[In the following essay, Kugé analyzes a poem by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (Man'yōshū no. 358) on the subject of communing with the dead.]

SHORE 1:

What does it mean to dedicate a poem to a dead body? What compels a poet to compose a poem for a corpse? A dead body's presence is haunting. Its being-there does not produce “knowledge” but a distance, both material and imaginary, which exposes us to the limit of knowledge and simultaneously to the experience of finitude. Weaving this sense of mortality into the drifting flow of language, our poet presents relationality to the dead as the promise of an open community still to come.

A dead body lies between life and death, at the undeterminable threshold, the constant risk of becoming our “it.” Every representation of this body falls short. There is only a helpless utterance, trembling, lamenting the inadequacy of representation. Our poet inscribes this lament, the sound of impossible desire of mourning, in his song of dedication. No matter how the poet tries, the dead body does not reply to his words; the body maintains a monumental silence. But the poet keeps speaking to the dead body nonetheless, for this speaking to the absolute other is the essence of poetry. If the poet's uncanny communication can be thought to produce some knowledge, it may be the very impossibility of knowledge existing between the poet and the addressee, the experience of the unknowable that poetry communicates. At the same time, this poetic “communication” should be neither a fabrication of spiritualism nor a clichéd discourse of religious experience. Rather, poetry is a learning how to expose ourselves to the paradoxical language, more precisely, the murmuring, of a dead body. While a corpse evokes our fear, empathy, and eventually compassion, it eludes our conceptual understanding. Our poet does not translate the dead body into something comprehensible. His poem respects a distance from the dead body, which in turn makes accessible to listeners the silence or the impossibility of communication. The poet shares his knowledge of the unknowable with “us,” placing us on the shore, a haunted site of infinite mourning.

DEDICATION:

The poem in question is from the Man'yôshû (c. 795), the oldest compilation of Japanese poems, and the poet is Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. Despite the popularity of his poems, we know very few things about Hitomaro. It is believed that this long poem, or song ‘chôka’, No. 358, which contains forty-five lines, was composed by the poet in the early to mid-eighth century. The head note to the poem reads: “A poem composed by Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro on seeing a dead man among the stones of Samine Island in Sanuki; with tanka (short poems)” (Cranston 232). The poem begins with a tribute to the local divinity in the region where Hitomaro is travelling, and gradually eases into the epic body: Hitomaro and his fellow travellers go through a tempest, and as the elevated description of the environment becomes more and more localized, the eye of the poet finally arrives at a dead body washed up on the shore. I quote the entire poem:

                              Splendid with gemweed,
Yes, rich is the land of Sanuki,
                              A land of good stock—
Is it for this I gaze but do not weary?
                              A land of godhead—
Is it for this it bides deep in awe?
                                        Together with heaven,
With earth, long as the sun and moon,
                              It will endure and prosper,
This land whose face, the legend has come down,
                              Is the visage of a god.
Having come this far, once more
                              We launched our ship
And rowed from Naka harbor out to sea:
                              Then the tidewind blew
Down from the Dwelling of Clouds;
                              When I looked far out
Great surging waves towered up,
                              And looking to the beach,
I saw the white waves seething on the shore.
                              In dread of the wild,
Whale-hunting sea, we struggled
                    With the oars of our
Hurtling ship until they bend with strain.
                              Everywhere about
Were islands, but of their multitude
                              In the end it was
The sweet-named isle of Samine
                              Upon whose rocky strand
We built our shelter and then looked about:
                              There on the beach
Loud with the ceaseless, pounding surf,
                              Sprawled with the sand
For your pillow of fine barken cloth,
                              On that rough bed
You had laid yourself; and if I knew
                              Where to find your home,
I would go to bear this word;
                              Or if your wife but knew,
Surely she would come to seek you out;
                              But all unknowing
Even of the jewel-spear road to take,
                              Timidly anxious,
Even now she must be waiting, yearning,
The dear wife that you loved so well.

