Article
Excerpts from '12 Questions to Masayo Koike - an interview through e-mail exchanges', conducted by Kenji Yamada
Interview with Masayo Koike
March 04, 2007
Kenji Yamada: Tell us about your most recent work.
Masayo Koike: My newest publication is a book about books titled A Star that Fell to the Bottom of a Well . . . In this book I include a fiction: the story of a woman who throws away books into the sea, the story of a woman who no longer writes or reads. The sea is what I would like to continue writing about. For the past several years, I have been going to the seaside when summer comes. Fierce sunlight and undulating waves make me feel ravaged, which pleases my senses. When one goes to the mountains to escape the heat, one does not get dirty. Mountains are where one goes to hide, where one can write, protected. They are so totally unlike the sea. In the sea, I am stripped bare, mauled, and reduced to a miniscule being. It is physical, yet spiritual. Baked in the sun, rolled in the sand, my ugly, no longer young flesh is disclosed. That releases me. A thought, “This is it, from now on,” has come to me. (Do you understand what I mean?) The sea is a huge force that energizes me into reaction. This book is filled with anti-bookish energy. It has turned out to be so, although I did not plan to make it that way.
KY: Will you expand on “release” and “reaction” in relation to the sea in your mind?
MK: The sea gives me a tactile sense of something that is connected to me. It is something like my inner being turned inside out. As I sit on the shore, I can face the sea somewhat objectively, but the waves are relentless, eating away the shoreline. Before they eat me away, I must make myself an offering to the sea. Those who go to the sea in summer are all offerings, asking the sea to swallow them. That is a hair-raising act. To float a small self in a larger self. I love to gaze out to sea, holding onto a swimming ring. The waves come at me, rising. With tremendous energy. That is really scary. The water actually ravages me, swallows me and makes me vanish. After vanishing, I come back, afloat like a bubble, and vanish again. A release, and then a tense rising again. That rhythm. That rhythm, I believe, is something we all have in ourselves. To remind me of that, I go to the sea.
KY: What has been consistent, and what has changed from your earlier work to the present?
MK: I have always desired to come to grips with the essence of what I am facing, without any excess, and to abstract it. Change is a matter of course as we live our lives, so I do not pay particular attention to it. Looking back, I find that changes and events in my personal life at times happened to coincide with turning points in my work. Change is, in essence, a totality of the time I have lived in, and its expression – writing – is merely a small visible portion of that totality.
KY: Do you ever “collaborate with your own past”, such as discovering something new in your earlier work as you re-read it, or does earlier work, in turn, lead you to new work?
MK: For me, to write is to drive my physical self into writing. My current self is always collaborating with my past self, or my cumulative self, from the day I was born through each and every day I have lived. And as I write, I am in the alternating current between these two selves. The amplitude is constantly changing and modulating, as ‘now’ is ever-shifting. Isn’t it the case that in an act of writing, this type of collaboration with one’s own (past) self is taking place? But, once a piece of work is complete, I do not go into a process where I might re-read the completed work to find some new meaning there, which might lead me to write something else. I really do not re-read my work. I want to move on with change. I cannot see what form the future will take, so you might say I am also collaborating with what I cannot see, my future.
KY: The images ‘water’, ‘tree’, ‘light’ and ‘wind’ often appear in your poetry. Currently which do you think is most important, and would you tell us why?
MK: Those images have organic interrelations, so I cannot name just one.
KY: Your recent work – Life Exposed by Light, Voices Crossing the Earth and The Star that Fell to the Bottom of a Well – seems to focus on light, wind and water respectively. Even though all the images are interrelated, are you not conscious of what one might call a center of gravity, the point to which forces gravitate?
MK: I can see your point. It is hard to see clearly one’s own central truth, to which one gravitates. I honestly don’t know what it is. I was not conscious of it.
KY: Would you name poets, authors, artists who have impressed, inspired, and affected you so far, and how they did so?
MK: Harue Koga, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Balthus. And I cannot forget a painting called ‘A Woman and the Sea’ by Felix Vallotton. I wrote about it in my Warming Eggs under Dark Clouds. I don’t know much about any of these painters. I was simply drawn to their paintings or etchings.
KY: I only know Vallotton as a painter who did an imaginary portrait of Lautreamont, but it seems to me that your essays discourse with the paintings themselves at a deeper level. Do you think your work is affected by paintings, because they are ‘silent’? Or are you hearing something in the ‘silence’?
