East Asia Library exhibits selections from the Yumiko Tsumura Collection on Japanese poetry

From March 6 through May 13, 2025, the East Asia Library will be exhibiting selections from a recent donation from Yumiko Tsumura, a local poet and translator, related to three major modern Japanese authors, Yumiko Kurahashi, Ryuichi Tamura and Kazuko Shiraishi. In preparation for this exhibition, Dr. Regan Murphy Kao, Director of the East Asia Library, interviewed Ms. Tsumura to learn more about her background, the history of this collection, and the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition. 

Dr. Regan Murphy Kao: Thank you for your recent donation of manuscripts, books, and ephemera related to three major modern Japanese authors, Yumiko Kurahashi, Ryuichi Tamura, and Kazuko Shiraishi. Yumiko Kurahashi’s meteoric career began with Parutai (The Party), a brilliant satire of the Japanese leftist students' movement that she wrote while still a student. The poetry of Ryuichi Tamura, perhaps the most renowned post-WWII Japanese poet, searingly reveals the agony of war. Kazuko Shiraishi, known for performing her provocative poetry with jazz accompaniment, has been called the “Allen Ginsberg of Japan.” We are delighted to introduce this donation in an exhibit in our exhibit space. I have so enjoyed talking with you these past months, and I would love to take this opportunity to allow others to hear some of the fascinating stories I have had the privilege to hear ever since first visiting your place last spring. 

Let’s start with how you got to know Yumiko Kurahashi, the anti-realist novelist.  How did that connection lead to meeting Ryuichi Tamura, the prominent Japanese postwar poet? 

Yumiko Tsumura: It all started in Iowa in 1967. One of approximately ten percent of Japanese women who had graduated from college in those days, I jumped at the opportunity to go abroad to obtain the MFA in poetry and translation at the University of Iowa after doing graduate study at Kwansei Gakuin University in American Literature. Having grown up in the aftermath of the war, it was my dream to introduce Japanese poetry to the world. Would you believe there was another “Yumiko” already at the University of Iowa that year!? When I received mail for “Yumiko Kurahashi,” I reached out to her and soon we became friends. Samuel Grolmes, who was the Assistant Director of the writing program at the time, and I later became her translators and would visit her often in Japan.

Notably, Kurahashi advised Paul Engle to invite Ryuichi Tamura as the inaugural guest poet for the International Writing Program he was just starting that year. I have a funny letter from Kurahashi after she returned to Tokyo in which she explains that Tamura would need a lot of care. “He cannot even make his own tea,” she told me. So, Grolmes and I went to pick him up at the airport on December 2, 1967 and brought him to our apartment. From that evening onward, our apartment became a gathering space for poets, and we became close friends of Tamura.

This connection with Tamura in turn led to a close relationship with Kazuko Shiraishi, one of Japan’s foremost poets. Could you tell us a bit about how you first met Kazuko Shiraishi?

Yumiko Tsumura: It was at an event held a couple of years after Tamura’s death. The poetry publishing company, Shichosha, organized a conference, entitled, “How to surpass Ryuichi Tamura” at the publishers’ club in Tokyo on September 30, 2000. Kazuko Shiraishi was an invited panelist as she had long been an admirer of Tamura’s poetry. Introduced to our translation of Tamura’s poetry, Shiraishi immediately asked Grolmes and me to translate her work as well. New Directions published our translation of her work, Let Those Who Appear, in 2002, My Floating Mother, City, in 2009, and my translation, Sea, Land, Shadow, in 2017. I enjoyed the privilege of translating her poetry and a close friendship with her for seventeen years. 

Kenneth Rexroth once said, “Shiraishi is the Allen Ginsberg of Japan.” In what ways is this comparison apt? How might it fall short?

Yumiko Tsumura: A prolific writer, Shiraishi was influenced by abstract arts, experimental literature, avant-garde Jazz and Beat Poetry in her early works, and particularly by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose works she translated into Japanese. She defied the traditional conventions of Japanese poetry, taking unexplored paths that were sometimes bizarre and outlandishly erotic, and exploring the disengagement of her generation. Kenneth Rexroth was instrumental in getting Shiraishi’s Season of Sacred Lust translated into English 1978. Like Ginsberg, Shiraishi is known for uninhibited free expression, but Shiraishi was never a political activist or anarchist. Her poetic work, which could be described as surrealistic and avant-garde, continued to broaden and deepen, especially after spending one year as a guest poet at Iowa in the International Writers Program in 1973. Her global concern, empathy and oneness with nature find a voice in Let Those Who Appear (New Directions 2002), and her later poems. More than anything, her poems exude compassion.

Kazuko Shiraishi is known for her poetry performances. How were her performances distinctive? 

Yumiko Tsumura: Kazuko Shiraishi’s performances were truly memorable! Standing before the audience with a long scroll dangling from her arms, she would read her poems, inked in brush strokes on the scrolls, while notable musicians performed beside her. She was known to read her poems alongside avant-garde jazz musicians, or with the distinguished trumpeter, Itaru Oki, from Paris. She often ad libbed her poems when reading on stage with such musicians. She was a real pioneer when it came to poetic performances in Japan.

While there is so much to admire and research on each of these authors, I would also like to highlight your own fascinating path. Tell us a little about your family background, early life, and how you came to decide to study poetry and translation.

Yumiko Tsumura: Prior to World War II, my maternal grandfather and his family were living on and operating a vineyard in Fresno, California. Before the Pacific War broke out, my grandfather had taken his family back to Japan and returned alone to his vineyard. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066, and, as a person of Japanese ancestry, my grandfather was one of the men incarcerated in an internment camp. In December 1945, following the end of WWII, he was shipped to Japan. His eldest child was my California-born mother, who was sadly ostracized in Japan during the war as if she were a spy; the military police inspected our house to look for anything in English. We went through a long period of hunger. The experience of living through the war definitely affected my direction in life. I was drawn to poetry, having seen my samurai father writing tanka poems and listened to him reciting kanshi (Chinese poems) as a child. Poetry offered me a vehicle for realizing my dream of bridging the gap between Japan and America.