The Shino Suite by Ronald Tanaka (review)

138 Western American Literature sake and for his own sake — and it is only the child who can say, at a baseball game, “I’m glad we came.” The last story here, “Song on Royal Street,” is not only on the ambiguity of memory, on what really happened in the marriage, but on the ambiguity of “family.” The divorced wife, having the last word, says of their child, “He isn’t even yours.” And truly the boy isn’t the man’s child, not now. The seven final poems are deeply moving both in subject matter and in the expression of that matter, an expression most serious and yet often playful, punning, a defense against pain. The speaker is ill, and it is his life that he holds to, turns over, loves and hates. In “Subtraction,” the voice says, “To reduce generalization, think of yourself as minuend. / The result is negative.” Or, speaking of the first onslaught of his illness, he stands, after hospital and pain, on the basketball court and says, “This is the court where the verdict came down, / a lawful seizure, a sentence like a blow to the head.” And in the last lines of the last poem, “Homecoming,” hand in hand with his lover, he looks out the window: “After the scanning, CAT scan and radium, the arterioscan / ... I And beyond Ballard, the end of the earth, / miles out on the black of Puget Sound, / two boats, no more lost than all the planets, / bear their small lights outward, to the sea.” But one can return to “Subtraction” which closes with “Only the broken self / becomes a self." This is Blessing’s achieve­ ment. L. L. LEE, Western Washington University The Shino Suite. Sansei Poetry by Ronald Tanaka. (Greenfield Center, NY: The Greenfield Review Press, 1981. 118 pages, $5.95.) Dear Tanaka: You’re 39, Sansei (third generation Japanese in America); I’m 57, Nisei (second generation Japanese in America). You were born in a WW 2 intern­ ment camp in Arizona. I graduated high school in one. Heart Mt., Wyoming. Like you, I’m a poetry lover. You will find few lovers of poetry among Nisei, which is odd because most Nisei are bilingual, and being bilingual, I believe, disposes to language sensitivity. It has in my case, I know. Related to this is the work of a Japanese scientist who found that Japanese and Polynesians process the spoken word in the right hemisphere of the brain. An anomaly. Like everyone else, they process the written word in the left hemisphere. The norm is both spoken and written words processed in the left hemisphere. This researcher found also that bilingual Japanese, like Nisei, tended to process the spoken word in the right hemisphere, but that monolinguals, like most Sansei, were after the norm and processed both spoken and written language in the left hemisphere. I believe the left hemisphere is concerned with linearities, the right hemisphere with simultaneities. I think this anomaly does much to explain the very sensual quality of the Japanese language. For instance, the strong onomatopoeic element of the language. Altogether, the language Reviews 139 sounds nature well. It would seem the Japanese “interior monolog” must have this slant also, for do we not hear the “interior monolog”? I think the Nisei took in a lot of this with their mother’s milk. Mother cooings. Then in passing, let me remind you of the strength of the linear side of the Japanese mind. Super linear. It is what makes Japanese good at school. According to recent research, the post WW 2 generation of Japanese has an I.Q. 6 to 10 points higher than that of any other techno-industrial people. I think with the Meiji the Japanese mind was taken over by its linear side, and that this led to the total yang-out of WW 2. Now, in reaction, though still strongly linear, the Japanese mind wants more yin, it appears, the better to computer­ ize all of the information contained in the onomatopoeic, if it is good business. All this bears on why more Nisei didn’t go into English poetry. Remember, the main part of the Japanese migration...