Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saiko (review)

Breeze Through Bamboo is a book of poems as refreshing as its title suggests. It takes us back to the poetry of Tokugawa Japan, which has its roots in classical Chinese kanshi. For women to be included in the rarefied circles of male poets writing in Chinese was unusual during the period—Ema Saiko and her peers Cho Koran and Hara Saikin were three of the exceptions. To find that Saiko was also free-spirited and independent is even more surprising.

Saiko differs from other women poets in early Japan because she wrote kanshi. Hiroaki Sato’s introduction to Saiko’s work provides a wonderfully detailed discussion of the historical background and technical aspects of kanshi, in addition to a fascinating personal account of Saiko’s life. Saiko might have found in kanshi the freedom to cover a wider range of subject matter than that afforded by tanka or haiku. Almost portraitlike, Saiko’s kanshi offer glimpses not of court life or entangled love affairs, but of the poet’s physical environment and artistic and spiritual development.

Saiko is a pen name derived from a line by the Chinese poet Tu Fu: “When the wind blows [the bamboo] is delicately fragrant.” Sato writes, “Because of this allusion, the name may figuratively refer to a ‘breeze soughing through bamboo,’ a name her teacher...suggested.” Having learned to write in Chinese as a child, she also became an excellent artist, often creating ink paintings of bamboo. As a woman who never married or bore children, Saiko devoted herself to her poetry and art. In her work she catalogued the daily rituals marking the passage of time, as well as the disruptions of those rituals, such as earthquakes or floods. The kanshi thus collected in Breeze Through Bamboo form a kind of daybook, an artist’s poetic diary. And because they were written in a “foreign” language, Saiko might have had a certain freedom—the distance to imagine outside of oneself and one’s culture.

Saiko paid homage to her literary antecedents in the following poem, which refers to a thirty-volume anthology of verse by over four hundred Chinese women poets:

Reading Ming-yüan Shih-kuei under a lamp

The hushed night deepening, I can’t take to my pillow: the lamp stirred, I quietly read the women’s words. Why is it that the talented are so unfortunate? Most are poems about empty beds, husbands missed.

No such laments exist in Saiko’s work. Many of her poems allude to her active literary life—reading, writing, studying, meeting with one of the many poetry groups she belonged to, and visiting Kyoto to see her poetry teacher, Rai San’yo, with whom she is thought to have been romantically involved.

Saiko’s poems are sensual and evocative, smelling of jasmine and incense, sounding of rain water and music, tasting of tea and sake. Suffused with resignation and wisdom, they possess lightness too. The poet often remarks that she composed a poem “just for fun” or that she “happened to write” a poem. Here is an example of such a work:

Solitary Living in Early Winter

This innermost room, with little to do, is adequate to commit my plain life to. Drink a bit, and forget my clothes are thin, an idea, and I let my brush run aslant. Wind at the eaves, and the maple sheds its leaves, on the wet stones chrysanthemums fade. All day with no guests visiting me, I’ve perused books, delighted to learn.

In Saiko’s poems, seasons change, blossoms fall, friends and teachers die, the body fails, but art remains as a refuge and an escape. In addition to finding refuge in art, Saiko also performed the duties of an ordinary woman, which included taking care of others.

Impromptu

Tending someone ill, I haven’t gone out for a hundred days. The new greens near the eaves have covered up...