Paul Rossiter
LOCAL INGREDIENTS
WELCOME TO PANSY SATELLITE –
sign over a shoe shop in the
underground passage at Shinjuku station
red cardboard speech-bubbles
affixed to pert ankle boots say:
HOT ! ! !
– and so to L’AMBRE coffee shop
a plush and lofty-ceilinged basement
with triple-decker wrought-iron chandeliers
dangling from dusty metal chains
tobacco-smoke-yellowed stucco walls
rustic redbrick pillars, fake-marble tables
and low red-velvet-cushioned chairs
Beethoven plays from the speakers –
and here we are,
effortlessly transported back
to the late Showa Era
*
Karasuyama-gawa
a former semi-rural
watercourse, confined under concrete, now
a paved and shrub-lined
footpath snaking through the suburbs
an old man plods along it
a dinging bear-bell dangling from
his day-pack, memento
of long-gone days of Alpine derring-do
afternoon: to the dentist
root-canal work
two front teeth at the bottom are under threat:
will I be able to keep them?
(doubtful)
once upon a time I was ‘a young man’
now I’m ‘an older person’
*
at Someday in Shinjuku:
Takeuchi Nao’s nine-piece band
four seasoned players (tenor, trombone, baritone, drums)
the other five in their twenties, all
with idol-style mop haircuts
(the two trumpeters growing thin moustaches)
faultless reading (complex charts) and brimming-over solos
the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive gifting
(what I spotted as a teenager, listening to
Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes
in the basement at 39 Gerrard Street –
and it’s kept me hooked all these years)
I order a bottle of wine: Mo has to go out
to get one from the convenience store –
the economics of owning a live house:
his middle names Precarity and Jazz
*
whenever I walk
through the underground passage between
the two subway stations at Shinjuku San-chome
as I do on my way home tonight
(the route we took together evening and morning)
I remember Alison, it happens every time
the young Ali, 1981
(especially tonight I remember her now anew:
last year, so suddenly, leukaemia)
*
to the hospital in Ogikubo to see Dr Nishino,
set an appointment for the annual post-cancer check, get
the ECG, blood test, and X-ray done,
the hospital staff as always
unfailingly cheerful and friendly
a saintly profession
walking back to the station
Tokyo winter sunlight on my face
glinting, brilliant, clear
*
Fuji-san looms when seen from
the platform at Kyodo station
this evening especially, silhouetted against
an orange sky
a horizontal band of cloud
edged with sunset fire encroaching on one flank
*
a flawless violet evening sky
bathes the Meiji-era
red brick façade of Tokyo Station in light
across the street
shining glass towers float high above
five-storey early-Showa buildings of cut stone
inside whose emptied shells the
bases of the skyscrapers have been inserted
pass through glass doors into one of these
then up the escalator to the Cotton Club
where everything narrows down to a small pool of light
containing Marcin Wasilewski
playing ‘Night Train to You’ –
touch, definite and delicate
strong and, at once, gentle –
the way, when he
completes an intricately
serpentine
phrase in the
treble, he suddenly
raises his right elbow high
*
a beautiful February spring-like day
train to Yokohama
where I get lost in the enormous station (as I always do)
lunch with Bill Elliott
he’s writing a lot, his swan-song he calls it (he’s 87)
train to Kamakura, narrow-gauge to Hase
such handsome houses in Kamakura
even the ones with plastic façades
look as if they might have been designed
rather than put together from a kit
(or some of them do, anyway)
crowds of tourists at the great Buddha
(the road from the station
more up-market than it used to be, I notice)
up a steep path at the back of the temple
a peaceful sunlit
walk through trees once I get my breath back
narrow-gauge home along the shore
late-afternoon sunlight on the
inward-rolling, long-fetch, deep-blue, silky Pacific swell
*
Kobe
to meet Maya’s mother at
the hospital where her father goes for day care
a short walk after lunch while
mother and daughter talk some more
downhill to a cemetery, where
I perch on a boulder in the sunshine –
which side of the world is ‘other’?
