In this episode of the Books on Asia Podcast, sponsored by Stone Bridge Press, we have guest interviewer Lisa Wilcut speaking with award-winning writer and translator Meredith McKinney. McKinney is translator of many Japanese classics such as Sei Shonagon’s 11th century classic The Pillow Book, and the 14th century Essays in Idleness, published together with Hōjōki. She has also translated Kusamakura and Kokoro (see our review) by Natsume Sōseki, one of Japan’s most celebrated modern writers. Today, she is going to talk about her long career and also about her just released book on the wandering poet Saigyō called Gazing at the Moon (Shambhala, September, 2021)

Books on Asia Podcast 16: Show Notes

I’m Lisa Wilcut, guest host for today’s show. I am delighted to welcome Meredith McKinney, an award-winning translator, who, I am sure, needs no introduction to anyone familiar with classical Japanese literature in English. Meredith has translated so many of the fundamental, bedrock standards of the classical Japanese canon, all the way from antiquity to modern literature. Her books include such gems as Sei Shonagon’s 11th century classic The Pillow Book, and the 14th century Essays in Idleness, which was published along with Hōjōki. She’s done Natsume Soseki’s Kusamakura and Kokoro, and the list goes on and on. We have several of her books up on the website, so please have a look.

Lisa: You know, your translations were mainstays on my bookshelves in grad school—I borrowed them non-stop from the library. And, now I have new copies my shelves, and in my Kindle, and I use some of them in my own teaching. And you and I have worked together on another project and we have exchanged so many emails, but this is the first time we’ve spoken in person. Meredith, thank you for joining us today.

Meredith: It’s wonderful to talk with you, Lisa. Thank you.

Lisa: So, I’ve heard that your first encounter with Japanese literature, or maybe I should say the first thing that piqued your interest in Japanese was a book of haiku. And then you went on eventually to translate quite a lot of Japanese poetry: haiku and tanka. So would you tell us something about that initial encounter? Was that love at first sight?

Meredith: Well, it’s so long ago that it’s really hard to kind of reconstruct the moment. But um, yeah, I guess I was in my mid teenage years when many, many young girls believe they might be poets, or are very inspired by poetry. And I was given by my mother, I think a book of haiku, by, translated by somebody called R. H. Blythe, who was perhaps the earliest, or among the earliest, people to translate haiku into English. And um, and when I look at this book now, I mean, it really is just so dated. It’s more a kind of an English romantic version of what haiku is than we had any real understanding of it. But, um, but it was, it was very moving for me. And it was an astonishing window into a whole little world that I had no idea about. So it sort of lodged in my mind as something that suggested Japanese literature might be interesting. And I guess that was somewhere behind my decision to study Japanese at university.

Lisa: Thank you so much for explaining that. So did that lead you to try your hand at translation, or was that something else?

Meredith: Well actually there was a huge gap between the 16 year old who read the haiku book and somebody in her, I guess, probably mid thirties, I was when I first began to try translating, well, maybe earlier. So I really didn’t have that experience conscious in my mind when I began to translate, although it’s become more and more relevant, the longer I’ve gone on actually. But, um, but the, the impulse to start actually translating was simply to learn to read better, because I was trying to teach myself, I guess, to really read Japanese literature properly. And in order to do that, trying to grasp just how the sentences were working. And it was sort of a natural instinct, I guess, to try putting things into English, just to see what I could do with what I was reading, really. So it sort of took off from there.

Lisa: You know, that’s fascinating. And I, I think maybe a lot of our listeners are probably also Japanese learners. I wonder if you may have just sparked a revolution in translation, translators out there. And so, and just looking over this, this amazingly wide range of things that you’ve done, I wonder if thinking about translation as this engagement with reading, is it that your translations have followed your interest as a reader?