(232-33, emph. mine)

Although the head note tells us in advance about the dead body, we do not encounter it until Line 36. The deliberate deferral succeeds in conveying the shock of this body's presence as well as the solitude. It appears that all the preceding lines move toward “you” in modification of it. Intriguingly, although the dead man is Hitomaro's ultimate focal point, he writes neither a detailed description nor a speculative biographical account of the deceased, except concerning the latter's imaginary wife. The body remains completely anonymous, its face away from us. In fact, the body no longer has a “face,” a definitive identity. All we can know from this poem is that the dead man is there, lying on the shore, making the white wave his pillow. (Well, is he just sleeping after all?) This anonymity signals the finite existence of the body, which is at this moment coming into our gaze, at the threshold between life and death. The ambiguous presence of the body distinctively signed with its namelessness leaves open the promise of its future translation in different contexts throughout history. To put it more radically, the deceased's face, which is turned away, offers “history” in the future tense.

Many critics have interpreted this famous poem as a record of a means to pacification. In Hitomaro no angô (Hitomaro's Crytograph), Yuka Fujimura explains that, in ancient Japan, those who died from peculiar or unknown causes were often enshrined or deified as kami (a powerful natural force or “god”) in order to pacify their unsettled spirits. Otherwise, it was believed that the dead would become enraged and harm the living (148). Gary L. Ebersole argues the same, writing in explication of Hitomaro's poem: “Here Hitomaro seeks to pacify both the spirit of the land, through stylized praise, and the spirit of the dead, through recalling the love of the dead man's wife and suggesting that if only she knew where the corpse was, she would dutifully lament at his grave site” (64). Ebersole further suggests that Hitomaro identifies with the dead man, provoking alarm on his part and the part of his travelling companions (the group must have included several members of the court) about the precariousness of their lives. Hitomaro's poem thus becomes a memento mori as well as a prophylactic incantation against the dead man's wrath (64).

Fujimura's and Ebersole's interpretations are useful for us in comprehending the ritual practice in which the poet might have been initiated. Nonetheless, their interpretation of the poem limits the poem's possibilities to the hope of reconstructing its cultural or historical context. If the most creative literary “history” or “culture” ought to imagine the very continuation and disruption of texts in their relation to the future, as Tom Hare suggests in his study of Egyptian writing systems (212-46), it is also important to analyze the poem's poetical effects that can be accessible or translatable to our present contexts. Hitomaro's poem presents the dead body in such an equivocal manner that it triggers our memory and imagination, and evokes a translation. I think of the numerous corpses in Sarajevo, Lebanon, Tel Aviv, Somalia, Iraq, Tianamen Square, Hiroshima, and elsewhere (which are “anonymous” to me). I also think of the first dead body I ever witnessed, that of my great-grandfather in Fukushima; and the body I failed to witness, my grandfather, who was killed during World War II. Recontextualization is possible only if a poem has a forceful structure that demands response. Merely depicting a situation is not enough. We need to think of its music, which complicates the semantics as well as the performative effect of repetition (Gumbrecht 170-82). That is why I would like to let Hitomaro's poem speak rather than resort to only contextually specific demarcation. I borrow some methods from formalism and carefully avoid the latter's potential reductionism.

Although acknowledging possible risks, I also want to open the “philosophical” questions that concern the poem's universality. One may be alarmed at such a pronouncement. Philosophical statements, whether they are about structures or meanings of poetry, may falsely proclaim their absolute validity. Such a vaingloriousness is no doubt dangerous, but “philosophical questions” as such do not necessarily belong to the same sphere of interest. They are unavoidably naïve. This naïveté, which philosophical questions enact, prevents us from a sacra-sanctioning domestication of “universality” and instead allows it to become a fluid space of infinite thinking, expanding the horizon. And let us remember that there is no one universal answer, but many universal questions. Hitomaro's poem can be creatively thought out only in such a notion in which we can come back, repeatedly, to “old” questions, such as: What is poetry?

