Gingko

Forrest Gander

Shibuya

The view from here of Empress Shoken’s garden reveals the fuschia’s adolescent comeliness. Tied to that mulberry tree, the angriest dog in the world strains all day against the chain. The Empress was famous for flaunting the imperfections of her curved nose by highlighting it with makeup and by always seeming to address others to their noses. As for your questions, while they symbolized eloquence, wealth, music and learning, the new stirp of dog she raised proved too large and vicious for the typical Japanese home, and this one is the last of its kind. At Koyasan, the Empress commissioned a lifelike sculpture and ordered a new bib tied to its throat every day. This gave rise to gossip, not true incidentally, that her dogs were thanatophagus. Empress Shoken was known to be a gracious hostess and to visiting dignitaries she often made gifts of paintings which, like a form of divination, she created by dipping live pond snails into brilliant colors, then letting them crawl away from the center of the canvas. The remaining collection is of national regard. Watch your head please. Visitors come each June to view the extensive tulip gardens and the lily pond on these grounds. There are so many it is common for every tenth group member to carry a flag bearing a particular tulip color so that no one is lost when tours intersect. In her thirties, when the Empress became obsessed with aging, she began to maintain scrupulously a visceral calendar. For instance, here is a date and the notation “New mole, 2:15 a.m.” You will learn more about her writing when you visit the Willow Room where I hope you will notice the dragonfly on the ceiling, work of reputed artist Tohaku Hasegawa. At the pond notice ghostfish luminous as yellow plums. And thick-bodied diamond-scaled carp which wag upward to stare at tourists and open their mouths, as if incredulous, so the surface stertorously rushes in. They have whiskers long and fleshy as noodles and often they swarm the shallows composing loud sucking arias. You can distinguish Japanese from Kyoto who will all be staring enchanted at the small turtle. Please have a good time if we don’t see you.

Ryonji

An aesthetic of perimeters emerges: the shoji screen slides open and disappears, migrating cranes. The rocks perform their heuristics in freshly tamed gravel; borrowed scenery looking on, and over the oiled earthen wall. Her conversation drifts laterally.

If I entered here, my heels would not break off their monologue with the stage. So would present love be displaced by longing.

Silk

The worms are kept far from the house, their chewing is so intense. Like a June rainstorm. Through which, across the Kamo River, concatenate empty passenger trains smooth themselves across the night landscape carrying green light.

On this same thin paper I wrote you a letter in your hand. Odd, conveying someone’s image so far from its source, to let it loose in places you have never seen. Putting it mildly. Inside her sleeves. Instead of a bra, she wears small wafers over each nipple to keep them from arousing through the sheer kimono.

Across the earth, you are sleeping.

Six Changes in the Imagination

He is not programmed to women,
she told me, he is programmed to pornography.

Did the minor gods consider themselves so.

Most buisnessmen
do not like the sculpture, but have come
to identify with the space around it.

Danmari—in Kabuki, a wordless slow motion pantomime which takes place in total darkness through which the protagonists glissade from one scenic pose to another trying to gain possession of an object or letter. To the audience, their movements are invisible.

Onnagata, The Art of
Female Impersonation

                   These masks embody a denial
                   of all specific human qualities
                                     whereby
                         it is possible for them
   to express the vast range of human emotions

The stranger fans her scent to me.
I move my forearm
                                   as close as possible
to the shared armrest.

Clearly, a man’s thick facial wrinkles
behind the small white mask of the heroine,
                and his oversized hands
                                          floating from her sleeves.
       His sonority muffles at the chin’s inner cup,
and he turns without lifting his feet.

Between us the axis is
reconceived
as a means of access.

Figures of Travel

Corollary to the phenomenon of looking familiar to strangers: the language which escapes you in one country haunts you in another.

Lip reads uninterpretable speech for clues. Whether you are in her seat or fine where you are.

Cherry trees along the tracks adumbrate platforms.

Their soporific half-closed eyes of lizards.

Clucking increases among those exiting the subway
through the long corridor
as the number of closed, dripping
umbrellas increases among those entering.

Too crowded to move I am fascinated
at the strangeness of a young man masturbating
against me.

The Silence in Another World

In Kamakura, away from the hill where the famous hollow Buddha exhales and inhales strings of tourists from the guarded back door to his gigantic inside, there is a wooded ascent lost in smoke sent twisting by disconnected women purifying their raiment and passing their hands through the drift from holy incense sticks they have just plunged into open altars of sand before they intend to climb further, with something shining in their arms, along the serpentine rock path and its adjacent brook which, interrupted by tiny waterfalls, is rimmed as the path is rimmed, by foot-high golden bodhisattvas extending over and punctuating every visible centimeter of slake and chine, thousands of bodhisattvas sitting naked in shadow or slashed with bright air, draped in cloth bibs bearing calligraphic prayers, or infant clothing, or strung with dried flowers and a pair of small shoes; a few propping cheap sienna reproductions of generic mother and child, crowding each other so seriously that no ground is apparent anywhere but for the dim path rising under thick branches where umbrella pines and cedars segue to larches at the fifth station, and everywhere else: bodhisattvas each placed by a woman whose child was stillborn, or aborted, or wounded fatally in birth, next to another left by another, and this for many years until every geography unjammed by tree thrusts has fallen occasion to the sculptured elegies, alike as newborns and repeated like a mantra, so to seem from a distance, in winter, a golden death cap pulled over the knob of a mountain, a cap woven as in a tale, from the wounds of women, strangers to each other but mourning the same dispossession, more women weeping than any dying emperor, or any man has known.

RINGS

To the audience his facial expressions would suggest a mood,
a shape, a movement particular to some bird, a color.

The tombstone, a triangular white pillar, was inscribed with
his name and an invitation, which had been accepted, to graffiti
the three flat surfaces.

A system of counting where each person is represented by one
clap.

“In the garden you will notice Island of Crane and Island of
Toad—no, Turtle!” (Embarrassed.)

tozan—mountain climbing
haikingu—hiking
hanami—cherry blossom viewing hiking
monijigari—maple mountain hiking
tsutsujigari—azalea viewing hiking

I can eat Japanese-style meals. I would like to each some local
dish. I can eat anything. Yes, I can eat it. No, I cannot eat
it.

The construction workers balancing their boxes of lunch on
the roof beam wear identical khaki, short-sleeved uniforms,
white gloves and black, cloven boots.