Meredith: Yes, I think, um, well until I actually began to translate for publication, that was exactly how I was translating. And that was the wonderful thing about it. I was free to, you know, sort of smell my way along the trail that I was after. And find it in the process of putting it into my own words. So I think it’s, it’s a very different thing if you’re translating something that you’re told to translate, you know, you sort of come at it as a sort of an object, but for me, this was something that I wanted to get to know the way you want to get to know an exciting person. So it was always infused with, fascination and a passion to know more and, and a need to understand what was there rather than to kind of hone my skills on it. I think it’s very different if you study translation is an art. Now, I’m not sure how things would be, but in those days there just was no course in how to translate. So I really taught myself through the process of following my own reading, I guess.

Lisa: That is just so lovely. That is an amazing way to spend one’s life and work, work life. Everything you do is just being, up know, guided by, you know, what you’re interested in. And as you said, smelling your way, I love that expression. That that ties that really ties into a couple of things I wanted to ask. One is that you’ve translated, not only this broad range of works from haiku to essays to stories to novels. You’ve also translated, works from pretty much every period of Japanese history and literature. So first of all, that is just an amazing feat to master this ever-changing Japanese language and the, the orthography as it’s changed throughout all of the centuries. So, speaking of using translation as a, a way of learning. How did you learn classical Japanese in the many forms that I’m sure you’ve had to learn to read?

Meredith: Well, there again, it was a matter of feeling my way, I guess. Um, I actually began by being fascinated by modern contemporary Japanese literature. Poetry is my great love, so I began by trying to translate poetry, which is like throwing somebody into the depths of the ocean rather than a small swimming pool. So I kind of scrambled out of that pretty quick, but, um, but I just, I began to be more and more curious about where things had come from, I guess. So, I just began to want to go back. And while I was living in Japan, oh, over 20 years ago, now I had this chance to go to a dokushokai, which is this, this nice thing that people do in Japan, I guess they still do it, which is just a group of interested people sitting around and reading something together and discussing it, you know, week by week. And we read, um, Oku no hosomichi, you know, the great Bashō travel writing. The “narrow road to the deep north,” as it’s usually translated. And I didn’t know any classical Japanese, but I really did want to read that. And so in the process of doing that with these very kind friends, I began to just pick up a little bit of what was going on in classical Japanese and got more and more interested, and got myself a high school textbook that explained the rules and went through that. And the more I learned, the more fascinating it was, it was a whole new language, a new version of Japanese. So I just sort of sank back into it, really out of modern literature as a natural part of following my nose is what it came down to.

Lisa: You know, that’s such a lovely image of, of learning it with, with friends. Um, I, I totally get what you mean. I have sort of poked my nose, if we can continue with this nose metaphor into, um, into tanka. And I joined a tanka group that meets once a week, or we did before, you know, two years ago before COVID. And so, this image of being among friends, learning as you go, that’s, that’s beautiful.

Meredith: Yeah, it’s a wonderful thing that people do that in Japan so well. It’s just such a natural group thing to do, and it’s such a nice informal way to really learn and be with other people, learning and feel your way together. And it’s great. I mean, the tanka kai sounds a wonderful thing because that would really immerse you in the process of making tanka, I presume.

Lisa: Yes, absolutely. Now, you mentioned that in the reading group, you were working on Bashō’s work, his Oku no hosomichi. That’s something that seems to have, really stuck with you, shall we say, this genre of classical travel writing. . . . because now we see it in your more recent book, Travels with a Writing Brush, and that spans from the Man’yōshū to Bashō.

Meredith: Yeah, well, that was the kind of culmination of, um, something that began, I guess, 25, 30 years ago with this little dokushokai where we were reading the great Bashō work. Because from that I discovered that Bashō was deeply immersed in the poetry of somebody who’d lived 500 years earlier than him, which is Saigyō, the monk Saigyō. And I just became interested in Saigyō, and then from Bashō, I lept backwards into Saigyō as I began to read better. And then I just began to feel all these connections across immense waves of time, I guess, in Japan, but through, from Saigyō up to Bashō, which is a 500 year leap, which is pretty impressive. And then back from Saigyō to the earliest poetry, there’s such strong connections all the way through, back to the, Man’yōshū. So, you know, over the years, I guess I’ve just been feeling my way back down through all that and finding connections and the travel writing book,  , was sort of the final expression of everything I’d been feeling, I suppose, as I was working my way through the classics.

