined there were lots of them,
Lots of people who looked like beggars came to our house,
So my mother repeated to me again and again,
People like that go everywhere, you’ve got to treat them well,
They might be reincarnations of the great priest Kukai,
She told us giving them alms was the children’s role,
She told us they’d hesitate to take from adults,
Most were Buddhist pilgrims, I suppose, but in any case,
We children would wrap money or rice in a lotus leaf,
Although I didn’t know how to see the buddhahood in them,
We were taught to bow, nice and polite,
Because even a beggar could be an enlightened buddha.

Interesting, I answered. How did they tell you to bow?

The poet changed her posture and said, we slid our hands down as far as our knees, and then pressed our palms together in front of us.

And with that, she pressed her hands together in front of her, as if in prayer.

Hands together as if in prayer. That was her answer.

Truly, this is the merit of coming and going.
Use it as the ability to help others.
Use it as the ability to help others.

I hadn’t understood this passage from the end of Ukai. The footnotes had said, “The meritorious work a monk or priest performs on his or her wanderings through the world helps others become enlightened buddhas by acting as an external guiding force.” Monks who passed by. Monks who passed through. I had thought receiving merit from Buddhist wanderers was something that didn’t actually happen in the real world. The poet was the first to explain it to me. She showed me that people, places, and things are always connected to one another. What was important in her story was not the monks or even the coming and going, but the belief that no matter where you looked, there might be a buddha before your eyes. That’s why it’s important to continually do good deeds wherever you are.

I promise, I’ll do them, I’ll do them, I told myself.

In the course of our conversation, the poet read this poem from the same collection.

Waking in the quiet at dawn,
I wonder, my tears welling:
having lived in this world of dreams,
will I ever reach the Pure Land?

The poet commented, it sounds as if the speaker thinks it will happen, as if there’s salvation even in the sadness of tears.

I wasn’t entirely sure I agreed. I asked, doesn’t that mean that the speaker might reach the Pure Land?

The “will I ever” sounds pretty hopeful, she said. “Will I” implies that it might happen.

I told her I’d read it more negatively. I’d thought it meant “I’ve lived such an irresponsible life until this point, how could I ever expect to reach the Pure Land?”

No, that’s not right. Imagine, for instance, missing your parents or your ex-husband. Maybe the poem is talking about losing someone to death and never seeing them again, I’m not sure, but in any case, it’s about being separated from your loved ones who will never return. Maybe you’ve lost a child, maybe destiny has dealt you a really bad hand. There’re all sorts of possibilities. The line “I wonder, my tears welling” contains all those feelings. The poem mentions dawn because that’s one of the chilliest moments of the day, right?

I nodded, it is.

The poet continued:

Spent in coldness and sadness,
My whole life has been fleeting like a dream,
Just as what lies before me, too, will soon be gone
I do not know whether I will become a buddha
Or whether a buddha will come to carry me away,
But all the sufferings of the present world will end,
And beyond that lies the Pure Land—
By thinking “will I ever reach the Pure Land?”
You may not be saved here and now,
But there is a path to salvation even so.

That led me to a request I’d wanted to make.

There’s a poem that you wrote in the form of a Buddhist sutra. When I read it, I felt like I got a sense of the world as you see it: there’s this thing called “death” that’s impossible to resist in the end, but there are more living things before us than dead things, there are tons of little living things all over the place, but the shadow of death always hangs over everything—that’s what I took from it. Since we’re here now, will you read the poem for me? Would that be that okay?

She laughed, my goodness, I’m sure you could do it just as well, you’re so good at reading. Still smiling, she started to recite the poem, which she’d written in classical Chinese. She had mentioned that long ago when she was young, she studied musical sutra recitation, so she’d set it to one of the melodies she remembered. Raised to the key of E, her voice stretched out, tough and thin, like mochi after a good firm pounding.

Infinitely extending in ten directions
Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of generations
Extending across incalculable measures of time
So exceedingly deep and subtle
In darkness without any light
The plants and flowers flow on and on
Blossoming far off in the distance—
In a world of darkness, devoid of light
An ocean of billions of lives not yet born

When she finished, she grew embarrassed and giggled. What an expression!

The old woman with whom I’d spent those three hours
Had inhabited a world separated by decades, perhaps even centuries from mine.
She spent so much time trapping animals in the mountains and in the sea,
Scraping words together with bloodied hands and speaking,
Before falling infirm and sitting right before me.
However, as we sat facing one another in her room,
Her smiling face was so innocent that I was transported
To long ago, when my grandmother, my aunts, my mother
Led me by the hand to pray to Lord Jizo.
Transported, I was transformed into the dust of space and time
And scattered to the winds before finally returning
To who I am now, here before you.
Up to this point, I have trapped animals in both mountains and sea,
Scraped words together with bloodied hands and spoken my mind,
And I will continue to do so from here on out.
One day, I too will grow old and infirm, and come here,
One step at a time, crossing a bridge to reach this side,
Where I too will sit with pen in trembling hand to sign my work.

Because of my Parkinson’s, my hand trembles so much that it’s hard to write.

How limiting, I said.

Yeah, it is. The poet said, there’s so much I want to write that it’s piled up neck high.

As she said this, she signed my book in her trembling hand:

To Shiromi, from Tasogare Yukiko, “She who goes into twilight,” late 2006.

Note from the Author

I borrowed voices from various poems in Songs to Make the Dust Dance, the Noh play Ukai (The Cormorant Fisher), Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s play The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Kosan Yanagiya’s classic rakugo tale The Row-House of Careless Folks, Rohan Koda’s novella Mystifying Tales, Kenji Miyazawa’s poetry collection Spring and Asura, personal communication from Michihiko Oikawa, Michiko Ishimure’s novel Cat’s Cradle, and the book of conversations Thinking Death, which I wrote together with Michiko Ishimure.

♦

Excerpted from the novel The Thorn Puller © 2007 Hiromi Ito; English translation © 2022 Jeffrey Angles; published under the Monkey fiction imprint at Stone Bridge Press.