Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, Family Room

Acknowledgments

Previous appearance of translations
‘Family Room’ appeared in Washington Square Review,

vol. 20, New York, 2008
‘Body’, ‘The Apple’ and ‘Reading My Wife’ appeared in Poetry Kanto,

vol. 23, Yokohama, 2007

Original Japanese publications
‘I’m leaving!’, ‘The Circuit’, ‘Grain by Grain’ and ‘The Abduction

and Murder of a Xmas Tree’ in The World Congress
of the Middle-Aged (世界中年会議), 2002

‘Piano’, ‘My Wife’s Starboard’, ‘An Encounter in the Shadow’, ‘Body’
‘Apple’, ‘Hand’, ‘Sunset’, ‘Reading My Wife’, ‘Listening to My Wife’,

‘Turning Over in Bed’, ‘Man and Woman’, ‘Summer’, ‘Lakeside’,
‘The Roadside’, ‘A Smile and a Swing’ and ‘Dinner’
in My Wife’s Starboard (妻の右舷), 2006

‘Mathematics Homework: a fraction’, ‘To Mother’ ‘Today’
and ‘Footprints’ in Voice Circus (声の曲馬団), a series of poems

published at Asahi.com, the on-line version
of the Asahi Newspaper, 2004

‘Winter Correspondence’ appeared in Asu no tomo
(明日の友), winter/2008 issue.

ISBN 978-1-922181-67-1
Vagabond Press, Sydney and Tokyo
© Yasuhiro Yotsumoto 2009, 2015

FAMILY
ROOM

poems

Yasuhiro Yotsumoto

VAGABOND PRESS

Contents

The Roses Are …. 7

I Kids
Mathematics Homework: a fraction 11
I’m Leaving! 12
A Big Picture 14
The Circuit 15
Penta-poem by the Only Son 16

II Dad
Portrait of a Father 21
Daddy the Rock 22
Phantom of My Father 23
Untitled 25
Winter Correspondence 26
In Memory of My Father 28

III Mom
To Mother 33
Piano 34
Mom’s Landscape 37

IV Wife and Husband
Grain by Grain 41
Adam’s Night 42
What Eve Has to Say 44
Today 46
My Wife’s Starboard 47 ◁
Meeting in the Shadow 48
Body 49 ◀
Apple 50 ◀
Hand 52 ◁

Sunset 53 ◁
Reading a Wife 54 ◀
Listening to My Wife 56
Turning Over in Bed 58 ◁
Man and Woman 59 ◁
Summer 61 ◁
Lakeside 62 ◁
The Roadside 63 ◁
Dinner 64
A Smile and a Swing 65 ◀

V Family
The Family Room 69
The Abduction and Murder of a Xmas Tree 71
One Hundred Years’ Sleep 73

Footprints 77

Translations by Akiko Yotsumoto, except:
◁ William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura
◀ Mitsuko Ohno and Beverley Curran

Mathematics Homework: a fraction

Why do the school teacher and Daddy and Mommy say
Suppose we have an apple here?
We don’t have an apple, do we?
Grandma ate them all yesterday, didn’t she?
She said those expensive apples from the department store
were not even as delicious as the ones we buy at Fuji mini-market.
How come we should divide a thing that’s not even here?
When you make it into two, you get a half and when you make that half

into two, you get a quarter. So what?
When asked which is larger, I don’t know which.
‘Cause it would depend on what kind of apple, wouldn’t it?
You wouldn’t be able to divide an apple which is as tiny as a sand grain.
Daddy, remember what you said once?
One is the largest number of all,
larger than a hundred, a thousand and even millions of billions.
’Cause it’s never chopped up.
I remember that.
I don’t want to be chopped up yet.
Let’s cut up a watermelon instead, Dad,
do a handstand and lift up the earth together!

11

I’m Leaving!

My son who left for the kindergarten in the morning
came home at night as a 35 year old man.
You are late, I said.
Yeah, looking up at the cuckoo clock with affection,
he replied in a man’s thick voice.

What have you been doing till so late, asked my wife.
Well, he showed that smile of his, and said that
he’s been married for three years, working as a space engineer,
summarizing his life in the same way as I once did myself.
Hey, isn’t he already quite grey haired!

I found it odd having my sake cup filled by my son who was the same age
as I, and murmured “thanks, that’s fine”.