Lisa: So speaking of this, this trail, or this thread and working your way through things, can I, can I just take that and go back even further, just a little bit? I think it might’ve been the second work that you’ve published, the Tale of Saigyō. So, that was really something that you did quite early on. And then did Saigyō just sort of sit and simmer for a while, because he surfaced and now the things that have been published in the more recent years, he’s certainly there. We just mentioned Travels with a Writing Brush. He’s in Three Japanese Buddhist Monks: Saigyō and Kamo no Chōmei, and Yoshida Kenkō and then, now your latest, Gazing at the Moon. So can you tell us a little bit about your first encounter with Saigyō?

Meredith:  Yeah, well, actually the first encounter sprang directly out of doing this reading with the group, of the Bashō book, because as I say, Saigyō is everywhere through, you know, what Bashō was writing. He just esteemed him as his great master. And so, that piqued an interest, but I wasn’t quite sure where to go with it, except that I was just browsing, as you do, through a bookshop, in among little books of classical Japanese. And I just came across this thing called Saigyō monogatari, which I’d never heard of. And it was only kyu-hyaku en, 900 yen. So I thought, sure. I’ll buy that. Don’t know what this is, but it’s got Saigyō in it. And it was, again, it was that process of, I can’t really read this very well, so I’ll just put it into English as I go along and see if that can straighten it out for me. And in the process of doing that, I learned more about Saigyō, and, you know, I began to produce what I guess amounted to a rough translation, and it was a very beautiful little book.

So the more I, I read through it and worked back over the translation, the more I thought, hmm, this, actually would would turn into something quite nice to publish. And at that point I’d never published anything. I had no sense that I might be a translator in the technical sense of the word. It was just something I did, but I sent it along to, I think the University of Michigan, just to see, as a kind of a naive, Hey, I’ve got this, what do you think, gesture. And they said, yes, they’d publish it. So that was how that turned out to work. And from there, of course, having done all that work on, Saigyō, with his story, the monogatari, I just became so interested that when I came back to Australia a few years later, I began to do a, um, a doctorate study at the Australian National University specifically on Saigyō monogatari, on the Tale of Saigyō. So I really jumped in deep at that point with Saigyō. He became the kind of the companion of my life, I guess, after that.

Lisa: That’s marvelous. And I love that you’ve connected this, the initial image of jumping in deep with haiku, jumping in deep into the swimming pool and immediately climbing out. And now you’re willing to get back in, and deep.

Meredith: Yep, yep, continuity of metaphors.

Lisa: And let me jump to your latest publication for a moment, Gazing at the Moon. So these are collections of, of some of Saigyō’s poems, and the image, at the very beginning of the book, it’s this ink sketch of Saigyō putting on his sandals and the image itself is just so charming. And it also seems like a metaphor of this sort of trail that Saigyō has traveled through, through your life and work, and also through, uh, literature and he seems to have been very influential in so many poets that have followed in his footsteps, traveling and writing as they travel. Could you tell us about that image, first of all, and then I have plenty of other things to ask about Gazing at the Moon.