a satisfaction, a kind of peace
in actually being here in a place
I never imagined I would visit
that I didn’t know existed
and which I’ll never come back to
at the hospital
we wheelchair Maya’s father to the café for tea
most of what he says
incomprehensible because of the stroke
but he wolfs down a waffle with evident pleasure
father and daughter are delighted to see each other
Maya has brought him a bag of books
*
in Takamatsu
dinner in a restaurant
where Isamu Noguchi used to be a regular
richly coloured, grainy wooden tables
modernist curves, planes and angles
Noguchi lampshades (originals) – small
suspended sculptures of thick
white hand-made paper
a restaurant catering for
fans of Modernism (like us) or
(white shirt, sedge hat, walking staff)
pilgrims visiting the eighty-eight temples of Shikoku
the cook uses only local ingredients
*
in the morning, the route from
the station to the Noguchi Museum
passes across the site of the Battle of Yashima (1185)
a naval encounter although
now it’s all reclaimed land
a roadside plaque tells us that
right here, on this piece of pot-holed tarmac,
Nasu no Yoichi rode his horse into the sea and shot
a lady’s fan off a pole on a Heike ship
(‘one of the most famous archery feats in Japanese history’)
Noguchi, though, came here to Mure
for the stone – and it’s easy to see why: dense,
compact, evenly granular, capable
of being polished to a perfectly smooth finish
atelier, sculpture garden (unfinished works)
exhibition space (finished works), house, garden
landscaped hillside with a view over the Inland Sea
a town inhabited by sculptors and stone-cutters:
some manufacture granite statuettes of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
a few try their hand at Noguchi-style abstracts, but
the local speciality is gravestones
*
a sunny Tuesday in Tokyo
cat Suzunari is outside, sniffing at things on the balcony
strong warm winds from the south
the dreamy Japanese spring
Paul Rossiter was born in Cornwall, England in 1947 and has lived in Japan since 1981; in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in English-language poetry from Japan, whether written by Anglophone poets who live in Japan or by Japanese poets who choose to write in English. His own most recent books of poetry are Temporary Measures (2017), and On Arrival (2019). More information about Isobar Press can be found at: https://isobarpress.com.
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LOCAL INGREDIENTS
WELCOME TO PANSY SATELLITE –
sign over a shoe shop in the
underground passage at Shinjuku station
red cardboard speech-bubbles
affixed to pert ankle boots say:
HOT ! ! !
– and so to L’AMBRE coffee shop
a plush and lofty-ceilinged basement
with triple-decker wrought-iron chandeliers
dangling from dusty metal chains
tobacco-smoke-yellowed stucco walls
rustic redbrick pillars, fake-marble tables
and low red-velvet-cushioned chairs
Beethoven plays from the speakers –
and here we are,
effortlessly transported back
to the late Showa Era
*
Karasuyama-gawa
a former semi-rural
watercourse, confined under concrete, now
a paved and shrub-lined
footpath snaking through the suburbs
an old man plods along it
a dinging bear-bell dangling from
his day-pack, memento
of long-gone days of Alpine derring-do
afternoon: to the dentist
root-canal work
two front teeth at the bottom are under threat:
will I be able to keep them?
