The Nikkei is an interesting newspaper. Today’s Nikkei features Kunio Tsukamoto on both the front page and the final page.
On the front page, the “Shunju” column discusses him. Its main point is elsewhere, though: it introduces his enduring interest in “the evocative expanse of proper nouns woven by kanji characters, such as place names and surnames,” then introduces the efforts of legislators from across party lines to enact the Act on Promotion of Character and Print Culture. It concludes: “Through familiar materials such as place names and personal names, we want to seek a path for sharing kanji culture.”
On the other hand, the final page carries a column entitled “Mourning Kunio Tsukamoto,” written by the tanka poet Takashi Okai, who promoted contemporary tanka together with him. Its subtitle is “Pursuing Poetry Beyond the ‘Self.’” As one would expect, the writing is excellent. At the beginning, he quotes a poem from Tsukamoto’s debut tanka collection, The Story of a Water Burial, published by Methode in Showa 26, August.
At the bottom of the sea, night after night, quietly dissolving,
it must be. Both aircraft carriers and stokers.
5 cm below that dignified prose is Junichi Watanabe’s serialized pornographic novel, A Penal Colony of Love. This installment begins with Fuyuka being penetrated from behind by Kikuji; she writhes and pleads, moaning, “Kill me, please…”; she is strangled, cries out, “I’m coming, I’m coming…,” and “goes away to a distant world.” Well, this too is an aesthetic of erotic love…
Truly, it is a strange newspaper.
Related posts
My 7 Recommended Books
Long ago there was something called the #7BookCoverChallenge, intended to help promote a culture of reading. “To participate, post a photograph of the cover of one…
Twitter Renga (collaborative linked verse)
At the after-party following a GLOCOM study session, we composed a Twitter renga, among other things. Links to the original tweets and such can be found…
Of August
After the late-August typhoon, in the autumn sky, mackerel-scale clouds seem to be falling.