Meredith: Well, the image is, actually, something that I just came across on the internet. Because, of course, I mean, you know, Saigyō lived roughly a thousand years ago, so there would be no actual portrait of him. But when I was thinking of publishing this little book of his poems, I was just looking around for what images might be used, might, might be able to be used, to accompany the book. And I fell into this wonderful little, in fact, he did a series of Saigyō images, this Hakuin, who is a very famous 18th century Zen patriarch, wonderful, wonderful artist and writer and, oh, a wonderful person. And I had had no idea that he was interested in Saigyō, who of course was many, many centuries before him. But Saigyō is such a key figure for so many people. He wasn’t actually a Zen monk because Zen hadn’t arrived in Japan then. But he was taken up by the Zen world. And obviously for Hakuin he was immensely important. So Hakuin did the, this style of Zen painting zenga, which is wild, just pick up your brush and go for it. Great sort of swirl of ink and you know, just a few little tiny strokes and you’ve got a whole person there. He did that wonderful portrait. So I really wanted that. And I spent a long time trying to find where it was and get the permission to reproduce it, and so on. And I’m just so happy that it’s there because it’s, as you say, Lisa, so it’s a wonderful portrait.

Lisa: Yes. I’m so happy that it’s there and it’s just, it’s it’s charming. And as you said, it’s, it does have that energy, that, that you see in Zen calligraphy. So since we’re we’re audio, our listeners are not able to see it at the moment, can you describe what’s there? Are there some visual elements here that have some resonance, either in Saigyō’s poetry or just in sort of the vocabulary of, uh, of traditional Japanese poetry and, and what’s actually written there on, on the image.

Meredith: Ah, well, um, that’s a very good question because Hakuin’s calligraphy was extremely hard to interpret, but it turns out to be the beginning of one of the poems that I’ve translated in the book, which is useful. And the image is actually of Saigyō beneath a little, a little sort of, ah, a swirly brush stroke of a pine branch and that’s because Saigyō was famous for, for living under an old pine tree for oh, quite a long time, and writing a series of poems to the pine tree, especially when he had to leave, saying goodbye to the pine and saying how lonely he felt the pine would be and how lonely he was going to be without the pine.

Meredith: And, and so it kind of encapsulates this wonderful thing about Saigyō, which is that his, his depth of response to intimacy with nature, with the natural world is just everywhere through the poems. And that, that moment of departure, that moment of being on the road, which is just the essence, I guess, of the traveling monk and the homelessness, that’s essential for being a Buddhist monk in the world. It’s all captured in this and it’s just such a beautiful, tender little portrait, I guess, that it seemed perfect for it.

Lisa: Wow. Thank you. Now, I’m even more in love with that little sketch. So, you were just mentioning Saigyō’s connection with nature. And this might be a good place to ask about the appearance, not just in Saigyō’s work, but especially with Saigyō, about nature and impermanence, evanescence, and mono no aware. Because this brings to mind the famous image that’s associated with Saigyō, of the cherry blossoms, and death. Could you tell us about that aspect of Saigyō’s work, or in poetry in general, and the connection to his death poem? And then, what kind of influence has this on Saigyō’s reception in the world, and how it is that we think about him.

Meredith: Yeah, sure. Well, it’s called the death poem, although nobody really knows when he wrote it. He may have written it fairly early in his life. But he was obviously thinking about his own death when he wrote it. And I’ll read the poem to you and then I’ll just explain why it’s such a crucial thing for Saigyō’s story. I’ll read it in, in my translation, which I have to say is, is not an adequate translation, but, hey.

“I pray that I may die in spring beneath the blossoms under that second month’s full moon.”

So that’s a little tanka that he wrote anticipating, I guess what he would call an ideal death. Which is, to be in the midst of spring, under the, the blossoms, the flowering cherries and the second month’s full moon. This is in the old calendar. This is the, the full moon of spring. This is the full moon, that, that is above the blossoms. So, essentially what it is, is it’s saying, is this is the ultimate moment. It’s the moment when the moon is at its fullest. So, that sort of transcendency of the beautiful clarity of the moon and the moment when the blossoms are about to fall, because of course the cherry blossom is the ultimate symbol in a way of, of transiency and impermanence, great Buddhist teaching.