In response to Fujimura's and Ebersole's interpretation of Hitomaro's poem, let us ask this philosophical question: What is “pacification”? Pacification is never a simple gesture of calming the dead. Since the dead fundamentally do not enter into the knowledge of the living, the imagination of the dead's wrath or returning is rooted in the living's non-knowledge. In this sense, the act of pacification secretly links the living and the dead as if to overcome the living's fear caused by their limit of knowledge surrounding “death.” The head note to the poem uses the archaic expression “mi-makareru hito” to describe a “dead man.” Makaru denotes a transitional movement, such as coming and going, entering and exiting, at the superior's will. This word can attach to another word to indicate to a superior the speaker's humility or modesty. The expression can be translated as a “man who departed the body (mi)” in respect to the local divinity. The head note avoids a more direct term, such as to die, and employs this euphemism to describe the dead man's misfortune with respect. This kind of rhetoric later becomes common in misogi or harai, Shintoistic purification.

In many Japanese ritualistic occasions, the verb to die is often replaced with to be cured; blood with sweat; and sickness with rest (Shibuya and Uryû 76). These displacements of ill-omened words are meant to prevent contamination of the living by the dead. Numerous critics have explained this linguistic displacement by way of the concept of kotodama ‘word-spirit’ belief in ancient Japan. This belief suggests that certain words would lead to either “bad” or “good” circumstances. I would like to call attention to this belief without particularizing it as a “ritual,” a “primitive,” or an “ancient” notion. The notion of word-spirit is actually an excellent reminder that every utterance is performative, not innocently constative; and every utterance produces effects.

Pacification involves the avoidance of “bad” words to protect the living from the dead's curse, yet, paradoxically, this linguistic performance connects the living to the dead by ostensibly separating them. The chain of the living's language is laid down to ward off the dead, drawing the borderline between them. The series of displacements is used not only as a shield against the dead but also as an attempt to assure the living's life. The living must keep using their language to establish distance from the dead; the practice of this linguistic play becomes a proof of their life. At the same time, the more the distance widens, the more this gap demands the living's speech. Pacification by linguistic displacement does not separate life and death but establishes a cryptic affinity between them, through the living's mouths and ears. Thus Hitomaro's poem as “pacification” should be analyzed in terms of performance as well as this distance between the living and the dead. Fujimura's and Ebersole's anthropological explication may normalize Hitomaro's poem as a pacification of the dead man's spirit within its “superstitious” and politico-religious backgrounds, but, if we intend to search for the universality of Hitomaro's poem, we need to speculate on the paradoxical relation to the dead body that the poem's pacification performs rather than to the pacification itself.

Hitomaro's poem should be described as a “dedication” that offers its words to the dead body. Let us reread the entire poem. Let us listen to its music. The movement of the poem is cinematic, staging the movement of the poet. Hitomaro is travelling, traversing the ocean, and escaping from a storm. In Japanese, the reader probably recognizes the way vowels, especially u and o, are consciously placed so that not only their resonance creates a melodic echo effect, like a boatman's song, but also their alternative repetition mimics the movement of the waves. Then, after the deliberate deferral, the poet's voice pronounces “you.” Hitomaro uses the word kimi ‘you’, an affectionate pronoun, as if the deceased had always been his friend. At this moment of arrival at “you,” the poem suddenly becomes a song of dedication, a gift to the dead man. What exactly is dedicated? When the poem acknowledges “you,” its movement is halted briefly; this small repose freezes the melody and thereby its time, punctuating a singular moment that distinguishes itself from the previous flow. In other words, the poem not only stages the presence of the dead body on the shore through the melody and the deferral, but it also bestows a unique moment of repose that demands silence for the deceased. Hitomaro offers up both poetic place and time. The poet composes memory for the anonymous dead man.

MEMORIAL:

The dead body remains anonymous. The poet does not try to inscribe identity on the body but instead places himself in the position of a witness to acknowledge and memorialize the dead body's being-there: Yes, I saw you there; there you are. For this nameless dead body is a being that does not even exist there otherwise. Yutaka Tsuchihashi states that the act of seeing in the Manyôshû was meant to stimulate the spirit of the seen and to connect it to the local divine power in order to define the cosmological totality of a speaking subject's realm (225-62). Marking someone's presence by sight also renders the seen; that is to say, it brings the seen into existence, staging the relationship between the witness and the witnessed. As Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit eloquently put it, “There is perhaps no spectacle prior to a certain kind of witnessing. That witnessing produces a spectacle (realizes the move from a relational narrative to relationality itself) that it also contemplates” (66). The act of seeing “you” freezes time to make “you” stand out, like a monument or memorial. Through witnessing, Hitomaro establishes his relationship with the dead body. Nevertheless, given that the latter is never able to answer to the poet's voice, how should we understand this relation, which appears to be terribly non-reciprocal?