MK: I suppose so. Recently I came across the word ‘synaesthesia’ and found it very interesting. I occasionally do ‘hear’ a picture, and ‘see’ a sound. I don’t get bored, standing in front of a painting for a long time, because other senses besides my sense of sight are stimulated. Probably each of us has an individual manner of perception. When I write poetry or essays, my synaesthesia is handy in some ways. Because I can simply report what I sense, as a whole, as it is, in the form it takes. Of course to present it ‘as it is’ takes skill, and it is hard work. But with resolve, concentration and persistent focus, I find it captivating to write that way. I sometimes feel a desire for food, looking at certain colors. When something appeals to my senses, I desire to have a physical relationship with it. Again, I do not think this is just me. My personal feeling is that when I cannot satisfy my desire to get to the subject just through the sense of sight, the desire spills over to other senses such as the sense of touch or sense of hearing, but I may be off the mark. When I see certain sorts of colors, I also feel like licking them or eating them. A violent sunset is the first on the list of colors I would love to lick. When I see young spring leaves or autumn foliage, I resign myself to accepting the impossibility of reproducing them. I desire to munch on them to take them into my physical being. Dangerous, isn’t it?
KY: When and how do you write poetry?
MK: When I write a poem, I always write it in one breath, in a flash. I do edit it somewhat later on, but words slide out of me like a rosary. I have never written a poem by following a conscious methodology. I’m not sure doing that would be pleasing to me. I write poetry as if spitting out a lump of something, and I feel catharsis by doing so.
KY: Do you consciously set yourself up to write poetry? Or does poetry suddenly come to you? Or both?
MK: In terms of waiting, I don’t particularly consciously wait for it. Everything associated with living my life is a kind of waiting. In the course of it, if I think to myself, “Oh, I’ll try to write about that,” I will type in the first line. To be truthful, I wouldn’t know at this point whether it is going to be a novel or a poem yet. But as the second and third lines come out, I know if the piece is bound to be a poem. As the poem starts sliding out of me, I feel a unique pleasure that is quite unlike the feeling I would have when writing stories or essays. Prose forces me to return to the first line. It has some strangely compelling force, or reflective energy. But once poetry begins to flow, it simply does not look back until it comes to an end.
Reprinted from ‘Bessatsu Shi no Hakken’, March 2007, by courtesy of Kenji Yamada
Kenji Yamada: Tell us about your most recent work.
Masayo Koike: My newest publication is a book about books titled A Star that Fell to the Bottom of a Well . . . In this book I include a fiction: the story of a woman who throws away books into the sea, the story of a woman who no longer writes or reads. The sea is what I would like to continue writing about. For the past several years, I have been going to the seaside when summer comes. Fierce sunlight and undulating waves make me feel ravaged, which pleases my senses. When one goes to the mountains to escape the heat, one does not get dirty. Mountains are where one goes to hide, where one can write, protected. They are so totally unlike the sea. In the sea, I am stripped bare, mauled, and reduced to a miniscule being. It is physical, yet spiritual. Baked in the sun, rolled in the sand, my ugly, no longer young flesh is disclosed. That releases me. A thought, “This is it, from now on,” has come to me. (Do you understand what I mean?) The sea is a huge force that energizes me into reaction. This book is filled with anti-bookish energy. It has turned out to be so, although I did not plan to make it that way.
MK: The sea gives me a tactile sense of something that is connected to me. It is something like my inner being turned inside out. As I sit on the shore, I can face the sea somewhat objectively, but the waves are relentless, eating away the shoreline. Before they eat me away, I must make myself an offering to the sea. Those who go to the sea in summer are all offerings, asking the sea to swallow them. That is a hair-raising act. To float a small self in a larger self. I love to gaze out to sea, holding onto a swimming ring. The waves come at me, rising. With tremendous energy. That is really scary. The water actually ravages me, swallows me and makes me vanish. After vanishing, I come back, afloat like a bubble, and vanish again. A release, and then a tense rising again. That rhythm. That rhythm, I believe, is something we all have in ourselves. To remind me of that, I go to the sea.
KY: What has been consistent, and what has changed from your earlier work to the present?
MK: I have always desired to come to grips with the essence of what I am facing, without any excess, and to abstract it. Change is a matter of course as we live our lives, so I do not pay particular attention to it. Looking back, I find that changes and events in my personal life at times happened to coincide with turning points in my work. Change is, in essence, a totality of the time I have lived in, and its expression – writing – is merely a small visible portion of that totality.