Meredith: And so he sort of identifies completely with the natural world and its its transience and sort of places what he hopes is the moment of his own transience and transcendence in a way deep into that landscape. So, what he asked for, in fact, legend says that he got, because he did indeed die, well officially, he died the day after, which is a bit unfortunate, but of course legend adjusted that and said that he died the day before. Which was the day of the actual full moon when the cherry blossoms were flowering. So his legend just took off after that. He became an almost saintly figure–he could anticipate his own death. And the other thing I didn’t mention about this particular day is that it’s considered to be the day that the Buddha died, traditionally. So of course that links in deeply in with the whole saintly tradition of, of Buddhist enlightenment and all that he stood for in a way. So from there, the moment of death became the moment when his legend began to live and it sort of walked off into the world.

Well, there was Bashō five centuries later inheriting all of that. And, and the process by which he walked off into the world is the Tale of Saigyō, (Saigyō monogatari). Which is what I did all my work on. And, it’s a fascinating thing because there are so many versions of it, but it was obviously a very potent tale in the middle ages and people wrote it in rewrote it and added to it and restructured it in terms that became more and more Buddhist. Um, so you know, it really kind of permeated, I guess, medieval literature and on down through Bashō, even today, I think, people know this poem as his most famous poem, as it sort of summarizes the, well, the legendary status that Saigyō has had in Japanese literature. So in every way, the whole Buddhist sort of feel behind it and the general sort of transcendent moment of it, it kind of encapsulates the whole Saigyō story, really.

Lisa: Wow, thank you. There are so many threads we could pick up within that. So I guess one may be just on the surface, this idea of dying under the cherry blossoms as being, if not literally under them, then just figuratively at the time of the blossoms. That seems to have permeated culture. I see it, just in, in so many, movies and dramas, when someone passes away, the funeral scenes of the family walking under the cherry trees is, I think it’s not a coincidence. I assume it’s, it’s connected here to this point, to Saigyō, and to this saintliness that has come out.

Meredith: Yes, I think that I didn’t ever put all that together, but, but that’s actually a very interesting observation. Yeah, I mean the cherry blossoms are really the symbol of transience of the passage of time, and the fact that things change and pass and die. So that actually, oh, began earlier than Saigyō, but Saigyō certainly, spoke that much more strongly than anybody had ever done before. So he sort of epitomizes, I guess, that whole sense of what cherry blossoms stand for in Japan. The hakanai kind of, you know, the moving, I guess that’s mono no aware, really. You know, the moving nature of that moment, the beauty and the ungraspable part of reality, really. So that’s cherry blossoms and that’s, that’s why they work so well. It’s a wonderful image, really.

Lisa: So speaking of, of these images from nature, and of just a short while ago, you mentioned, um, Bashō following in the footsteps of Saigyō. So, he, he did that through his poetry, but what about, literally? Maybe, can we talk about the traveling poet for a moment and Saigyō’s journeys. Now, did Bashō actually go and retrace some of the same routes and visit the same sites? And, is there a connection and continuity in the places and in the way they talk about them, for example.

Meredith: Yes. Yes, there absolutely is continuity. The “narrow road to the deep north,” the trip that Bashō did that he wrote his travel journal about, is in part visiting the old sites that Saigyō first trod 500 years earlier at a time when really going into that country was such, ah, such a remote and adventurous thing to do.
I mean, in Bashō’s day, it was, it was pretty adventurous and pretty remote, but back so much earlier, it was really, you know, it was going to the ends of the known earth, I guess. So this was Saigyō. He went twice, I think, up into the, the oku, the Tohoku area. And he wrote poetry about the places that he went to as indeed, that was what poets really did. I mean place was so central in the old tanka tradition. And, and so those places became, oh, well, it’s called in Japanese utamakura, which is places where, where a sort of a poetic spirit has begun to inhabit the place a bit, almost like a religious site, I guess, because people have written about it and visited it in the past and, and now new poets come. And then down the centuries, so many people went to those places and all knew of Saigyō’s poems. So it’s sort of got, got sort of buried into the landscape, deep, like a spirit, I suppose.

