Noisy Animal – Sayaka Ōsaki

[Vagabond Press; 2023]

Tr. from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

Sayaka Ōsaki’s collection Noisy Animal engages with the genre of eco-poetry not through nostalgia for an “untainted” ecological past, nor through prescriptive calls to action, but through a playful reckoning with the awkwardness of being human. In “Me in the Blindingly Bright Morning Light,” the speaker gets irritated by the sound of herself folding origami. Even after someone suddenly claps their hands over her ears, she remains vulnerable to the “blindingly bright morning light.” The poem “Pointing Impossible” evokes how we adjust to the man-made constraints on our lives (like work).

Nonetheless, Ōsaki recognizes our fundamental freedom—a freedom that becomes apparent once we accept that we are little more than noisy animals:

The blood under your textured skin

Doesn’t flow in streaks

Like fibrous little roots

Like a gamelan’s sound

It seeps into twilight over the rocky shore

In the two zoo poems in the book, “Four Zoo Tales” and “Aboo,” Ōsaki is fascinated by how animals unassumingly transgress man-made boundaries. In “Aboo,” an Aldabra giant tortoise whose “docile belief that the ground goes on endlessly” vanishes from the Shibukawa Zoo, never once doubting “the righteousness of a single step.” Ōsaki is taken by this “divided world” between man and animals:

The moon passes through afternoon

Thin blades of grass grow wild

Where there are no more men or animals

The divided world closes its doors

Collapsing the distinction between those who see and those who are seen

Ōsaki is sensitive to the power imbalance between “those who see and those who are seen.” Might we view her choice of the word “men” (rather than, say, “humans” or “people”) in this context to further hint at the “divided world” of gender, though women remain unnamed in the poem? Perhaps presciently, Ōsaki recognizes that “[a]lmost everyone sees something / Almost everyone overlooks something / One by one, invisible things are transformed into words.” As English readers, it is crucial to reflect on the role of Noisy Animals translator Jeffrey Angles here, who himself translates politically engaged Japanese writers into English, particularly women and particularly poets, who are invisibilized in a global literary marketplace that values the novels of men.

For Ōsaki, eco-poetics is a deeply political and relational endeavor, getting at the question: What sort of world do we want to create for ourselves? Perhaps this is why the poet is so interested in the power of language, its divine ability to create something out of nothing. A beautiful example of this occurs in “Rice Steamer”:

We line up the rice balls and other things we brought home

You say it’s like we’re picnicking under the cherry blossoms

And as you do, you live

In these lines, Ōsaki does not take life as a given. With the words “you live,” she places this fact firmly into existence. In the collection, language is both a powerful force and a source of vulnerability for human beings. It is multitudinous. Words can take on different meanings and human beings risk misinterpretation all the time, as Ōsaki warns in “The Window Washer” and “Rice Steamer.” In the author’s note to the title poem, “Noisy Animal,” Ōsaki writes, “[l]anguage is the first disaster that humanity experiences.” And yet, we need it:

Noisy animals are distributed throughout the cities

We require money for housing

We require money for food

We require money for light and warmth

We need music

We need thought

We need word

Without them our bodies break down

And break out in fever

Ōsaki’s collection is preoccupied with disaster, whether the disaster of language, or traumatic historical events in Japan like the 1945 atomic bombings and the 2011 tsunami. In “Mother Taking Turns,” the narrator refers to the B-29 planes that dropped the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with the narrator’s grandmother thinking: “How could we possibly win against that?” Ōsaki repeats this line throughout the poem, not just in relation to political events, but in response to disagreements between the narrator’s mother and aunts over the clothes they will inherit, or the narrator watching her grandmother’s impending death. Perhaps this apparent powerlessness is less a recognition of political odds stacked overwhelmingly against you, like the military might of another imperial power, and more of a recognition of how being human is being subject to things beyond your control, like cycles of life and death. Whatever tone of helplessness Ōsaki introduces here is countered by a poem full of action. The narrator’s grandmother has created an entire, buzzing life: She is the mother of the mothers who laugh with abandon; she planted seeds, thinned seedlings, fertilized them; she harvested cucumbers, tomatoes, aubergine and edamame. Ōsaki genders this creative life-force: When her narrator speaks of taking the cabbage, daikon, yuzu, tangerines, citrus, she says: “It was me who took them (because I was not yet a mother).”

In “A Special Day,” a poem about the 2011 tsunami in Japan which killed over twenty thousand people, Ōsaki writes that this was a day when “lots and lots of people died all at once and we mourned / When things were like other days at so many other places and times.” Ōsaki notes how these exceptionalized moments of disaster are not quite so exceptional. Relatedly, in “Heaven and Earth,” she illustrates how we register disaster in our bodies. In that poem, the speaker hears a song but cannot tell where it’s coming from:

The song seems to sing

Of some happening long ago

That became part of people, made them weep

Then was forgotten completely . . .

The song comes from the water’s edge

I hear it not in my ears

But in the bone deep in my back

Ōsaki evokes the human tendency to forget disaster, but also the ways our bodies nonetheless register it and compel us to relive it beyond our own generations. Ōsaki invites us to see how our attention is resolutely political, demonstrating commitment to and celebration of life even in the face of disaster. In “Bewilderingly Quiet Night,” the speaker feels like she is the only one attentive to the world around her. The poem is not utopic: The only hope the speaker feels is for moments like a couple “sitting on a park bench late at night, sharing earphones, listening to good music.” These poems illustrate that Ōsaki’s political vision isn’t aspirational toward some unsettled end. Even in poems expressly about political moments, such as “A Moment of Silence,” Ōsaki illustrates how life is always throbbing underneath, if only one dares to look:

A clean

morning road

A spider connecting

Grass and leaves with its thread

The snooze button of the alarm

Of the people rushing

To the station nearby

Far away

The water the tofu shop sprinkles out front

Scatters

Even further still

The dolphins in the sea

Communicate with

The dolphins in the aquarium

Conveying the patterns

Of the underside of the world

This is the “hum, the buzz, the stirring of life,” as Ōsaki refers to in “Traveling Through Takao.” And it is because she cares so deeply about life that Ōsaki’s poems do not shy from death. “Because the World is Dancing” is one such poem, which appears to take place at some sort of dance, and it is brisk. It moves rapidly from the personal (“I love you”) to the historical (“Ancient songs and / instruments of the common folk”). In one moment we’re surrounded by the material reality of the dance floor, its “Rows of chairs / Sliding chairs / Fretting people.” In the next, we’re swept up in the games and heat of the dancers. We are at once present with the narrator, and then taken somewhere else: “Women / Women washing hair / The sound of water somewhere.” In the short span of a few lines, the narrator lives and dies:

I breathe in

Then breathe out

Stretch my wrists

Raise my soul

Grow old and die

And yet the poem continues. To be living is to be “sloppy, troublesome.” But nonetheless, the dance continues, and the next morning, so does life: “A burst of rain falls from the cloudy sky / Someone puts up the first umbrella.” Ōsaki’s collection moves between death and life, between gravity and lightness, with great dexterity.

Fatima Aamir is a current JD candidate at the University of Toronto and completed her MA at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature in 2021. Her literary and legal research interests lie in imagining liberation.