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‘The Answer Man’ by Z.T. Burian »
Yakumo tatsu
Eight clouds rise The poem above is said to be the first poem ever written in Japan. It was composed long before the age of Men, by the deity Susano-o-no-mikoto upon arriving in the province of Izumo. My translation leans toward the literal, but in fact the poem contains many layers of meaning. The number eight, for instance, was used in old Japanese in the same way one might use “a dozen” or “hundreds” in English. It also signifies the eight cardinal directions and thus implies something which is all-encompassing. So Susano-o — after having been banished from Heaven and overcoming many perils, including an encounter with an eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent so large it spanned eight hills and eight valleys — came at last to the land of Izumo. There the clouds rose to greet him and they surrounded him and his wife, Kushi-inada-hime, as if to lay for them the foundation of their new home. The scene inspired him to utter the poem, and in doing so, he created a new form of art. * * * Susano-o is not the only one to have been so touched by the beauty of Izumo. When the writer Lafcadio Hearn decided to become a Japanese citizen in 1895, he chose the name Yakumo — the first word of that first poem — in honor of the place he most loved. Though he was originally a foreigner to Japan, few outside the country have ever heard of Lafcadio Hearn. Born in the Ionian islands to a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish father, Hearn didn’t come to Japan until he was forty years old. However, even before he arrived, he felt Japan was his true home. He once remarked that he had been born Japanese but had appeared in the wrong place by mistake. In the spring of 1890, on a commission from Harper’s Magazine, he came to Japan, where he would spend the rest of his life. It was a turbulent time. Less than thirty years prior, the Meiji period — that headlong race toward Westernization — had begun; the seeds which would soon give rise to the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars had already been sown. Hearn observed the nation on the cusp between tradition and modernity, peace and wartime. His are some of the most valuable first-hand accounts available to us from that era. But Hearn was interested not so much in politics as he was in the daily lives of the people and the scenery around him. Especially he was intrigued by stories of a fantastic nature — by fairy tales, ghost stories, and exotic superstitions. He collected them obsessively, translated them, and preserved them for us in books such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Stange Things. If we did not have Hearn, it is likely many of those stories would have been forever lost. The name of this magazine therefore pays homage to him. And while we’re at it, let’s put in a good word for Susano-o, too — for without him and his invention, perhaps there would be no literary magazines. I hope you enjoy this first season of Eight Clouds and will come back again to see what the next season brings. *
Jude Coulter-Pultz This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010. |