So, you know, Bashō, when he went to many of these places and some of the poems in Oku no hosomichi are specifically referring back to Saigyō’s presence there. And that’s part of what makes that work so deep is the resonances that go so deep down, the more you know, the more you feel those resonances. It’s really, I think Western, Western readers, miss just so much of classical Japanese literature, because you know, a single word can resonate with such depth in relation to that tradition. And that’s partly why I did Travels with a Writing Brush, really, because I wanted to show just where Bashō had come from and what he was working with and referring back to in his writing. So it all kind of winds together for me in that.

Lisa: There are just so many rich landscapes to explore–landscapes in so many senses of the word there. But, now speaking of, of landscapes, let me go back to Gazing at the Moon and ask you about how it came about, and––besides your history with Saigyō and all of the poetry. Tell us about your environment when you are actually putting this together. Why one more book on Saigyō, and what was going on in your life, the last two years have been really, uh, momentous for a lot of us. Can you talk about that process?

Meredith: Yeah, sure. Well, actually, as with so many things that one does, or I do anyway, it all just, is a matter of, of things coming together rather than of having a plan and putting it into action. And, I guess what was happening in Australia two years ago or, well, two, two summers ago here anyway, was, the end of a terrible drought and a huge bushfire, as we call a forest fire, which spread for, ah, it just spread and spread and spread unstoppably for six weeks or more. It just burned so much country. Um, and I think, I mean, the memory of that is still very, very strong and traumatic in Australia. Although there’ve been so many more terrible fires in, well, I guess in the western North American countries, you know Canada and America, and so on, since then that it may not be foremost in people’s minds, but it was, it was a very traumatic experience. And I live in a forest, a eucalyptus forest, which is very susceptible to fire. And one of the two big fires that started this whole thing started very close to me. So I had to leave. I couldn’t be in the house because it was just so dangerous. And I was basically living in the city with a friend for the six weeks that the fires were raging. And finally, the fire did arrive early, early last year. It arrived in the forest at the back of my house and burned right up to the house and took most of the forest out. And it was just, it was awful. It was horrible. And I was living kind of on some edge in every way, really, I guess, during that time.

And at that point, Penguin suggested, that this is completely coincidentally, suggested that they do a little book of the Three Japanese Buddhist Monks, taking some of the things that I’d already translated and adding a third. And they said, so who could the third be? Can you come up with anybody who might add to Kamo no Chōmei and Yoshida Kenkō, who I had already translated. And I said, well, you know, the other great Japanese Buddhist monk in literature is Saigyō. And they said, well, you know, we don’t want poetry, basically. Which is what almost all publishers say now, no poetry. So I thought, oh, well, okay, I’ll do something a bit different. So I found another little thing about Saigyō and put that in, but I’ve been sort of sparked in my interest, I guess, if you can excuse the fire metaphor. So while the fires raged, I just went nosing around Saigyō’s poems and, and I just began to kind of feel my way into how I might translate them. And this was a real revolution for me because I really have a great deal of difficulty with translating Japanese poems, classical poems, particularly. I’ve really tried not to do it, which is impossible, really, because as soon as you start translating classics, there’s poetry everywhere. But, it’s not something that I feel I can do, but I just began to sort of play with them in a rather free way and find my way towards doing something that might work in English at least. And I brought that back with me when I finally managed to come back to my burnt forest and my house, which thank God was standing and began to kind of work away at it a bit more consistently. And then three weeks after I arrived back, the first wave of COVID hit. And then we went into lockdown as in many places. Yeah. So at that point I was actually locked into my house, having just been locked out of it. So it was a real, it was a real spin around, the whole story, but this carried me through the lockdown nicely because this was the project that I was about to launch for myself anyway. And it freed me up because I had all this wonderful time suddenly, what else is there to do? You translate poetry? Right? So that’s––

Lisa: What else would you do?

