Throughout Hiromi Itō’s novel The Thorn Puller, a semi-fictionalized version of the author travels back and forth across the Pacific, visiting her elderly parents in Japan and her family in Southern California. In Japan, she shepherds her parents through health crises and daily infirmities; in California, she fights viciously with her ailing husband, who is thirty years her senior. With three daughters of varied ages, she is low on time and money. She has been praying to the Thorn-Pulling Jizo, a Buddhist figure worshipped in Tokyo’s Sugamo neighborhood, asking him to remove the thorns of suffering from herself and her loved ones, but everyone continues to suffer.
Itō is, in both her real and fictional forms, a feminist poet celebrated in Japan since the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, we find her in her fifties, saddled with the burdens of caregiving, surrounded by suffering but also an archetypal sufferer herself; she has unique knowledge of the elaborate forms of self-sacrifice expected of her as a mother and daughter in each country, but lives in a world that has not caught up with her insights. Nowhere is she more misunderstood than in her marriage, a drama of linguistic fallibility in which the writer and thinker is illegible to her chosen partner. She “always [has] to rephrase [herself] for him” (74). In one conversation, she hopes to share a Japanese legend with him, then demurs: “The words of this old story rose to my tongue, but I suppressed them… Over the decade we’d spent together, I’d given up on my husband more times than I could count, thinking there was no way he could understand me” (60). Frustrated, she throws a peach, which lodges in his thigh.
“I say this all metaphorically, of course,” Itō writes. “The peach is a metaphor, the thorns are metaphors, my husband and mother and father are metaphors, the summer heat and winter cold are metaphors, everything is a metaphor. The only thing that isn’t a metaphor is me living as myself, and that’s all I had to hold onto” (69). The situation remains opaque: Is language an object as hard as a peach? Or are life’s flesh-and-blood fixtures just metaphors in a quest for meaning?
Such questions are left open in Itō’s writing, where language has an intensely physical character. This is a world in which words are a source of embodied suffering and occasionally a balm, where they rise up to the tongue or are pushed out by the lips. As an often-reluctant caregiver, Itō has spent ample time listening to the soliloquies of the human lifespan, from the babbling infant searching for the language that will fill their life to the muttering nonagenarian reprising it. In Itō’s literary vision, life unfolds more as a stream of language than a series of plot points. With each phase of life she records, Itō shows how language emerges from the rituals of social reproduction that mark the coming and going of generations, from childbirth to eldercare.
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The Thorn Puller, though, is non-metaphorical enough that after it was serialized in a Japanese literary magazine in 2006 and 2007, Itō requested that the English-language translation be deferred until the death of her partner, who did not speak Japanese.[1] That way, he would not know that she had described their fights in lurid detail. “That would just lead to more fights,” she said.[2] Itō’s longtime translator Jeffrey Angles began work on the book after her partner’s death in 2016.
Death, aging, suffering—these subjects are, in some ways, a departure from the material that cemented Itō’s cultural status and occasionally sparked tabloid coverage in Japan in the 1980s, writing that was sexual, frank, funny, often grotesque, always weird:
I breathed in as much dust as I could from the surroundings, then held it in without expelling it. In other words, I do not fit into the household order of things.[3]
These early works took risks with language, skewered motherhood, and joked about abortion:
Congratulations on killing Tomo-kun
Congratulations on your destruction
Mari-san
How about getting rid of Nonoho-chan?[4]
But The Thorn Puller does not turn away from the subject matter that led Japanese critics to call Itō “the poet of childbirth.”[5] She interprets the problems of middle age like a sculptor pouring new resin over old forms. As she assists her parents and reflects on their shared lives, she recalls the hardened traumas and hard-won insights of her younger self: “a series of bad love affairs—a whole string of marriages, divorces, and abortions” (127). Every generation of women in the fictionalized Itō’s family has undergone similar periods of emotional turmoil closely linked to sex and reproduction. Her mother “was alone, she was beaten, she was sold, she was bought,” writes Itō. “She gave birth to children she couldn’t care for. She got pregnant and had an abortion, then later, a miscarriage” (46–47).