The dead body remains monumentally silent; the person addressed (“you”) does not respond to the poet. Indeed, Hitomaro knows that the dead man is forever speechless (or in-fans), so what is the point of speaking to it and initiating friendship with it? At Emmanuel Levinas's funeral (27 December 1995), Jacques Derrida quoted his deceased friend: “There is here an end that always has the ambiguity of a departure without return, of a passing away but also of a scandal (‘Is it really possible that he's dead?’) of non-response and of my responsibility” (Adieu 5). Derrida immediately comments: “Death: not, first of all, annihilation, non-being, or nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivor of the ‘without-response.’” And it entails a survivor's “guilt”; Derrida alludes to Levinas again: “But it is a guilt without fault and without debt; it is, in truth, an entrusted responsibility, entrusted in a moment of unparalleled emotion, at the moment when death remains the absolute ex-ception” (6, emph. Derrida's).

In other words, death places us before the hiatus that is perpetually agape, the absence that is also the source of our “guilt,” and in this gap echoes our speech. The dead body in Hitomaro's poem demonstrates its non-response as an irrefutable fact. It is an unsettling, uncanny experience. While the corpse still maintains the living human's appearance, its face is forever turning away from the poet. The corpse's silence, at the same time, demands the poet's response, words, and music. The poet's song is then the expression of his response-ibility, out of his “guilt without fault and without debt.” Perhaps the experience of non-response caused by the presence of the dead body is the ambivalent origin of compassion, the etymology of which contains the Latin word pati ‘to suffer.’ There is a pain that compels us to speak. But how can we talk about this pain or grief philosophically? Maurice Blanchot insists on the necessity of “learning to think with grief” ‘apprends à penser avec douleur’ (219), a task at once urgent and difficult.

The survivor's responsibility, as Hitomaro demonstrates, is to create an effective memorial, commemorating the dead person or thing. This is, however, not an easy assignment. We must think inventively and carefully, for example, where the memorial should be built, which material should be used, and what kinds of inscriptions should be written on it. Nevertheless, commemoration of the dead is contradictory: it is dedicated to the dead but fundamentally concerns the survivor, and oftentimes is a public sphere. The best memorial does not aim to reconstruct or resurrect the dead, but it should provoke the dead's silence in a certain poignant and helpless manner to the living so that the latter can stop and think. That is why it would be insufficient and purposeless to merely narrate a deceased person's biography. Effective memorials are not so much interested in conveying stories or messages as they are in staging the dead's speechlessness, which breaks up our illusion of communication with the dead. Hitomaro's poem is a poetical event in which the dead body's silence takes place. The poet's job is not to give voice to the deceased but rather to make its silence present to “us,” for its silence opens up a place of ethics: memorial.

It is necessary to analyze further the structure of Hitomaro's poem, especially the use of apostrophe by Hitomaro. An apostrophe is a figure of speech in which an inanimate object is addressed. (Yet it is true that a dead body cannot be easily categorized as an “inanimate object.”) Jonathan Culler warns that it would be mere teleological reduction to translate the addressee of an apostrophe (such as a rose in Blake and a Grecian urn in Keats) conveniently into a moral concept, such as “divine spirit” or some other metaphysicality (140). Reading apostrophic verse requires one to make a detour from a conventional interpretative mode in order to see what the work does rather than what it simply means, because apostrophe is essentially performative.