KY: Do you ever “collaborate with your own past”, such as discovering something new in your earlier work as you re-read it, or does earlier work, in turn, lead you to new work?
MK: For me, to write is to drive my physical self into writing. My current self is always collaborating with my past self, or my cumulative self, from the day I was born through each and every day I have lived. And as I write, I am in the alternating current between these two selves. The amplitude is constantly changing and modulating, as ‘now’ is ever-shifting. Isn’t it the case that in an act of writing, this type of collaboration with one’s own (past) self is taking place? But, once a piece of work is complete, I do not go into a process where I might re-read the completed work to find some new meaning there, which might lead me to write something else. I really do not re-read my work. I want to move on with change. I cannot see what form the future will take, so you might say I am also collaborating with what I cannot see, my future.
KY: The images ‘water’, ‘tree’, ‘light’ and ‘wind’ often appear in your poetry. Currently which do you think is most important, and would you tell us why?
MK: Those images have organic interrelations, so I cannot name just one.
KY: Your recent work – Life Exposed by Light, Voices Crossing the Earth and The Star that Fell to the Bottom of a Well – seems to focus on light, wind and water respectively. Even though all the images are interrelated, are you not conscious of what one might call a center of gravity, the point to which forces gravitate?
MK: I can see your point. It is hard to see clearly one’s own central truth, to which one gravitates. I honestly don’t know what it is. I was not conscious of it.
KY: Would you name poets, authors, artists who have impressed, inspired, and affected you so far, and how they did so?
MK: Harue Koga, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Balthus. And I cannot forget a painting called ‘A Woman and the Sea’ by Felix Vallotton. I wrote about it in my Warming Eggs under Dark Clouds. I don’t know much about any of these painters. I was simply drawn to their paintings or etchings.
KY: I only know Vallotton as a painter who did an imaginary portrait of Lautreamont, but it seems to me that your essays discourse with the paintings themselves at a deeper level. Do you think your work is affected by paintings, because they are ‘silent’? Or are you hearing something in the ‘silence’?
MK: I suppose so. Recently I came across the word ‘synaesthesia’ and found it very interesting. I occasionally do ‘hear’ a picture, and ‘see’ a sound. I don’t get bored, standing in front of a painting for a long time, because other senses besides my sense of sight are stimulated. Probably each of us has an individual manner of perception. When I write poetry or essays, my synaesthesia is handy in some ways. Because I can simply report what I sense, as a whole, as it is, in the form it takes. Of course to present it ‘as it is’ takes skill, and it is hard work. But with resolve, concentration and persistent focus, I find it captivating to write that way. I sometimes feel a desire for food, looking at certain colors. When something appeals to my senses, I desire to have a physical relationship with it. Again, I do not think this is just me. My personal feeling is that when I cannot satisfy my desire to get to the subject just through the sense of sight, the desire spills over to other senses such as the sense of touch or sense of hearing, but I may be off the mark. When I see certain sorts of colors, I also feel like licking them or eating them. A violent sunset is the first on the list of colors I would love to lick. When I see young spring leaves or autumn foliage, I resign myself to accepting the impossibility of reproducing them. I desire to munch on them to take them into my physical being. Dangerous, isn’t it?
KY: When and how do you write poetry?
MK: When I write a poem, I always write it in one breath, in a flash. I do edit it somewhat later on, but words slide out of me like a rosary. I have never written a poem by following a conscious methodology. I’m not sure doing that would be pleasing to me. I write poetry as if spitting out a lump of something, and I feel catharsis by doing so.
KY: Do you consciously set yourself up to write poetry? Or does poetry suddenly come to you? Or both?
MK: In terms of waiting, I don’t particularly consciously wait for it. Everything associated with living my life is a kind of waiting. In the course of it, if I think to myself, “Oh, I’ll try to write about that,” I will type in the first line. To be truthful, I wouldn’t know at this point whether it is going to be a novel or a poem yet. But as the second and third lines come out, I know if the piece is bound to be a poem. As the poem starts sliding out of me, I feel a unique pleasure that is quite unlike the feeling I would have when writing stories or essays. Prose forces me to return to the first line. It has some strangely compelling force, or reflective energy. But once poetry begins to flow, it simply does not look back until it comes to an end.
Reprinted from ‘Bessatsu Shi no Hakken’, March 2007, by courtesy of Kenji Yamada
© Kenji Yamada
Translator: Takako Lento
Source: Bessatsu Shi no Hakken, March 2007
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère