Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Chronicle of Drifting
by Yuki Tanaka
Copper Canyon Press
July 2025, $17.00, 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1-55659-705-3
“I can’t invite anybody into my head as a result of it’s not snug,” the speaker in one of many sections of the “Chronicle of Drifting” prose poems says. He’s in a museum observing a hermit crab migrating from shell to shell. The speaker is a trainer who has simply been in a college assembly “about punctuation and the aesthetics of powerpoint.” It sounds ironic, and possibly it’s, however Yuki Tanaka has invited us all into his head on this magical assortment of writing, half prose, largely verse.
Divided into 4 sections, three of which begin with epigraphs from the eighth-century Manyoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, the poems all have the surreal high quality of a suspension of cause-effect and a fairy-tale environment through which mermaids exist and cats speak. The poem, “The Village of the Mermaids” begins:
My cat stated, “Your thick inexperienced gown tastes of salt,”
and licked a satin curtain
I’ve realized to take a seat nonetheless on a chair
in entrance of my home and bear in mind our dwelling,
the place I wore a necklace of sea-foam
some known as a stunning snare.
It’s a poem from the mermaid’s perspective. A person with a bowler hat that he ideas “like a magician,” tells the mermaids that “There’s a spell in each seashell.” All of it looks like a charmed folktale, however the underlying vibe is a type of dislocation or alienation.
Within the “Chronicle of Drifting” part, fifteen quick prose items which seem like the diary of a person who has moved to Tokyo from the provinces, the protagonist is all the time on the transfer, a traditional flâneur, noticing all the things round him. (“Transferring to Tokyo has modified my mindset—by no means cease, by no means wait. Within the mountains, I may stand within the rain, like a parsnip ready to be pulled up by the hair.”) “When I’m not strolling, I liquefy,” he writes.
The flâneur tells us, ”I’m studying a e book about 13 geisha ladies who boarded a steamer to America to attend the 1901 World’s Truthful in St. Louis, as a part of the Japanese exhibit.”
Certainly, the second part of Chronicle of Drifting comprises three poems – “Exhibition of Need,” “The Empire of Gentle,” “The Physique in Fragments” – which can be from the geishas’ perspective. It’s an odd expertise, the ladies displayed as freaks or sirens. “The Empire of Gentle” begins:
We’re requested to face on the pond. A sudden gentle
drowns us. 4 empty turtles full of flowers.
We use our our bodies to understand a overseas tongue.
Crimson-eyed fingers, porcelain pores and skin, darkish eyelashes
that by no means fall. Come, we are saying in unison, and so they come
as ants collect round a slowly loosening sugar dice.
Because the title counsel, the final drift of those poems displays a rootlessness, a restlessness. The epigraph to the fourth half comes from the traditional poet Sano No Chigami No Otome, who was a low-ranking feminine palace attendant and wrote love poems, reads: “You’ve got departed on a protracted street.” Tanaka’s multi-part poem from this part, “Discourse on Vanishing,” concludes with the road: “This isn’t the top of the damaged world.” And but, the world does seem like damaged and negotiating its brokenness is the problem.
Tanaka, who teaches literature at Hosei College in Tokyo, teases out the etymologies of Japanese phrases all through. “Two phrases for ‘coronary heart.’ Kokoro means coronary heart in an ethical, non secular sense,” he writes in one of many “Chronicles of Drifting” prose fragments, “it by no means refers back to the organ. Shinzo, it all the time does.” The geisha poem, “The Physique in Fragments,” likewise considers English and Japanese phrases, from the geisha’s perspective: mizu and matsu (“water” and “wait”), and marzipan, maze, meteor, marsh. It feels instructive, as if we had been in a classroom.
Maybe the poem “One Arm” greatest captures the general temper of this colledtion. It’s a poem that entails a indifferent arm. Not fairly like Gogol’s nostril, the arm speaks or has an impulse towards speech. It’s clearly disconnected from the entire. The poem ends with the introduction of a mysterious character absent from the seven previous stanzas:
The primary sentence: “I can let you might have
one in every of my arms for the night time.”
She tears her arm off
and locations it on my knee.
Equally, “Aubade” entails a grandfather’s kneecap used as a ingesting cup for sipping sake. A lady and her son detach the kneecap and wash it a stream. The poem ends:
Humorous he appears extra alive now,
this trembling bone beneath the chilly water.
Full of those curious photos of estrangement and separation, Yuki Tanaka’s Chronicle of Drifting, directly surreal and folkloric, charms the reader with a dreamlike urgency. As the ultimate poem within the assortment, “Proof of Nocturne,” concludes so eloquently:
This pile of wooden wished to be a stairway
however couldn’t. Will you fake to climb it.
Yuki Tanaka’s invitation into his head is a mind-blowing journey, like a seeing the world via Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass.
In regards to the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry assortment, A Magician Among the many Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Gentle Press Poetry winner. A set of poems and flash known as See What I Imply? was just lately revealed by Kelsay Books, and one other assortment of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was simply revealed by BlazeVOX Books.
