Tales

• Harbour Town
• Five Monsters
• The Commutation

Poems

• The Winter Slippers
• Persimmons
• Spider and Bee
• The Captain’s Walk in Summer
• Ozasa
• In the Spring Garden
• Memory and Flesh
• The Tobacconist
• It was on another morning

Photographs

• Shadowflowers
• Embracing Rivers – Persimmon leaf
• Naniwa rose
• Cicada’s wing in autumn
• Embracing Rivers – Cabbage leaf

Poems

Persimmons

Autumn breakfast, with persimmons,
And everyone at table, all along the street –
     everywhere but there, in the old Koga house,
Where it’s too early now for anyone.
Yesterday was laughter in the Koga kitchen, where the grey cat was,
     as the wrecking boys shot bolts through the plaster walls.

That old cat, he cried and cried, and called attention,
     so they left him behind.
No cats allowed where they were going
So they only brought the quiet one.

The young men up the street – they talk philosophy at breakfast
     in their one-room flat
As the wrecking boys arrive.
They ride on two-stoke motorbikes. They eat too quickly.

Local persimmons; economy grade. Dark inside,
     and not yet altogether ripe.
One eats persimmons skinned, and sucks the seeds.

The young men are growing beards as the fruit sags low
     on the landlord’s tree.
They’re good boys, and enviable.
They don’t know their limits
     and no-one’s about to tell them.

There, the Koga house had a shiny steel post-box –
Bought it and put it in themselves; left it behind.
Shining now below the rest:

All left, as the house dies, as autumn removes.
Dark where the garden was, dark below the landlord’s tree –
     autumn persimmons, taken from the tree too early.

Those young men up the street are renters too – at breakfast
As the wrecking crew returns
     to finish off the Koga house.

It’s a cheerful business, to be a wrecker’s lad.
Good work for young men in the autumn light, learning
     their way about hammers and claws.

Autumn breakfast, and the old cat’s dying above the door.
He had a plate of little fish before I peeled my persimmons,
     now he’s sleeping in the sun.

This sunshine, and the last warm sky – he knows about the winter,
     and he’s sleeping.

Persimmons are deep orange on the blue autumnal sky, before
     falling as they must
Beside the evergreens – the pines, the camphor trees.
Bless your little beards, my boys, and talk away.

Also from
Nishigawa Kobo

An Andalusian Dog’s Life
the case of my
detached retina
by Yaemi Shigyo

Click here for extracts.

Click here to order.