It should be clear by now that Hitomaro's poem is apostrophic. This figure of speech is also effectively demonstrated in one of the two short envoys or hanka ‘returning song’ following the long poem:

                    And you who lie asleep
Where the long waves wash ashore,
                    Taking this rough strand
For a pillow of fine barken cloth
Where you may gently rest your head …
                    Okitsunami
Kiyoru ariso o
                    Shikitae no
Makura to makite
Naseru kimi kamo

(Cranston 233)

Cranston's translation is superb, but the last line falls slightly short in the apostrophic effect. In the original, it ends with “kimi ‘you’ kamo ‘an emotional suffix’.” With the help of carefully placed vowels (it begins with o and ends with the same vowel), the entire poem leaves an ecstatic timbre, remarking the irreducible presence of “you.” As with the long poem, this short poem does not render the dead body into an abstract concept or message, but it forcibly places “you” before us in stark apostrophe. Culler states: “The vocative of apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship which helps to construct him” (142), and referring to Shelley: “I, you, they are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind” (148, emph. Culler's). In other words, the poet constructs his subjectivity by speaking to an inanimate object. So this subjectivity cannot be solipsistic: bouncing off of or letting his speech be swallowed up by the object's silence (let us recall Keats's hysteric exclamation: “Cold pastoral!”), the poet's own speech act complicates and even risks the stability of his subjectivity. Culler continues: “Brought together by apostrophes, they [natural objects] function as nodes or concretizations of stages in a drama of mind. This internalization is important because it works against the narrative and its accompaniments: sequentiality, causality, time, teleological meaning” (148). Therefore, what constitutes the poet turns out to be this violent relation to the other that maintains an adamant silence.

Apostrophe stages the speaking “I” as relationality itself. In the dynamic relation between the poet and the nameless dead body, Hitomaro's subjectivity is not only exposed to this fearful experience but also demonstrates that the poet's speech act is always already his relation to the dead man. The poem demonstrates this fact as a poetical event. To quote Culler once more: “The very brazenness with which apostrophe declares its strangeness is crucial, an indication that what is at issue is not a predictable relation between a signifier and signified, a form and its meaning, but the incalculable force of an event. Apostrophe is not the representation of an event; if it works, it produces a fictive, discursive event” (152). In this light, Hitomaro's poetical event goes beyond the categories of “subject” and “object,” or they cease to be the poem's main interest. When the instance of “you” comes into presence, the poem transforms itself into an event of dislocation of these presumed ontological categories. The dead man is, first of all, a dislocated body, with no name, no address, and no reference, washed up on the shore, baring himself to the precariousness of the external world. Confronting the monumental muteness of the dead body as well as its uncanny reminiscence of the living form, the poet loses assurance of his existence; his subjectivity experiences the dislocation of what seemed stable ground.

Still, dislocation is relation. Jean-Luc Nancy critiques Heidegger's famous passage on a stone (“The stone is without world”), stating that “there is not ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ but, rather, there are sites and places, distances: a possible world that is already a world” (61, emph. Nancy's). Nancy departs from the prejudice of anthropological subjectivity to radicalize ontology. Relation, or “touching” as Nancy terms it, does not signify active subjugation of objects, but instead signifies ambiguous spatiality in which any existence already positions itself. Like a stone on the surface, there is a touching that separates; it touches others by distancing itself from them. In the same manner, Hitomaro's poem gives us a clue about what effective memorial should do: it should bring forth the dead's homelessness and muteness to produce and to maintain a distance.

TELE-COMMUNITY:

In any case, there would be no future without repetition.

—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

A memorial encrypts signs designed to commemorate the dead, yet it is motivated by our forgetfulness. We can say that a memorial is haunted by forgetfulness and that this haunting is also the relationality to the dead. Thus, an effective memorial does not ask us to remember but affirms the fact that we forget. This incompetence already immanent in our speech is also the painful origin of poetry. We desire a rhythmical piece of composition so that we can repeat, learn by heart, and acknowledge our forgetfulness, which is always already in touch with the “dead.” In this sense, poetry does not preserve memory but is endlessly in the process of producing it through repetition. “Memory” here does not mean the recollection of anecdotes from the past but a unique place and time in the present that give us over to thinking. Heidegger proclaims in his lecture: “Memory is the gathering and convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thought about first of all. Memory is the gathering of recollection, thinking back” (11). Poetry allows us to “think back,” that is, to think with no end: this infinite commitment becomes “memory.” We are not promised reconstruction but only time to think. That is why poetry resists containment in an appropriated space of the past; it constantly calls to the outside, to new readers yet to come, to the future.