(doubtful)
once upon a time I was ‘a young man’
now I’m ‘an older person’
*
at Someday in Shinjuku:
Takeuchi Nao’s nine-piece band
four seasoned players (tenor, trombone, baritone, drums)
the other five in their twenties, all
with idol-style mop haircuts
(the two trumpeters growing thin moustaches)
faultless reading (complex charts) and brimming-over solos
the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive gifting
(what I spotted as a teenager, listening to
Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes
in the basement at 39 Gerrard Street –
and it’s kept me hooked all these years)
I order a bottle of wine: Mo has to go out
to get one from the convenience store –
the economics of owning a live house:
his middle names Precarity and Jazz
*
whenever I walk
through the underground passage between
the two subway stations at Shinjuku San-chome
as I do on my way home tonight
(the route we took together evening and morning)
I remember Alison, it happens every time
the young Ali, 1981
(especially tonight I remember her now anew:
last year, so suddenly, leukaemia)
*
to the hospital in Ogikubo to see Dr Nishino,
set an appointment for the annual post-cancer check, get
the ECG, blood test, and X-ray done,
the hospital staff as always
unfailingly cheerful and friendly
a saintly profession
walking back to the station
Tokyo winter sunlight on my face
glinting, brilliant, clear
*
Fuji-san looms when seen from
the platform at Kyodo station
this evening especially, silhouetted against
an orange sky
a horizontal band of cloud
edged with sunset fire encroaching on one flank
*
a flawless violet evening sky
bathes the Meiji-era
red brick façade of Tokyo Station in light
across the street
shining glass towers float high above
five-storey early-Showa buildings of cut stone
inside whose emptied shells the
bases of the skyscrapers have been inserted
pass through glass doors into one of these
then up the escalator to the Cotton Club
where everything narrows down to a small pool of light
containing Marcin Wasilewski
playing ‘Night Train to You’ –
touch, definite and delicate
strong and, at once, gentle –
the way, when he
completes an intricately
serpentine
phrase in the
treble, he suddenly
raises his right elbow high
*
a beautiful February spring-like day
train to Yokohama
where I get lost in the enormous station (as I always do)
lunch with Bill Elliott
he’s writing a lot, his swan-song he calls it (he’s 87)
train to Kamakura, narrow-gauge to Hase
such handsome houses in Kamakura
even the ones with plastic façades
look as if they might have been designed
rather than put together from a kit
(or some of them do, anyway)
crowds of tourists at the great Buddha
(the road from the station
more up-market than it used to be, I notice)
up a steep path at the back of the temple
a peaceful sunlit
walk through trees once I get my breath back
narrow-gauge home along the shore
late-afternoon sunlight on the
inward-rolling, long-fetch, deep-blue, silky Pacific swell
*
Kobe
to meet Maya’s mother at
the hospital where her father goes for day care
a short walk after lunch while
mother and daughter talk some more
downhill to a cemetery, where
I perch on a boulder in the sunshine –
odd to be sitting quietly in a graveyard with none of whose inhabitants I have any connection, here on the other side of the world – although that of course begs the question: |
a satisfaction, a kind of peace
in actually being here in a place
I never imagined I would visit
that I didn’t know existed
and which I’ll never come back to
at the hospital
we wheelchair Maya’s father to the café for tea
most of what he says
incomprehensible because of the stroke
but he wolfs down a waffle with evident pleasure
father and daughter are delighted to see each other
Maya has brought him a bag of books
*
in Takamatsu
dinner in a restaurant
where Isamu Noguchi used to be a regular
richly coloured, grainy wooden tables
modernist curves, planes and angles
Noguchi lampshades (originals) – small
suspended sculptures of thick
white hand-made paper
a restaurant catering for
fans of Modernism (like us) or
(white shirt, sedge hat, walking staff)
pilgrims visiting the eighty-eight temples of Shikoku
the cook uses only local ingredients
*
in the morning, the route from
the station to the Noguchi Museum
passes across the site of the Battle of Yashima (1185)
a naval encounter although
now it’s all reclaimed land
a roadside plaque tells us that
right here, on this piece of pot-holed tarmac,
Nasu no Yoichi rode his horse into the sea and shot
a lady’s fan off a pole on a Heike ship
(‘one of the most famous archery feats in Japanese history’)
Noguchi, though, came here to Mure
for the stone – and it’s easy to see why: dense,
compact, evenly granular, capable
of being polished to a perfectly smooth finish
atelier, sculpture garden (unfinished works)
exhibition space (finished works), house, garden
landscaped hillside with a view over the Inland Sea
a town inhabited by sculptors and stone-cutters:
some manufacture granite statuettes of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
a few try their hand at Noguchi-style abstracts, but
the local speciality is gravestones
*
a sunny Tuesday in Tokyo
cat Suzunari is outside, sniffing at things on the balcony
strong warm winds from the south
the dreamy Japanese spring
Paul Rossiter was born in Cornwall, England in 1947 and has lived in Japan since 1981; in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in English-language poetry from Japan, whether written by Anglophone poets who live in Japan or by Japanese poets who choose to write in English. His own most recent books of poetry are Temporary Measures (2017), and On Arrival (2019). More information about Isobar Press can be found at: https://isobarpress.com.
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