Wild Grass upon a Riverbank: Transformational Narratives by "the Poet who goes into a Trance"

17 september 2006 The narrator, a young girl, moves back and forth between a ‘wasteland’ which reminds us of California and a ‘riverbank’ which resembles Kumamoto in the South of Japan. The author, a former resident of Kumamoto, became familiar with and so fascinated by native American oral poetry in Japanese translation that she immediately brushed up on her English and, in 1990, paid a visit to a researcher of native American poetry in California. After dividing her time between the two places, Ito finally emigrated from Kumamoto to California in 1997.

Wild Grass upon a Riverbank incorporates and reflects Ito’s background by using words like ‘moves’, ‘translation’, ‘oral tradition’ and ‘emigration’. We could actually paraphrase these words by using the prefix, ‘trans-’ and sum up that Ito transports (‘moves’) herself and her narratives from one place to another (‘emigration’), reads and writes through ‘translations’, and aims for transmission of the heritage (‘oral tradition’). Her experiences of these various ‘trans-’ings have been transfigured and transplanted into this poem as fictional accounts. Such ‘trans-’ motifs will be the markers in our cartographic examination of this mysterious and complex text.

Before we begin to consider some key ‘trans-’ elements in this poem, let me make a meaningful digression to add that Ito used to be known also as “the poet who goes into a trance”. Noro and Saniwa, published in 1991, demonstrated her ‘Noro’ (Okinawa shaman)-like capability to go beyond the border of this world to the other world. Her trances were then assisted by the co-author of the book, Chizuko Ueno, but now 15 years later, in Wild Grass upon a Riverbank, Ito seems to have become a mature poet who can travel freely back and forth between reality and the trance state at will, having established a passage between the two worlds.

Now back to ‘trans-’ings. In the first place, Wild Grass upon a Riverbank is a poem for all those who have been ‘transplanted’. “The man who lives on the riverbank”, one of the characters who appears in the second half of the poem, talks about himself and a plant that originally came from a foreign country:

Vasey’s Grass is originally from South America
It came to this region around the time I was born
We grew up together, here on the riverbank, always together
But we haven’t got used to this place
Neither Vases’s Grass nor I
not used to this climate, to the landscape, to the language, to the local accents, to getting along with and talking to people. Every morning as we wake up, both Vasey’s Grass and I are doomed to find that we are in a foreign place again. . . .

In an essay titled ‘Monsoon Garden’, Ito compares herself to a naturalized plant: “Seven years or so after moving to California, I realized that I would not be able to go back to Japan any more. The realization drove me to learn everything about plants. . . . I learned their species, their genuses, their habitats. Then I touched the earth, touched their leaves and watered each of them, then they started to grow.” Ito seems to have succeeded in transplanting her own life, like that of a naturalized plant.

Wild Grass upon a Riverbank is set on the symbolic stage of a riverbank and is filled with metaphoric use of plants. It includes versions of various tales and songs which she created over the past 15 years and which continue to transform themselves through a series of retellings and recitings. The plentiful seeds that were planted in her preceding novels, essays and poems have finally come into bud. Prototypes for transformations can be found in Oume whose narrator takes a walk on a damp ‘riverbank’; in Ito’s 1993 masterpiece I am Anjuhimeko from which Mother’s recitaion is quoted; in the use of Neil Young’s lyrics Out on the Weekend, which Ito translated into Japanese in her essay collection Love Song; in Buddhist tales from medieval Japan in I am Anjuhimeko and Kazoku Art (Family Art). These are just a few examples from the long list of her prototypical products which have gone through various transformational processes, sprouting new buds and leaves each time. At the end of this long poem awaits yet another surprising transformation: ‘Father’ who must have died long time ago in the ‘wasteland’ is still alive and as he transforms himself into a thousand-year-old tree, he talks to the children:

Where is Mother? Is she not with you?
. . . . .
Don’t worry, she’ll manage. If she can't make it here,
we will emigrate to that riverbank with our passports intact.
It’s gonna be great this year,
Look, after this rain,
We can bear as many children as we want.

Ito sees the life of plants as ‘transfiguration’. She wrote in Midori no Obasan (Mrs Green-Thumb) that for plant life, “to die” is “not to die” and that “to die”, “to be born”, “to live” and “to reproduce” are fundamentally different from what we, human beings, know. Transfiguration is the “plant’s karma”. Thus the crumbling family in Wild Grass upon a Riverbank regenerates by transfiguring itself into botanical lifeforms. As if to answer the call from ‘Father’ who has transfigured into an old tree, ‘I’ “squatted down in the middle of the wasteland spreading my limbs in a radial pattern” and:

I stretched my stalk
A bud shot out at the tip of the stalk
grew bigger
and rounder
when it opened
it sucked in everything
the stalk kept on growing
from which bud after bud sprouted
swelled
opened and withered
withered red
I stretched my stalk with blossoming flowers and withering flowers
stretched it all the way
blown by the wind
I looked up
the sky was not blue
it was full of clouds, clouds passing by
and they flickered here and there

This is how Ito closes her long poem, which we could see as a story of the transfiguration of ‘I’ from a human-being to a plant. The ‘I’ who was born on the ‘riverbank’ moves back and forth between the ‘wasteland’ and the ‘riverbank’ until she finally takes root in the ‘wasteland’ as a naturalized plant. Although it is debatable whether she was influenced by Ovid, her story is interestingly akin to his Metamorphoses. Amongst others, the two short segments entitled ‘On the riverbank’ in Wild Grass upon a Riverbank reveal that Ito is a poet who quintessentially shares the same poetic roots as this Roman poet, the very roots shared by wandering minstrels in medieval Japan and also by T.S. Eliot, who wrote his rather cerebral yet powerfully mythopoeic The Waste Land based on the plant regeneration myth. These roots might be shared by Neil Young and Joni Mitchel, too.

The very last ‘trans-’ word to describe Ito would be transmission. She is an omnivorous poet who can transmit and transform a variety of literary legacies: tales, poems and songs that have been passed down over the centuries. What she has tried to achieve in the Japanese language is similar to what contemporary and influential poets like Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott have done – hone the voices in their own poems by retelling such classics as Homer and Dante. We, Ito's readers, are witnessing the advent of a new poetic language that modern Japanese has never seen, an enchanting fruit that “the poet who goes into a trance” has delivered through her transformational ventures.