These reproductive burdens are at the base of so much suffering across generations that they have accrued a kind of warmth, like old friends who help Itō interpret the present. “I can talk on and on about menstruation—it seems I always have more to say,” she muses (279). After all, she knows how to live with her period “far better than [with her] own husband” (82). Elsewhere she writes that a medical procedure she receives is actually “a lot like getting an abortion. You know, the old-fashioned way with curettage” (278). She collects reproductive experiences much as she collects language, interpreting her present responsibilities through the weight of personal history. To age out of abortions is not to graduate from the problems of the body—physical reproduction is only the first item on a lifelong list of human responsibilities which demand vigilance. Itō rattles them off: “I thought of all the things I needed to do. / Make Yokiko happy. / Make Aiko happy”—her two youngest daughters—“Watch over Mom and Dad to the end, then stay with my husband to help him” (283).
Attuned to these responsibilities, droning on like a generator in the background of life, Itō explores the many linguistic registers that arise from them. Her early poems on childrearing, for instance, may have drawn the most ire for their treatment of abortion, infanticide, and female sexuality, but equally present (and usually tied up with these topics) is the issue of language-learning. In her 1986 poem “Lana Learning Language,” she meditates on language acquisition through a strange narrative of a human woman raising a chimpanzee, Lana, as her adopted child: “One night, when no one was at the keyboard / To read Lana’s requests / She made the sentence / (To the machine) / Please machine tickle come into room period.”[6] Elsewhere, Itō mimics the structure of grammatical exercises—“On days I can write poetry, I masturbate / On days I can write poetry, I do not masturbate / On days I cannot write poetry, I masturbate / On days I cannot write poetry, I do not masturbate”—which devolve into baby sounds: “iiyoo / iiyoo / iiyoo.”[7]
Itō’s experiences of immigration and motherhood deepen her insights into language-learning. Before the events of The Thorn Puller, she left her first marriage in Kumamoto and immigrated to the US with her children. This rupture placed her in a new maternal role, staging a new family life. She was also, like the infants of her earlier poems, faced with a new world, struggling to learn a new language. In her 2004–5 serial narrative poem “Wild Grass on the Riverbank,” two migrant children have lost their grasp on language, so they “push out sounds with our lips and palates / … extract them from our noses, catch them on our tongues.” In this piece, Itō writes of being alienated, confused, restored to a state of dependence on men and bureaucracies. But language also becomes, once again, a raw material, more magma than rock: hot, visceral, “[spilling] out unintentionally.”[8] Like a child, she is open to new meaning, but now she is an adult, capable of examining that meaning as it lands fresh in her ears.[9]
It is this new attention to the mechanics of speech, Itō has said, that inspired the unique form of The Thorn Puller.[10] Though the book is billed as Itō’s first novel translated into English, Itō refers to it as a long poem, which rings true: it reads like less an autobiographical narrative than a repository of all the literary references, folktales, and idioms that populate Itō’s internal world. Each chapter concludes with a list of “borrowed voices,” recording all the references contained within: “I borrowed voices from the poet Mitsuharu Kaneko’s poem ‘Sink,’ Chuya Nakahara’s poem ‘Frenzy on an Autumn Day,’ Genshin’s treatise Essays on Rebirth into the Pure Land, and the Buddhist prayer ‘Hymn to Jizo’” (194).
This citational style may seem more archival than personal, an oddly distant toolbox for writing about intensely corporeal activities like caregiving and the infirmity of old age. But Itō’s recall for bits of memorable language comes from the same source as her ability to write from embodied experience: her ear. She has a singular knack for deriving language from all aspects of life and reproducing what she hears, whether from literature or from the kind of physical experience often said to evade language. When writing about the body, she often emerges from its recesses yielding new poetic sounds. As she helps her mother adjust on the toilet, her mother mutters the phrase “yotto,” which signifies effort. Soon yotto punctuates the record of her mother’s suffering: “Yotto. She sank in heavily.… she swayed her body as she leaned forward. Yotto” (33). The distance between experience and utterance feels at times negligible, like Itō is transcribing life through a stethoscope. Visceral as they may be, reproductive rituals are not unspeakable, nor are they roped off from intellectual life. They are, rather, an exceptional vantage point for asking elemental questions of language: Where does it come from? What does it mean to develop a voice of our own?