Meredith: What else would you do, sure, that’s you know, who would do anything else? Really? Yeah. So that’s, that’s how Gazing at the Moon came into being, and, you know, with, with things that are really interesting to translate, you really don’t have any sense that it might ever be published. You just want to do it. And that was how I felt by doing this. But at the end, I thought, well, you know, Shambhala, they were kind enough to write to me some years ago and say, is there anything, you know, Buddhist that you could translate for us? And so I thought, well, maybe they might like this. And they came back and said, no poetry, which is what everyone says, but I persisted a bit because I thought, you know, there’s more to this than just a book of poems. There’s a whole story of Saigyō. And the poems are pretty approachable, really. So if I can just sort of dress it up as a little story of his, his life, his spiritual life, maybe that would be something they could accept and they did want it in the end, which is, you know, a wonderful thing. So they finally produced this little book out of something that I had had no idea what was going to happen. And it’s very pleasing to me that it’s worked out like that.

Lisa: That is such a beautiful example of, of serendipity, but, but going back to where you started with this and, and working on this during the fires and that Kamo no Chōmei was in there. That just seems so, so apropos of, you know, writing through all this disaster. So that is just a wonderful coincidence. And knowing that backstory is just amazing.

Meredith: Yes. Yes. Hōjōki is the ultimate book for our time, really, one way and another. Yeah.

Lisa: Indeed. And so there’s one more question about Gazing at the Moon. Um, and you mentioned putting it together as this, this sort of, this Buddhist collection of things. So did the poems come from one place, one work of Saigyō’s? Did you collect them from an assortment of places? How did you go about, um, selecting them? And the categories that the book is divided into is, was that you’re devising? How did you come up with this plan?

Meredith: Yeah, the categories where my devising, I was pretty familiar with Saigyō’s poetry because you know, I’d done my dissertation on it. So it was a matter of just sort of going back through some of the ones I remembered and I’d already translated long ago for the Tale of Saigyō book. And then, feeling my way through reading. There is one central collection of Saigyō’s poetry called Sankashū, which is, uh, now I think William LaFleur, was it, who translated that as, or no, maybe it was Burton. Anyway, it translated as Poems for a Mountain Home, and that contains his selection of his poetry that he made at the end of his life. And there’s no chronology to it. Nobody really knows. A few of them suggest when they were written, but most of it is simply put in there thematically. And so I decided to follow the idea of thematic collections, which is a very classical version of how to do an anthology of poetry, and kind of reconstruct the story of his life through the poems, by putting arbitrarily, really finding poems that seemed to slide into place through a series of themes beginning with his aspiration to leave the world as a young man and become a Buddhist monk. And then through his experience of reclusion, which was the central thing that I wanted to look at from my own point of view, because I was in lockdown. So, you know, reclusion was the theme of the moment.

And it was, uh, it was interesting because you know, his version of reclusion is a very positive version, and isolation and reclusion in the modern Western world are anything but positive. So this was a very good way of coming at the experience I was going through from a different point of view and feeling my way into what might be positive in there. So for me, that was a very important part of the book is the reclusion section, but then of course it leads on to, why was he reclusive? What was he trying to find? What was he trying to do through that? And that led into a little section I called Seeking, which is attempting to find his way towards, well, what should be perhaps not called, but is generally called Buddhist enlightenment. And, you know his sense of failure, his sense of groping towards it, his desire for it, his understanding of how impossible it was to achieve. And then occasional moments when he actually perhaps experienced something like that, which I call Finding as the next section. And then bringing that back to look at the world with Buddhist eyes in a way with, you know, the clarity of what he’d understood. That section I called Looking, which is a long section, of simply poetry about the world, poetry about what’s around him and to finally a little section called Awaiting Death, which takes us up to that final death poem. So it sort of fell into place in the process of structuring the poems around his life, I suppose, his spiritual life, anyway.

