Reflections: “The last farewell”: traces of physical presence

Back in my undergraduate days, when I was hostelling my way across Japan, transferring from one overnight train to the next, a book of Kenji's poems was always among the paperbacks in my backpack. I particularly loved one series of poems (" Pine Needles, " " The Last Farewell, " " Aomori Elegy " and " Okhotsk Elegy ") lamenting the death of his younger sister Toshiko; I read and re-read them until the dog-eared pages were actually fraying. In that book, the conflict in Kenji's heart as he tried to overcome the death of his most beloved sister was expressed in evenly spaced 9-point type; this was his " poetry " or so I long thought. What I saw in the Miyazawa Kenji museum in Hanamaki, though, was an entirely foreign " The Last Farewell. " In the handwritten manuscript I saw there, for each phrase written there seemed to be a rewriting , for every erasure, a new addition. The words danced together crowded across the yellowed paper of the manuscript sheet. The palimpsest of phrases, piled up in ever-so-slightly differing shades of ink, spoke quietly of his agony. Strangely, when I stared continuously at the lines traced in that ink, I actually began to see his pudgy fingers gripping the pen, and his rugged hand. I even heard the scratching of the pen point across the fiber of the checkered manuscript paper on which he wrote his characters. That was a feeling I was never able to get from " The Last Farewell " when expressed in typeset characters. Actual vestiges of his physical presence were there, painted onto the dis-colored, thoroughly-stained manuscript paper. These got through to me somehow, and for several minutes I stood there glued to the spot in front of the glass display case. I asked myself: " Is this really the same poem? The same work as " The Last Farewell " I had known until then from my paperback? " When, in the process of picking up and setting characters from type drawers, followed by mass duplication on the printing press, all those vestiges of the author's physical presence that were dyed into the original manuscript were wiped away, the artistic work " The Last Farewell " was transformed into a piece of completely " dry " media. But there is one small consolation: there are traces of my own physical …