My wife stared at us, comparing my face to his, his to mine,
as he started to tell us about the planet in 30 years, which
knocked us both with horror and surprise.

How have you survived in such a terrible world!
Environmental disaster, population explosion, nuclear weapons,

nationalism and terrorism.
Sure, I can see the seeds of the problems right here and now,
and this here and now has somehow turned into the irrevocable past for

my son and his family in the future, confusing as it may be,
the only thing clear is that they ended up with the worst case scenario.

Say, what if Mom and I try to change all those things from now on?
I’m not sure, Dad, once it’s done it’s done.
My wife held him on the sleeve and begged him to stay home in an oddly

theatrical manner.
I see his point, it would go against providence.

12

It’s all our fault
yet my son utters not a single word of reproach.
Could it be because I am already gone from his world?
I am mildly curious about it,
but it really does not matter one way or the other.
“Don’t worry about us. If we are lucky, we can win the lottery for the

lunar immigration.”
With one hand on the small of his back,
he shook my hand with the other, kissed my wife
on the cheek like a western foreigner.
Midnight darkness falling behind him,
he said,
I’m leaving, in a 5-year-old’s voice.

13

A Big Picture

On a wall stretching out boundlessly
someone is drawing a big picture with
stars twinkling in the midnight sky,
dolphins splashing off the bright midday ocean,
a man and a woman staring at each other under a tree.
I stride ahead down the wall,
traveling across the bed of a stormy sea,
wandering through the deadly still desert,
passing by travelers as small as rice grains.
Towers soaring up to the clouds.
Soldiers’ footsteps fill every corner of town.
Hundreds of babies lying on the ground.
I run.
A smile like Mom’s inside a melted, softened clock.
Dad carrying a large heavy rock.
But beyond the densely drawn roofs
there is no more picture,
there is only somebody standing
and casting his shadow onto the snow-white wall.
I take his hand
and enter the cool shade of the tree.

14

The Circuit

The baby’s first smile.
Under the nightly sky saturated with some gigantic force

that could twist and bend even the light beams
a minute circuit which is unrecognizable to the naked eyes

is connected in
that moment.

15

Penta-Poem by the Only Son

Mother is a shining stadium.
Father is the cheering crowd of 65,000 spectators
and the players running around

…
I am the ball kicked up into the night sky.

*

Father is receiving an oracle
from the huge super-thin TV screen,
sitting on the throne of a leather sofa in the living room.
Mother is dancing a melancholic tango, turning
round and round on the turntable, the keepsake of Granpa.

*

In the vast plain of Father’s brain,
rage like a bull in the stormy night
is tied up with a rusted chain.
Mother wrongly believes that love is to tame and soothe it.
I tell you, a matador can be found right here.

*

They say Mother came into the bay,
placed on a small boat of a paulownia chest,
sweeping her way through the morning mist of dry ice.
All her life she gave everything that was asked.
Her first love was her baby, me.

*

Things look differently every time I wake up.
Mother says it’s because I’m getting taller and taller.
A cloud of sand dust rises beyond the horizon.

16

What’s that? Dakar Rally? A horde of bison?
No, Mother, that’s blood spurted from Father.

*

When will Mother finally call my name
with the honorific ending, -san?
I’ve been waiting for that in the beech tree shade all afternoon
with a pure-white open-neck shirt and a freshly shaven face.
Hurry, Mom, my first love will be here any moment.

*

Father is a first-class architect. “I’m the one
who drew up your structural plan. You’re damn earthquake-resistant.”
he says with a smile, but my body and soul are shaking and quaking.
Look, even liquefied earth is spurting out between my toes.
I need you to drive in more stakes.

*

Look, the Oedipuses of the Heisei Era are going home,
hunting the drunks, not knowing they are their own fathers,
chatting with frustrated housewives online, not knowing they are their

own mothers.
The railway bridge reverberating on the river plain is the grieving and

wailing of Choros.
Dear Light, I see you now for the last time.

*

Every time I hunt a deer in the deep forest,
I think of my poor elder sister
who never had a chance to be born into this world.
If it were for her, I would have neither written a single poem
nor got bothered by stuttering and blushing.

*

17

I am setting off on a journey,
holding up the first-person baseball bat Father gave me,
mounting on the second-person swift horse Mother provided,
beyond the refrigerator door
into the sky-blue third person.

18