It may be common sense that we do not invent our spoken languages. But it is uncommon to ask: What reservoir do we draw from when we choose our words, if not our pure intellect, aided by perfect access to the dictionary of our mother tongues? The idea of using “borrowed voices” emerged from Itō’s experiences learning English, when she would hear a phrase and then unwittingly incorporate it into her own speech, before remembering: “‘so-and-so said that, in such-and-such tone of voice.’”[11] This description recalls echolalia—the act, nearly universal among children learning language, of parroting phrases in the same inflection in which they were spoken. Itō formalizes what toddlers know: people teach us to speak, not only once, but throughout our lives. Phrases, once introduced, punctuate her lexicon, bearing the weight of their original proclamation and their subsequent use. “Man, I’m really working up a sweat!” says a rabbit in a folktale in Itō’s memory, after meting out relentless punishment to a trickster (132). “I’m really working up a sweat,” says Itō’s fictionalized daughter Aiko on a punishingly hot day of airport travel (134). Itō is interested in words that are lived in, ideally spoken. Language is “blood covered meaning.”[12]
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In the past, some Japanese critics and poets have deemed Itō a “shamaness” for her ability to channel cultural consciousness in her poetry, and she has embraced the label.[13] Readers turning to Itō for feminist insight might bristle at the way this descriptor portrays the female writer as a vessel and not a voice. But Itō does not credit any outside source with a voice more original than her own. “The language that enters my ears, comes out my mouth / And disappears is all my own / Something I want to claim,” she wrote in 1993.[14] In that sense, she is no one’s vessel, she simply declines to put much stock in original authorship.
This irreverence is manifest in her lists of “borrowed voices,” which place everyday language on the same plane as classical works of literature. Her eclectic sources might tempt the explanation that she is “updating” a canon, but she offers a different metaphor for the entwinement of literary objects across time—not the canon but the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage form is, if anything, anti-canonical, a catalog of literary knowledge defined by Itō’s lived aperture rather than an abstract taxonomy. The back-and-forth serial structure of the book is inspired by the mythic form of sekkyō-bushi, described by Jeffrey Angles as “religious stories that wandering storytellers and priests told on bridges, crossroads, temples, shrines—just about anyplace where people naturally gathered.”[15] Itō identifies with these traveling storytellers: “‘Coming and going’ can mean just what it sounds like—a perfect way to describe my life—but the phrase also describes the unsettled life of a monk who wanders from place to place” (174). She uses the pilgrimage as a metaphor for her vertiginous travels across the Pacific and her family’s endless pinballing through hospital systems, but it also gives form to her life’s project of linguistic accumulation.
The religious allegory of the pilgrimage raises questions about faith and death, but its most meaningful function within the book is to ground Itō’s language-gathering in time, place, and social context, tracing the experiences through which she collected her words. Some words came to her by way of the books on her shelves, others from a walk with a poet friend in the park, others from a play sent in the mail by a friend, still others from a story passed down by her mother’s mother’s mother. The pilgrim collects and repurposes stories as she goes. The fruits of reading and writing are equally social, equally time-bound, continuous with the process of linguistic accumulation that begins at birth. We fold these words, all of them, into ourselves as we construct our selves. In this way, the maturation of the author is indistinct from the maturation of the human. By claiming a polyphony of voices as her own, Itō asks readers to hear not just the author but the many voices that mothered the author—as if to say: go, take your journey, write it all down, but don’t forget who taught you how to speak.
Notes:
[1] In the novel, Itō refers to her partner as her husband, but the two were not married in real life.
[2] Hiromi Itō, “Author Hiromi Ito Reveals Her Approach to Writing,” interview by Eric Margolis, Tokyo Weekender, December 20, 2022, https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/books-literature-art_and_culture/hiromi-ito-interview-thorn-puller/.
[3] Itō, “Logical Like a Baby,” in Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, trans. Jeffrey Angles (London: Tilted Axis Press, 2020), 34–35.
[4] Itō, “Killing Kanoko,” in Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 60–61.
[5] Jeffrey Angles, translator’s introduction to Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 6.
[6] Itō, “Lana Learning Language,” in Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 69.
[7] Itō, “Logical Like a Baby,” 35, 38.
[8] Itō, “Wild Grass on the Riverbank,” in Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 143.
[9] For a separate discussion of “Wild Grass on the Riverbank,” see Zhou Sivan, “Hiromi Itō, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Translated by Jeffrey Angles,” Chicago Review, July 29, 2018, https://www.chicagoreview.org/hiromi-ito-wild-grass-on-the-riverbank-translated-by-jeffrey-angles/.
[10] Itō, “Author Hiromi Ito Reveals.”
[11] Itō, “Author Hiromi Ito Reveals.”
[12] Itō, “The Maltreatment of Meaning,” in Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 73.
[13] Angles, translator’s introduction, Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 5.
[14] Itō, “Nashite Mounen,” in Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 90.
[15] Itō, “Author Hiromi Ito Reveals,” and Angles, translator’s introduction to Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 10.