Through Hitomaro's poem, we learn that apostrophe is the act of sending words to a silent addressee. Like a relay of signals traversing the air or a telephone line, the gesture of addressing generates a movement, the flow of language, evoking a rhythm and melody. Apostrophe has great affinity with the essence of tele-‘distance’ communication. But what exactly does this concept offer us? Avital Ronell opens her first chapter of The Telephone Book with: “And yet, you're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you're its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don't know who's calling or what you are going to be called upon to do, and, still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. Who answers the call of the telephone, the call of duty, and accounts for the taxes it appears to impose?” (2). Conceptualizing the telephone as an inexorable relationality to the unknown other, Ronell suggests that “a call,” a sign or gesture that inspires thinking, reaches us, but the complicated task is how to respond to it and how to deal with “taxes,” or debts, that a call imposes. Ronell warns that there is no such a thing as a “free call”; our automatic response of “Yes,” this affirmative gesture, is often followed by a question mark: “Yes?” (5).

Such an ambivalent response must have been the first response of Hitomaro. The dead body's presence as well as muteness moves the poet. Here, silence speaks. It signals, like a telephone call. But the ultimate question rings in vain: Yes? Who is it? In her later work, Finitude's Score, Ronell finds the poetics of telecommunication in the experience of finitude: “As for me, to the degree that I am writing this to you, I never simply pose my solitariness alone. The one for whom I-write: ‘The one for whom I write is the one whom one cannot know’ [Bataille]. It is precisely the unknown and the relation to the unknown that exposes me to death or finitude. […] What I-write can never become absolute. Its inescapable temporal predicament means that no final definition will ever stabilize or settle this writing” (1). Ronell articulates writing as receiving from and sending a call to the unknown other. The sense of mourning persists in writing because we are always writing to the dead and also written by the dead. Only in this notion does Bataille's dream of his ideal “community,” to which Ronell alludes, become true: the community of the unknown who do not have communities. But, importantly, this task requires a different mode of writing. The word in the title of Ronell's book, “score,” not only has political connotations but also implies the desire for poetical language in philosophy, which will radicalize the notion of tele-communication.

If the essence of tele-communication consists of distant communication, that is, a certain mode of relation enabled by dislocation, we need to think of what kind of a community is possible through this communication. Our relation to the dead relies on tele-communication, but the obvious problem here is that there is no response coming through from the other side of the line: Are you still there? Isn't it true that telecommunication magnifies and even creates a distance? What is the effect of this distancing through communication? We then must radicalize the entire notion of this “communication.”

Let us go back to Hitomaro's poem. While he demonstrates the dead body's muteness that produces a distance between the deceased and the poet, he calls the nameless corpse “kimi” ‘you’. Kimi is an esteemed or affectionate pronoun that was used as an intimate “you” as well as a pronoun addressing a superior, such as an emperor. Furthermore, Hitomaro chose to use the possessive marker “ga” ‘kimi ga’ instead of “no.” Susumu Ôno states that there were probably two particles to indicate the subject's relation to the object in Hitomaro's time: “no” was often used when the subject was too peculiar or pious to be familiarized, while “ga” was employed when the subject was considered to be part of the speaker's social frame (178-79). Therefore, the employment of “kimi” and the choice of the particle indicate that the poet is inviting the nameless stranger inside his community. But the poem itself does not familiarize the dead man; on the contrary, it makes little effort to specify either his homeland or his social status. The dead man remains unfamiliar and unidentified.

By inviting the other inside while preserving its otherness, the poet is inevitably re-mapping the boundary of his given community or, more radically, even rewriting the very notion of what a community should be. Inviting inside this dead friend, whose name he does not even know, the poet interrupts the comfortable site of his community and in turn opens it up. This is more than facing mortality. Through his poetical composition of dedication and memorialization, Hitomaro places finitude at the heart of his community. Consequently, it is not possible for this community to close itself off; the boundary is perpetually expandable. To put it more precisely, we no longer know how to describe the boundary of this community in conventional spatial terms. The threshold between the dead and the living, this indeterminable spacing or distancing becomes itself a so-called community. Hitomaro's poem becomes a poem-public-space par excellence, which is infinitely open to “us.”

