Poetic Musings: Red Flag Tanka by Shuji Terayama

a summer butterfly

passes over me 

as I sell Red Flag

mother must be tilling

the rice field in my hometown

Kaleidoscope, 2007 

Shuji Terayama

Commentary: Many of Terayama's tanka read "like scenes from a movie, stage play, or short story" (Terayama, p. 7). The stories he writes in his tanka are different from those of his real life. In the "Red Flag tanka," Terayama's dramatic construction of a montage of  two scenes: one is about the speaker who has come to Tyoko, selling the communist newspaper, Akahata / Red Flag, and the other is about his mother, who now lives in his hometown , tilling the rice field. 

This tanka not only overlaps the life in reality of Terayama who came from Aomori to study at Waseda University in Tyoko while his mother was working, even if not in the rice field, at a US military base to send him money, but also raises "an ethical question at the heart of left-wing politics: who will bear the labor burden on the road to social change?" (Ridgely, p. 27) 

Most of his critics cared little about the ethical dilemma or the suggestive power of the image of a summer butterfly that might transcend and bridge mother and child (ibid.), but more about the questions regarding if Terayama had ever actually sold the communist newspaper, or if he was really a communist, or if his mother was a farm worker. He addressed these challenging questions at a published round table shortly after his debut:

I'd like to unravel one more thing: the problem of fiction. It seems that until now whenever people say fiction they only ever mean absolute fantasy I feel that we've got to integrate something else we might call "the fiction of possibility" [kanosei fikushon] into our work. For example, when I composed the poem, " a summer butterfly passes over me as I sell Red Flag," everyone instantly started asking: "you sold Red Flag?" or  "stop lying" or "you are dishonest." Kitamura and I had a long debate about this the other day, and it's true, I have never sold Red Flag, but I know a lot of people who do, and when I muster up my empathy for those people I feel justified in saying "I sell Red Flag." By giving tanka primary significance and subordinating everyday life to the poem, I was able to live within a consciousness that was selling Red Flag, even if I hadn't physically stood there selling it. We've got to start using this type of fiction of possibility (ibid., p. 29)

-- excerpted from To the Lighthouse: Shuji Terayama's Tanka Poetics, "Fiction of Possibility"

References:

Ridgely, Steven C., Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Terayama, Shuji, Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayama, translated by Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 2008