<Begin Segment 38>

AI: I'd like to continue on a little bit more about this, just a little bit more about your father, since you mentioned. And if you could tell a little bit about his poetry and some of his, the meetings that he used to have, his poetry club.

MY: Yeah, my fath-, so our dad, he founded the Senryukai of Seattle.

TY: Of Seattle, yeah.

MY: And of course, he was the president. And he had a meeting at our house. And I think it was about once a month or so. I don't remember how, it wasn't any more frequently than --

TY: Well, yeah, I think he periodically had it at the house, but other times he had it at places like Maneki and --

MY: Oh yeah, that's right. They had it at a restaurant.

TY: Yeah, other places, yeah.

MY: But very often they have the, had it at our house and I remember my mother preparing osushi, and there would be about, about how many people? About fifteen?

TY: Yeah, at the most. Not, not that big of a crowd, yeah.

MY: Fifteen poets would gather and, around our dining room table, and they would -- I think they gave themselves topics. And they got this large roll of butcher paper from somewhere, I don't know exactly where, but, and they would, and I remember that they put the butcher paper all around the room.

TY: As I recall, there were, they had, each meeting they have contests.

MY: Oh yeah, yeah.

TY: And then they put it up on the wall and then they, everybody would look at it and they pick the best one they think, by vote. And --

MY: But they took turns.

TY: Yeah, they, yeah.

MY: So what they did was they took turns and then they had a, they would write, there on the spot, they would be given a topic, and they would sit down and write. And then they would read it one by one, and then the calligrapher would take it, and he had a sumi thing, you know, you would scrape this --

TY: Sumi and fude, yeah.

MY: Sumi and fude, and he would, the calligrapher would write. That was the part that was really interesting to me. It was just fascinating to see. They would recite the poem and then it would be written on the butcher paper.

TY: Right on the spot, yeah.

MY: And so there would be all these poems all around the wall, and then they went around and they vote, they would vote which one they liked the best. And if somebody said, "I like that poem the best," they would put, the calligrapher got a brush with a red ink, and he would put one circle over it. And then if a person said, "I like that one," they did all that, and then if a second person said the same, they like the same poem, they would put another circle around it. And so, and then in the end, the poem that had the most red circles, had the largest number of votes, won. And they already had prizes. They had prizes.

TY: Yeah, I can't remember. I knew it was something, but...

MY: I remember Dad used to buy, buy little things, a notebook or whatever, a pen or a notebook or whatever that... and they had that quite often. I remember that it was just fascinating. And senryu, unlike haiku, is a very down-to-earth poetry of daily living.

TY: Sometime it's racy.

MY: Very often, apparently.

TY: Yeah. [Laughs]

MY: And so sometimes -- I didn't know that kind of vocabulary, so that, I knew when something was getting kind of bawdy, because they would start, "Ha, ha ha." They used to, there's a big laughter. And my mother -- I used to sit there in the dining room listening, because I was very interested in poetry myself. And it was just kind of a fascinating process, that they were doing. And my mother would come in from the kitchen and say, "Come in here." She would say, that, "Anna" -- what is that? "Kato na hanashi," kato, what does that kato mean? Coarse?

JY: That means "rough."

TY: Kato, yeah.

MY: Course, yeah.

JY: Coarse. Crude.

MY: "Onna no ko ga..." she didn't want me to listen to it. I didn't know what was being said, so it didn't matter. But she didn't want me to sit there listening to this bawdy language of the men. It was kind of interesting.

AI: So when she would say, "Onna no ko," she meant, "You're a girl. Get away from here, that's not for girls."

MY: Yeah, "It's not, that's not for you." And the other thing was, there was one woman in that group.

TY: I think a woman, two, a few.

MY: No, there was one, very often there was just one.

TY: Oh.

MY: And later on, maybe after, in Chicago, after the war, there were quite a few women. But in Seattle --

TY: They were being liberated, I guess. [Laughs]

MY: Yeah, in Seattle there was always this one woman who was there. She was a wife of one of the guys.

TY: She was what? Wife of one of -- oh.

MY: The wife, yeah. And she smoked. She was the first woman, Japanese woman I knew who smoked, other than the people that our parents knew, that Mom knew. And she talked very, she said, she said, "Kimi," for "you." And she just fascinated me. There's this woman who was acting like -- and then Mom said, told me, "Come on in here." 'Cause she wanted me to help her in the kitchen, for one thing, and she said, "Anna hanashi kikan demo ii no."

TY: You don't have to listen to such talk.

MY: And then, "Mrs. So-and-so, I don't know what she's doing here. Ano konna ni, otoko no nakamade. What is she doing, sitting there among men? She should be home watching her children or something like that." So she, Mom had this very proper sense of her position and women's position in the family. But, so I have this very vivid memory of the senryu, senryukai, although I didn't really understand all the, the language of the poetry that much. And I did try to, I did get some of his poems translated, but then they have to be put into poetic form, so I -- and it's rather, it's just kind of difficult. Putting Japanese poetry into English.

TY: 'Cause there's subtle meanings, I think, doesn't translate too well.

MY: Metaphors.

TY: Yeah, metaphors and things, yeah.

MY: Metaphors are really different, difficult to translate. And so we, and so I'm still sitting on it. I'm not too, I haven't really done anything for -- I would like to do something for, for the children, because they don't read Japanese. They need to be translated.

TY: We do have a book about this thick that Mother had --

MY: Compiled this book.

TY: Somebody compiled all Dad's senryu, and each of us have a copy of that book.

MY: I do. You have, we all have copies of that. You do, too?

JY: Uh-huh.

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.