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The Garden Shukkei-en | Introduction

Carolyn Forché initially published “The Garden Shukkei-en” in Provincetown Arts in 1988 and included it in her third collection, The Angel of History (1994). The poem was also shown in conjunction with Danz Macabre photographic art exhibit at the School of Art, Arizona State University at Tempe and is included in the portfolio of show photographs, So to Speak. Forché takes the title and epigraph of The Angel of History from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In haunting disembodied voices, the poems in the collection detail the atrocities of various twentieth-century horrors such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. In “The Garden Shukkei-en,” which appears towards the end of the collection, a Japanese woman who survived the bombing recounts the horrors of that time and how it has come to shape the ways in which she remembers the past and interacts with the world. Known as a strolling garden, Shukkei-en is dotted with islets of various sizes and surrounded by a range of hillocks on its north shore. The name “Shukkei-en” means “the Garden of Condensed Scenic Beauty.” It was heavily damaged when the Enola Gay, an American Boeing B-29 bomber, dropped an atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945. The survivor in the poem remembers the death and destruction she witnessed during the bombing. Primarily a descriptive poem, “The Garden Shukkei-en” uses two voices, the Japanese sur- vivor’s and a woman who accompanies her, to structure the poem.

The Garden Shukkei-en Summary

Lines 1–3
With its haunting simile, the opening lines of “The Garden Shukkei-en” create the tone for the poem. The speaker compares crossing a river “by way of a vanished bridge” to the way “a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain.” This imagery evokes an otherworldly place, where the details of the present are barely visible. The “she” of the third line refers to the speaker’s companion, a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Lines 4–7
In these lines, the speaker is reporting on the memories of her companion, who is haunted by images of the past. The people “crying for help” are victims of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb destroyed the city and killed more than half of its 400,000 residents. The shock of the bombing was such that neither “tears nor lamentation” made any difference to the burnt corpses that filled the river Ota or to the thousands crying for help.

Lines 8–16
A “matsu” is a type of pine tree. The speaker juxtaposes the image of the tree with the image of “barbed wire” to shock the reader and to evoke a sense of both beauty and horror. Lines 9–16 are spoken in the voice of the Japanese survivor, who is remembering what used to be in the garden and comparing it to what she sees now. She is so consumed with the past that she hallucinates a teahouse that is no longer in the garden and in it the victims of the bombing. The Ota is a river that runs... » Complete The Garden Shukkei-en Summary