Postscript: I Found a Witness
THE PRECEDING was published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement in July 1996, and was
the first public declaration of the pseudonymity of Araki Yasusada. A few weeks later, the
American Poetry Review published an issue with a special supplement featuring Yasusada.
APR, whose trademark is photos of the poets often larger than the poems themselves,
represented the witness poet with what appeared to be the blurred xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a
mug shot of some low-level yakuza.
The coincidence led to an article in Lingua Franca, a gossip magazine
for academics, in which an APR editor called the poems a “criminal act,” a proof
that they publish poets, not poems. This, in turn, led to one of those momentary media frenzies
that now routinely accompany any novelty: articles in the Wall Street Journal, the
Manchester Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Financial Times of
London; a front-page story in the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper; a conference
in Utrecht; symposia in the Boston Review, the Denver Quarterly, Stand in
England, and in various places on the Internet — all before the poems were published in book form.
The first order of speculation was, of course, whodunit. A poet I know called
me out of the blue — he had never called before — to ask point-blank if I was Yasusada; he had a
long list of entirely persuasive reasons. An editor at one of the magazines that had published the
poems thought it was her old boyfriend. Various names were raised and debated, with the likeliest
suspects being the primary purveyors of the Yasusada manuscripts: Javier Alvarez, a prominent
Mexican composer living in London, and Kent Johnson, an instructor at a community college in
Illinois and the editor of an anthology of American Buddhist poetry and one of contemporary Russian
poetry.
In response to the journalists, Alvarez and Johnson said the poems were the
work of one Tosa Motokiyu, who had been their roommate in Milwaukee in the 1970’s.
“Motokiyu” was, almost needless to say, also a pseudonym, and the person attached to that
name had recently died; Alvarez wrote a moving account of his last hours.
Meanwhile, in a further complication, the Russian critic Mikhail Epstein
rather brilliantly demonstrated that Yasusada could be the work of either of two well-known Russian
writers, Andrei Bitov and Dmitri Prigov, or a collaboration between them. Both have previously
invented authors — one of them Chinese, another Polish-Italian-Japanese — and both have
long-announced, mysteriously unpublished “Japanese” projects. Moreover, in true
conspiratologist fashion, Epstein located both writers at a conference in St. Petersburg with none
other than Kent Johnson.
[I should also say that, in 1995, before I wrote my article, I had been
unexpectedly contacted by someone claiming to be the Yasusada author. He or she had read an essay
on forgeries I had published in a Mexican art magazine, and thought I was someone who would
understand. Also enclosed was a correspondence with the novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who had
diplomatically suggested that the question of an invented Hiroshima poet was too delicate and
complex a matter to respond to without a great deal of thought.]
In the proliferating discussions, the identity of the author had become so
refracted that it approached the condition of We Are All Yasusada. Perhaps it is best to call
him/her/them the Yasusada Author, much as we refer to a Renaissance painter as the Master of the X
Altar.
The Yasusada debate rather predictably fell into the categories of politics,
literary politics, and theory. The political reading was based on the assumption that the author
was a white American male, and thus the poems were a cruel, racist, imperialist joke. This in turn
was based on the assumption that anyone who is not a white Euromale wants to speak only in an
“authentic” voice. It was inconceivable that the Yasusada Author could be a young woman
in Chiapas. (In the beginning of the century, there was a Japanese memoirist and novelist, Onoto
Watanna, who was a best-selling writer in the West; she turned out to be a half-Chinese Eurasian
who lived in Hong Kong.)
In the political debate, Edward Said’s Orientalism was inevitably
cited, much as mediæval discussions always deferred to the authority of Isidore of Seville. But, as
Said himself says in passing, his dissection of the Orientalism of the “Near” and
“Middle” East (those geographical dislocations) becomes less applicable as one goes
further East. Western scholars, poets, and philosophers never idealized Arab civilization as the
Source of Wisdom in the way that the Enlightenment imagined China or Romanticism India. When one
reaches 20th century Japan, a First World imperialist nation, Said’s book hardly applies at
all. The Yasusada Author, even if a white American male, is no more an agent of colonialism than a
Japanese country & western singer.
The literary-political response centered on two points, both true. One was
the current cult of celebrity that has expanded to engulf literature: we now like to have authors
attached to books, preferably attractive people or ones with sad lives (or best of all, both). The
other was the general ignorance and lack of interest in nearly all foreign poetry. Thus, it was
only Yasusada’s tragic life, not his poetry, that got him published in all the leading
magazines. And if the poetry seemed radical, it was only because few were familiar with 20th
century Japanese poetry. (In fact, for a far more complex reaction to the war, see Takamura
Kotaro’s A Brief History of Imbecility.)
Finally, the theory-minded raised the banners of those other Isidores of
Seville, Foucault and Barthes, to connect Yasusada to “the death of the author,” an
advertising campaign that was wildly successful in the academic market, but had limited appeal to
readers and writers. It was true that the Yasusada Author refused to step from behind the curtain
— at the opposite extreme from Joyce Carol Oates, who writes “pseudonymous” books that
are labeled, on the cover, “Joyce Carol Oates writing under the name of....” — but
pseudonymous authorship, even when fractured into heteronyms (Pessoa) still assigns production to a
single named source. True invisibility — the “text itself” — could easily be achieved
by publishing every book and every magazine contribution under a different name. Writers, as far as
one knows, have never practiced it; if one were that egoless, one wouldn’t be a writer.
Yasusada had appeared at a moment when the Eng. Dept. had split into two
contradictory “post-modernisms”: multiculturalism and deconstruction (and its spin-offs).
One side wanted to hear the stories that hadn’t been told, and the other doubted that stories
could be told; one side promoted authenticity, and the other inauthenticity. The former embraced
Yasusada and then violently rejected him when his identity became questionable — the precise
moment when the latter embraced him.
Finally, for all the talk of Orientalism and “Japonoiserie,” no one
has discussed Yasusada as the latest chapter in the American invention of Japanese poetry. The
Yasusada poems are very much written in the style, not of Japanese poetry, but of American
translations of Japanese poetry, including some witty intentional infelicities and bits of
translationese. Moreover, they could only have been written in recent years, for they owe a great
deal to the work of Hiroaki Sato.
Sato, the most prolific contemporary translator of classical and modern
Japanese poetry has, since the 1970’s, vigorously promoted the idea of translating haiku and
tanka (and by extension, renga) as single English sentences without line breaks — the way the
poems are written out in Japanese. Sato’s work has been widely and unjustly reviled by the
academics, but it is precisely Sato’s form of presentation — not necessarily the Japanese
poems themselves — that were clearly determining for the Yasusada Author. (Some have mistakenly
attributed the Yasusada line to Ron Silliman’s so-called “new sentence,” which is
comparable but not the origin.)
Yasusada, regardless of authorship, is very much an American Japanese poet: a
product of the specifically American tradition of translating Japanese poetry. (It is stylistically
highly unlikely that the Author is Russian or Spanish or French.) While it is true that the initial
reception was due largely to the biography — and in that sense the work was exploitative of the
publishing climate and the poems a “hoax” — the creation of the work is clearly an act
of empathy and compassion. The Yasusada Author has merely taken the invention of a first-person
narrator of a novel one step further: along with speaking, thinking, seeing, feeling, this
fictional character now writes. In many ways, the work is far more interesting, full of brilliant
details, after one knows that Yasusada is an invention. He is both the greatest poet of Hiroshima
and its most unreliable witness.
— Eliot Weinberger, New York, 1997
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