Everything is a poem, everything is a book
I have just finished 小さなおとこ、静かな声 (Small Man, Quiet Voice) by吉田篤弘 (Atsuhiro Yoshida), a charming, funny and disarming book. I will write about it in greater detail later, after I have let my thoughts marinate. For now, I will share one of my favorite episodes from this book.
This side story concerns Shin, the younger brother of Shizuka, one of the two main characters. Shin is a self-styled あかり屋(“light man”—this is not a real Japanese word so you can’t expect a smooth English translation!), and his catch phrase is “delivery of a single light”—not that his business is on any kind of scale that would justify a catch phrase, as Shin says himself. He barely makes enough money to pay his rent, heat and electricity, buy a little bit of food, and get a hair cut now and then, with enough left over to buy two or three books every month. (I love that books are included in his budget.) Sometimes he doesn’t make enough to buy the materials needed to make his lamps, and has to deliver newspapers on the side.
As his catch phrase says, Shin delivers “light” (really, lamps) all over Tokyo, making them from scratch once orders have been placed with his friend, Hakuei. Hakuei runs a used bookstore in the outskirts of Shimo-Kitazawa that only sells poems (needless to say, his business is as hand-to-mouth as Shin’s is). And yet, if you looked closely at the shelves, you would find books that certainly do not contain poems (in a strict sense)—a train timetable from the late 1950s, an illustrated reference book for tropical fruits, even an advertisement for luminous paint. Confronted with this, Hakuei insists that they are also poems. This is his own particular magic—he can convince you that a reference book or a train schedule is a poem (and indeed, surely I’m not the only one who thinks that the BBC’s Shipping Forecast is a prose poem of sorts?).
When Shin visited the store for the first time, he picked up a pamphlet entitled “Practical Guide to the Production of Desk Lamps”. He had thought this was simply a used bookstore, so he was taken aback when Hakuei told him it was a book of poems. Flipping through it, the pamphlet seemed to be no more than a manual on how to build desk lamps, and he thought Hakuei must be a little crazy. But when Shin read the manual at home under the light of his own desk lamp, no less, he felt that he might understand what Hakuei meant.
Following the guide, Shin made a desk lamp and brought it to show Hakuei, who was quite impressed, asserting, true to form, that this was also a poem. He insisted on buying it from Shin, and kept it on the desk at his bookstore. There was enough interest in the lamp from customers that Hakuei essentially became Shin’s middleman and printed up a small sign to put by the prototype lamp that read: “This is a desk lamp. As you can see, this is a modest lamp, ideal for those who devote their precious evening hours to reading. It is only 16 centimeters high and 8 centimeters wide. This small lamp uses a 30 watt bulb. It only has an on/off switch. There is no dimmer function, it does not come with an alarm clock, nor FM/AM radio. It does not have a calendar function, nor a timer, nor any automatic controls. There are no redundancies; it is simply a lamp. Orders accepted.”
Shin didn’t really understand Hakuei’s definition of a poem, but somehow, when he gazed at the light from his own desk lamp, it seemed soft, and witty, and fleeting, even lovable. Reporting this to Hakuei, Hakuei nodded and said, “Exactly, that’s what a poem is: soft, witty, fleeting and loveable. All the poems I like best are like that.” And looking over his shelves, he added, “But there are also poems that are hard, and full of life, and audacious, and provoking. Yes, and there are also poems that are inhuman, colorless, sharp and droll. But if I had to pick one type, I’d have to say that poems resembling desk lamps are the best.”
After Shin came back from delivering a lamp, he would make a red mark on a blank map he kept on his wall, gradually creating a constellation of sorts showing all the places to which he'd delivered his lamps. Gazing at this, and imagining all the 30 watt lamps spreading their quiet light all over Tokyo, Shin felt a modest satisfaction and contentment. He figured that, even if he wasn’t quite sure that his lamps were poems, he would keep making them for as long as he could.
Around the same time that I was reading this book, I came across a poem by Hiroshi Osada (1939-2015), who seems to have seen the world as Hakuei does.
I have translated it below, but you can follow along with the Japanese text as it is recited.
世界は一冊の本
長田弘
The World is a Single Book
By Hiroshi Osada
Read books!
Read more books!
Read more and more books!
Books are just words printed on a page –
Sunlight, the twinkling of a star, the chirp of a bird,
The murmur of the river, are all books.
The quiet of a beech grove,
The white flowers of a dogwood,
The imposing, solitary keyaki tree, are also books.
Everything is a book.
The world is an open book,
Written in words we cannot see.
Far-off cities in far-off countries
That are just dots on the map—
Urumchi, Messina, Timbuktu—are books.
The books of the people living there are cities.
The unfettered crowds are books.
Each light shining from a window at night is a book.
The quotes on the Chicago futures market are books.
The sand storms in the Nefud Desert are books.
The two closed eyes of the Mayan rain god are books.
You hold the book of your life in your heart.
Each person is a single book.
The expression on the face of an old person who has lost her memory is a book.
A meadow, clouds, the wind.
The gazelle and the gnu, dying in silence, are books.
Dignity without authority is the only kind that matters.
A tiny star within the span of 200 billion light years.
Being alive means being able to think—
Nothing more, nothing less.
Read books!
Read more books!
Read more and more books!