◎Liang Wenjia
It's the middle of winter, and I'm sitting in a heated room reading a book of poems by Toshitaro Tanigawa. I think Tomitaro Tanigawa is a magical poet, and the magic is that if you read one of his poems, you will easily fall in love. The earliest contact with Tanigawa Shuntaro's works should be unconscious. I probably say this because I was four or five years old and I didn't know exactly who the lyricist of Astro Boy was, so I was shocked when I learned that it was Shuntaro Tanigawa who wrote the lyrics. The first time I read his poem, and the most impressive poem, is "Two Billion Light Years of Solitude", the language of poetry is as innocent and childish as a child, but invisibly let the small people collide with the vast universe, giving birth to a wonderful sense of loneliness.
The book "Heart and Woman" in my hand is softer and more sensual. As the name suggests, there is no routine, and the poems in the book are divided into two parts, focusing on the two sensual themes of "heart" and "woman".
In the chapter "Heart", what impressed me the most was the simple poem "Heart Rolling Around", just four short paragraphs, each sentence began with "heart", the language was witty, the words were simple, and the rhythm was very rhythmic, such as "heart, stumbling and stumbling ass to sit down / heart, a bone lying down / heart, snoozing in confusion", how vivid and lovely the image of "heart" is. If you read the original text, you will find that the echo-like repetition of the tone in the poem constitutes the focus of the rhythm of the poem, and the translator must have noticed this when translating the poem, using many overlapping words to express the rhythm of the repetitive speech in the original text. It is difficult not to create an atmosphere of tension, anxiety, and uneasiness in this straightforward and repetitive expression in the poem. The original text uses hiragana throughout, and there is not a single Kanji, which can be read fluently even with a Japanese knife like mine, which is also in line with Tanigawa Shuntaro's consistent style of writing poetry- not pursuing obscure and complicated language, writing poems in words that even children can read, but achieving mysterious effects.
Toshitaro Tanigawa is known as the "Poet of the Heart", as evidenced by the fact that he wrote sixty poems related to the "heart". It is said that he has serialized these poems writing "hearts" at a rate of one poem per month for five consecutive years, and I would like to ask how he could have done it if he were not a poet who seriously talked to the abundance of his heart? But even the psychic poet has times when he is confused and confused about the "heart", and probably most of the time, such as the heart in "Don't Understand" does not understand itself and cannot clearly express its feelings in words; as in the dialogue between "Head and Heart", the head constantly asks questions, and the heart is tired of explaining and explaining until it is speechless, "The head constantly emits language / The heart is dissatisfied with the asserted language / Charged by unspeakable emotions / The fuse of the heart suddenly burns out!" "The head is the mind, it is reason, it is logical, and the mind is emotional, and even the poet cannot describe in precise terms what the mind is. Questions that leave people speechless should be answered with the same unspeakable answers, and this is the ingenuity of the poet's writing. Perhaps the people who really understand the "heart" are precisely those who realize that the mind is an elusive thing!
Compared to those that write "heart", the poems in the chapter "To Women" are shorter, with four or six lines being the norm, but with longer sentences and deeper meanings. This may be because people are born with a "heart" in general, and relatively speaking, the consciousness of women awakens later. Before reading it, I had worried several times that a man's woman would appear frivolous and cause me discomfort from a female perspective, but I realized that this worry was superfluous after I read it. The poet's words that gently touch the female soul are either blunt or euphemistic, and there is no lack of sexy descriptions, but none of them disgust me, but a very simple appreciation of art—whether I read poetry or the poet reads women.
The poet's so-called woman does not only contain men's views on the opposite sex, but the women he writes about may be daughters, wives, mothers, or even just women themselves. I think that the reason why Tanigawa Shuntaro was able to write a series of moving poems "to women" is probably inseparable from the heartfelt respect for women when he wrote it, which is not difficult to see in the section of "Tanigawa Shuntaro's Answer to Twenty-Two Questions About Women" in the book. There are some slightly sad, lonely works in these poems, such as "More Days": "You shed tears alone / What you did before you knew me / ... That one thing after another", but I still prefer those cheerful. The innocence of a child in "Hide and Seek", the frank "happy" in "Together", as long as you can "be together", no matter what you do, you are happy, although the poet says at the end: "In the uneasiness that may not be able to have that luck / I torment every night", but even if it is uneasy, it is still full of longing.
There are no obscure metaphors or flowery rhetoric in Tanigawa's poems, but only plain, simple language and sincere gaze in the poems. It is worth mentioning that if the content of the poem is left aside, the binding design of the book is also deep in my heart: the blue envelope that is as calm as loneliness, the light gray cover, and the pale orange lining that opens the book and comes into view. In addition, the soft color of the paper, the comfortable typography of the Chinese-Japanese contrast, the blank space that is extremely important to poetry... If poetry is breathing, then when I open the book, the blank space between the lines is full of poetry.