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

The Tobacconist

Call the shadows from the morning light, breathe
     And slam the window shut.
          Nothing there.

Nothing the tobacconist wants to see, nothing she sees.
Light another stick of incense,
     Put it on the grave.

That spring should be so lovely. Always galling,
Always settles like the dust blown in from China
     Along this dirty street.

Shadows, gather in the morning light, descend
     From the dusty reaches, from the metal braces
          Rusting overhead.

Forty years ago they sat and drank and thought it up:
Put a cover on it, this old street, and make it an arcade –
     to keep the dust down, sweep away the war.

Her sweetheart was among them –
     and her husband, too.
Husband died when it was done. The other lived too long.

Suck on a cigarette, and draw the window open.
Shoot a line of smoke to the arcade,
     and slam the window shut.

Glare at them, the fickle shadows, in the morning light
     Dancing with the dust
          And drifting smoke.

There’s always smoke, and noise, and they were wrong:
She wasn’t safe at all,
     sent out to the country in the war.

She left the battle unresolved –
     sweethearts off to war, and she was gone.
There was never enough food,
     and they bombed them just the same.

Pulls on her cigarette, draws the window back, exhales a blast
At all shadows and graves,
     and slams the window shut again.

Forty years, it should be long enough to wait.
Sixty years, it should be long enough to win contention
     between the shadows and the grave.

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.