During the 1960s, Tamura Ryūichi published two poems as separate, exceptionally slim volumes. One was Research into Fear (or A Study of Fear, 1963); the other was Decaying Matter (or A Perishable Substance, 1966). One of Tamura’s translators commented:
“In these two long poems Tamura surveys art, history, society and mankind, and touches on those aspects of thought and experience which create anguish in human beings” (Grolmes x).
The two “aspects of thought and experience” (the topics of these poems) are, respectively, fear and mortality. Each poem advances its treatment of the topic by means of fragmentary images, broken sequences of uncanny apparitions, laconic first-person observations, and urgent commands. These are difficult poems, more evocative than constative. Tamura’s poems cast an oracular spell.
In Research into Fear the images collide into each other. Because the imagery comes in snippets and scraps, the poem seems to represent a consciousness taking random impressions of a reality too inchoate (fear) to relate in a fashion any more coherent than this poem can manage to do; still, a surreal sequence takes shape and makes sense. Phrases resemble speech shorn of all excess, made spare to convey something essential. What matters—the speaker seems to imply—is simply the posited experience; only stark, unsentimental language is bearable where this topic is concerned.
No wonder Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburō Ōe felt that Tamura Ryūichi was a writer whose “strong, sad, and compassionate voice” evoked nothing less than awe (Grolmes xviii). To enter the spiral of this poem is to participate imaginatively in someone else’s nightmare or daylight terror. The poem induces dread, then horror, followed by apprehension, numbness, feelings of insignificance, and finally fear’s dissipation.
Research into Fear is composed of 10 numbered sections. The sections are numbered, ominously, in reverse order, suggesting a countdown to an explosion or some other fearful ending. By poem’s end, however, the reader has raw poetic data from which to arrive at more than one conclusion regarding the emotion in question.
The first part (“10.”) begins by evoking apprehension:
“An evening / you can hear a needle / hit the floor / the whiskey glass on the table cracks” (ll. 1–4).
(We do not know what causes the silence, nor the glass to shatter; this is how it starts; this is what happens.) Next, “unfamiliar cards” appear with inscriptions the speaker cannot read, X-ray negatives that picture blood vessels as “orchid veins” and “ashy streams.” Here “skin and subcutaneous fat embrace / regions of darkness / . . . they might as well / be touched by rubber gloves / . . . scalpels and tweezers.”
In a captious allusion to the Christian view of salvation (via Holy Communion), the speaker commands:
“ask a poet you like / what bread he can imagine / ask a painter you like / what wine she can see / in a stream of milky blood— / modern cities cremated / at the slightest incursion of meaning / the negative world caving in.”
There is reverberation. A
“pin lifts from the floor / a milky stream turns the color of blood / beneath smooth skin.”
“10.” ends as bafflingly as it began:
“a door bangs / someone goes out / or / someone comes in.”
“9.” embodies the fear of losing one’s mind when it is surrounded by emptiness. The poet fears not being able to revive the ability to think once that ability dies. The speaker recalls past artists and wonders how Brueghel would have painted the emptiness he now perceives, or how Mozart would have expressed it, what he would have needed to convey it, “perhaps . . . a flute.” Other artists come to the speaker’s mind: Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miró; then French postimpressionist painter Henri Rousseau; then “the metaphors” of Saint John the Evangelist, 17th-century English metaphysical poet John Donne, and French 19th-century poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Meanwhile, the speaker says:
“and in my mind / four thousand days and nights / are at war.”
“8.” begins with a one-word line (“There”) that refers to the speaker’s mind, where “days and nights divide” and “keep harmony and order” or “wage war” while “the tip of a needle” glints objectively and surreally with the light from an “unnamed star.”
In “7.” the speaker drums an appalling list of vicious, marauding actions taking place at tower, castle, and estate, while an unnamed but menacing
“they . . . express in every art form / white-hot rhythms”
and
“dangerous similes / self-exposing manifestos / ultrahypocritical art movements that suppress hypocrisy.”
Part “6.” speaks in alarming mystical riddles:
“Gouge your eyes out if you want to see / cut off your ears if you want to hear.”
In this section the speaker contrasts the terrifying language of kings, angels, and slaves and pronounces on the depraved joys of slaves and the despotic powers of kings. He ends with the perturbing prediction:
“if you can see your own angel” you will see “its ears are in its wings.”
Part “5.” dwells on the apparition of
“trembling wings / trembling tongue . . . piercing . . . flicking . . . beautiful tongues”
that the speaker saw in the mouth of “a pure green snake” in one temple he visited and around a bodhisattva he met in the “autumn wind.”
Part “4.” contrasts the clear (if short-lived) objective light that spills from a falling needle to the frightening darkness
“in a dove’s voice / in a snake’s design / in the arms of Sakuraiwa Kannon”
(a goddess of mercy).
Part “3.” evokes, in its incantatory 11 lines, the evolution through history of sounding instruments
(“Animal horn / becoming metal horn / recorder / becoming flute”)
and implies that—their egos aside—artists are merely instruments, too
(“Mozart becoming Debussy”).
Part “2.” employs the similes of “a hunter stalk[ing] game” and of “hunger stalk[ing] wild animals” to explain how darkness (dread) closes in “on mind.”
In part “1.” the dire images of needle, angel, tongue, tower, castle, and
“animal horn / becoming metal horn / recorder / becoming flute”
all reappear, in the midst of which the speaker notes the absurdity of life:
“our lives are too long to commit crimes”
and
“too short to pay for our crimes,”
and observes cryptically that
“soul is form.”
Part “0.” is empty.
Whether the title Research into Fear or A Study of Fear seems more appropriate to this countdown poem, the work’s overall structure suggests that fear is experienced in phases, the first being the most alarming and irrational. As one nears the zero hour or the final second of fear, one’s thoughts swirl to comforting mantras and irresolvable paradoxes. The final state is either annihilation or freedom. No language can express the end of fear.
Bibliography
Tamura, Ryūichi. Research into Fear. In Dead Languages: Selected Poems 1946–1984, translated by Christopher Drake, 34–40. Rochester, Michigan: Katydid Books (Oakland University), 1984.
———. Poetry of Ryūichi Tamura. Translated by Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura. Palo Alto, Calif.: CCC Books, 1998.