It is also important to note that Hitomaro is not only addressing the dead man but also, less directly, the fictive wife of the deceased, whom the poet has indeed never met. No one knows whether she really exists. However, such a factuality is not important. All we should recognize is that Hitomaro is calling, addressing his words to her. Knowing that the dead man's wife will not hear, the poet's words are actually forwarded to “us.” Because the poem can be recited and even learned by heart, the poet's position is always transferable to ours. However, repetition should not exhaust the effect of the poem; on the contrary, repetition strengthens it because through repetition the poem reveals the mortality immanent in language, that is, the belatedness of words that at once leaves us helpless and drives us to speak more. Judith Butler says that responsibility is “linked with speech as repetition, not as origination” (39). Speech always accompanies a sense of distance, dislocation, and mourning, for it never fully reaches an addressee. It is always late. The haunting distance from “you” resides in our speech, but, thanks to this distance, we can respond or make a telephone call.

Hitomaro's poem also reminds us that we never know who will pick up our call. As if to reflect the unpredictability of telecommunication, the editor of the Man'yôshû, which contains a series of Hitomaro's masterpieces, follows the aforementioned poem by the same poet's last poem (#361), which is Hitomaro's visualization of his own death, Hitomaro's wife's poems (#362-63), and one unknown poet's response to Hitomaro's last poem (#364). This insightful editing succeeds in illustrating the way Hitomaro's poetic calling invites other poets' voices, producing a space of interrelation (to make sure, this “space” did not exist prior to these correspondences), a future community or public space. It is absolutely necessary to cite these poems here:

361: A poem composed by Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro sorrowing over himself as he lay at the point of death in Iwami Province

          On Kamo Mountain
Embedded among boulders
          Here I rest my head—
Unknowing, my beloved wife
Must even now be waiting.

(Cranston 234)

362-63: Two poems composed by his wife, a maiden of the Yosami, when Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro died

                    You for whom I wait
Day after day, do they not
                    Say you lie mingled
With the shells, my love,
In the bed of Pebble River?
                    To meet face to face—
We shall not meet so any more;
                    Rise up, O clouds,
Stand along Pebble River—
I would gaze and remember.

(234-35)

364: A poem in reply by Tajihi no Mahito [personal name missing], in imitation of the sentiment of Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro

                    Who will bear the word
That I am here, am pillowed
                    Amid the gems of sea
Washed by wild waters in to rest
Along the wave-wet shore?

(235)

Thanks to the editor's intelligent work, these responses generate a relay of delayed voices. None of the voices harmoniously corresponds; in fact, they are out of sync. Hitomaro's death poem is addressed to his own wife, knowing that her correspondence would not reach him before his death; his wife's poems are addressed to Hitomaro (“kimi”), who cannot possibly return her call; the last one, alluding to Hitomaro's long poem (#358), laments the impossibility of direct correspondence imposed on the poet by the distance. The addressees remain dislocated and silent. None of the poets can expect a direct reply from them. At the same time, the more they fail to get direct responses, the more their tele-communities' possibility expands. These poems perpetuate the addressees' silence so that it traverses different planes and travels further, and passing by different regions, it insists on more translation, more memories.

What is shared in this poem-as-tele-community is the silence of the dead; they share the irreducible distance, the perpetual spacing. What is shared is this poignant knowledge that the dead's reply is infinitely delayed. But this experience invites the act of speaking, singing, repetition, and sharing. That is why those who dream of overcoming death could not do so without also overcoming language. The immortal would not know poetry.

SHORE 2:

A dead body has been washed up on the shore. (Was it you?) The shore is a threshold, where the water meets the land. But the waves are constantly in motion, blurring the boundary, mocking our geometric imagination. The dead body lies on this threshold, making the white waves his pillow. Is he listening to the sounds of the waves? Does he feel their repetitive rhythm? He never responds to our question, but we still strive to hear the waves as if we could do so through his ears. We speak to it. Murmuring to silence, silence to murmuring. This is our poetry, always in the dead body's ears.

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