In the light of day, I could see that her teeth marks were imprinted on the towel, and it struck me as a little bizarre. She must have bitten down on it pretty hard. In the light of day, she seemed out of place. It was hard to believe that this girl—small, bony, with a not-so-great complexion—was the same girl who, the night before, had screamed out passionately in my arms, in the winter moonlight.
“I write tanka poems,” she said, out of the blue.
“Tanka?”
“You know tanka, right?”
“Sure,” I said. Even someone as naive as me knew that much. “But this is the first time I’ve met someone who actually writes them.”
She gave a happy laugh. “But there are people like that in the world, you know.”
“Are you in a poetry club or something?”
“No, it’s not like that,” she said. She gave a slight shrug. “Tanka are something you write by yourself. Right? It’s not like playing basketball.”
“What kind of tanka?”
“Do you want to hear some?”
I nodded.
“Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“Really,” I said.
And that was the truth. I was curious. I mean, what kind of poems would she write, this girl who, a few hours before, had moaned in my arms and yelled another man’s name?
She hesitated. “I don’t think I can recite any here. It’s embarrassing. And it’s still morning. But I did publish a kind of collection, so if you really want to read them, I’ll send it to you. Could you tell me your full name and address?”
I jotted down my address on a piece of memo paper and handed it to her. She glanced at it, folding it in four, then stuffed it in the pocket of her overcoat. A light green coat that had seen better days. On the rounded collar was a silver broach shaped like a lily of the valley. I remember how it glistened in the sunlight that was streaming in through the south-facing window. I know next to nothing about flowers, but for some reason I’ve always liked lilies of the valley.
“Thanks for letting me stay over. I truly didn’t want to ride back to Koganei on my own,” she said as she was leaving my place. “That happens with girls sometimes.”
We were both well aware of it then. That we would probably never see each other again. That night she simply didn’t want to ride the train all the way back to Koganei—that’s all there was to it.
—
A week later, her poetry collection arrived in the mail. Honestly, I really didn’t expect her to follow up and send it. I figured she’d totally forgotten about me by the time she got back to her place in Koganei (or perhaps she’d tried to forget me as soon as she could), and never imagined that she’d go to all the trouble to put a copy of the book in an envelope, write my name and address, stick on a stamp, and toss it in a mailbox—maybe even going all the way to the post office, for all I knew. So one morning, when I spied that package in my mail slot in the apartment, it took me by surprise.
The title of the poetry collection was On a Stone Pillow. The author was listed as Chiho. It wasn’t clear if this was her real name or a pen name. At the restaurant I must have heard her name many times, but I couldn’t recall it. No one called her Chiho, though, that much I knew. The collection was in a plain brown business envelope, with no name or return address, and no card or letter included. Just one copy of a thin poetry collection, bound together with white string, silently resting inside. It wasn’t some cheap mimeograph, but nicely printed on thick, high-quality paper. I’m guessing the author arranged the pages in order, attached the cardboard cover, and carefully hand-bound each copy using a needle and string to save on bookbinding costs. I tried imagining her doing that sort of work, but couldn’t picture it. The number 28 was stamped on the first page. Must have been the twenty-eighth in a limited edition. How many were there altogether? There was no price indicated anywhere. Maybe there never was a price.
I didn’t open the poetry collection right away. I left it on top of my desk, casting the occasional glance at the cover. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, it’s just I felt that reading a poetry collection someone put together—especially a person who, a week before, has been naked in my arms—required a bit of mental preparation. A sort of respect toward it, I suppose. Finally, that weekend, in the evening, I opened the book. I leaned back against the wall next to the window and read it in the winter twilight. There were forty-two poems contained in the collection. One tanka per page. Not a particularly large number. There was no foreword, no afterword, not even a date of publication. Just printed tanka in straightforward black type on white pages with generous margins.
I certainly wasn’t expecting some monumental literary work or anything. Like I said, I was simply curious. What kind of poems would come from a woman who yelled some guy’s name in my ear as she bit on a towel? What I found as I read through the collection was that several of the poems really got to me.
Tanka were basically a mystery to me (and still are, even now). So I’m certainly not able to venture an objective opinion about which tanka are considered great, and which ones not so much. But apart from any judgments of literary value, several of the tanka she wrote—eight of them, specifically—struck a chord deep within me.
This one, for instance:
The present moment
if it is the present moment
can only be taken
as