Lisa: Thank you for that explanation. That is a wonderful way of looking at at his life and, and poetry. It, it just seems, it’s very moving and, and, and knowing this, this process, ah makes the experience of maybe going through the book that much richer seeing how it unfold. So at the end of each show, we always ask our guests what their favorite books on Asia are. So what books have influenced you, or what is, is near and dear to your heart?

Meredith: Well, it’s a very difficult question because there are just so many out there and, you know and each generation has its own favorite books, I guess. And the books that I, I guess, I mean, I’ve read many, many that are, are wonderful books, and many of them are quite recent, but I would probably want to go back to books that were very powerful for me when I was living in Japan, in the seventies and eighties, which is kind of going back into the past, but then that’s what I tend to do. So one of the books that I think I would certainly choose is, well, actually, when I say one of, is anything by a writer called Donald Richie, who was just such a wonderful writer about Japan and a wonderful writer of English, I mean, he just is a wonderful writer. And I would kind of go between, oh gosh, he did so many things, but one of them is The Inland Sea, which is of course a great travel writing example, but the one that I really would like to, to suggest in this case, it’s something called Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese. And it was these lovely, intimate pen sketches of people he knew in Tokyo in the eighties. And it just, it encapsulates the pleasure of being in Japan and knowing Japanese people, as friends, as intimates, not as objects of study, which is what so many books had been writing about before, when Japanese people were the subject. So definitely Different People is one book that I would say I loved and I think should still be read by many, many people.

And, another one is something called the Roads to Sata, which is by Alan Booth, who was again, a wonderful writer, and one of the great travelers, I think. It’s a beautiful travel book of the course of a 2000-mile walk through Japan. And, it’s funny, it’s tender, it’s, very perceptive. It’s a beautiful piece of travel writing. And I think many, many people would probably envy the Japan that he saw when he was doing this back in the eighties. So that’s another one that I’ve always gone back and back to. I think it’s a wonderful little book.

And the final one, which is a difficult choice because there are so many kind of jostling for attention, but there’s another little book that I think many people might not know now, which is actually by a Japanese doctor called Junichi Saga, or Saga Junichi. Ah, and the book is titled Memories of Silk and Straw (Transl. Garry O. Evans). And he was a doctor in a little town in Japan, which was full of old people as these little towns or small villages still tend to be, I suspect. And he was so moved by the stories of all the old people who were coming to his clinic, that he began to do a kind of an oral history and interview them about their memories of childhood back at the turn of last century. And the, the result is just this wonderful book of very moving little portraits of what life had been. Which for me connects it right back down through oh, centuries of Japan, that moment that bridges between the old Japan and the new, and it’s, it’s again, it’s just a beautiful, uh, beautifully translated as well, book of real people and their real experiences. And it’s a book that I think everybody should be able to read again. And I don’t think it’s available much anymore, but Memories of Silk and Straw is, that that’s my last choice.

Lisa: Well, I guess it’s no surprise that you’ve mentioned two books on travel and that all of these, as you were just explaining there, they’ve got these threads that tie things together through, through place and through time. And that definitely seems to have been our theme today.
So, Meredith, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking with me.

Meredith: That was an absolute pleasure, Lisa. Thank you.

The Books on Asia Podcast is sponsored by Stone Bridge Press, publisher of fine books on Asia for over 30 years. Subscribe to the Books on Asia Podcast.

About the Interviewer:

Lisa Wilcut is a writer, editor, translator, and educator based in Yokohama. She writes and edits works on Japanese culture for both scholarly and general audiences and teaches courses in Japanese society and culture as well as philosophy at the University of Maryland Global Campus in Yokosuka. She holds an MA in Japanese language and literature from Stanford University and an MA in philosophy from San Francisco State University. She also writes short fiction and poetry. Find her on LinkedIn.