When I first visited Kōra Rumiko’s archive in the summer of 2024, I noticed the scribbled words taped to a large bookshelf: “For donation to the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature,” which is where her eventual official archives would be held. Kōra’s daughter, Mihoko-san, explained to me that before her death, Kōra was explicit about how she wanted her manuscripts, correspondences, scrapbooks, and published works—all meticulously kept and organized—to be available to as many people as possible. She wanted her life’s work, her labor, to be accessible to scholars, and this idea of labor as well as the philosophy of sharing, of community building, of being generous with knowledge, comes up time and time again in her literary, scholarly, and activist work.

Born in 1932, Kōra would have witnessed an unstable and fluctuating Japan during her childhood as it overlapped with the country’s disastrous involvement in World War II. Her early adulthood coincided with the American occupation and continued political upheaval. In the 50s when Kōra began writing poetry, Japan was transforming into an economic powerhouse. Her early obsession with object and labor in her poetry is only logical given that she witnessed the rapid industrialization of her country in a frantic effort to rebuild itself. This obsession also explains, in some part, her turn towards ecological themes in her later works, as she sought to direct her readers towards the natural world through feminist imagery and Japanese mythology. Her legacy is a culmination of decades of observing the ever-changing world, writing in response to—and very much against—the destructive forces of capitalism and colonialism. Though little of her work is translated into English, she is certainly a pioneering figure in postwar feminist poetry and academic circles in Japan.

I began reading Kōra’s work purely out of curiosity and coincidence—I had found her selected works in the university library. I was particularly drawn to the collection 場所 (Basho, literally, “Place”), which I have translated as Site, because of its obsession with objects and labor. I had been trying to conceptualize the act of translation as labor, embodied and physical, often erased and underpaid, and the object that we create through this labor, influenced and shaped by our own physical and environmental constraints. At this time, I was also preoccupied with the dynamic nature of texts and how a translation cannot claim holistic cohesiveness in perpetuity; there are infinite iterations a translation can take, and each translation, including mine, captures a translation-moment-in-time, one of many that have and will exist. This enmeshing of labor, event, and object, the friction it breeds, continues to fascinate me.

Visiting the archives put me face to face with material that was tangible proof of what existed in all, if not most, of the text’s different drafts, which also augmented the instability of the source text and the implications it had on a translation. It further demonstrated the idea that a translation is a dynamic process that births a dynamic text. Kōra’s poetic intentions complement this fact: “[t]o excavate a deeply unified world inside or at the depths of reality […] To capture the movement and experimentation of a poet moving back and forth from inside and outside of themselves.”

Looking back on her career, Kōra writes in 2005, “[i]t has always been my method, philosophy, and goal to speak about objects both through and as objects, in relation to Marxist thinking, in that I want to liberate the past labor (and the illusions projected by humans) that is trapped in the object. Objects are always the intersection of history.” And it is through the seemingly normal objects she chooses for her poems—belts, rooms, manhole covers—that the poet reveals a history preserved by the objects. The pavement holds “abandoned dreams”; pipes, metals, and machine presses have the power to “haunt [men] like regret”; the last lingering leaf “contorts time and space / Of the universe.”

As I translated Site, I found myself oscillating back and forth, inside and outside the layers of labor that exist in the text as an object, revealed to me through the manuscripts. I realized my translation is another ever-changing artifact with its own history of labor, containing all layers of labor trapped in Site.

Site is a text that demands to be translated as a collection—its stylistic and thematic intentionality is woven into the progression of poems. Together, they create a confluence of friction that probe the poet’s main inquiry into the experience of objects and its intersection with the politics of postwar Japan. The collection showcases a kaleidoscope of form in its many modes, but cohesiveness through tone and theme. One mode resembles the Pongian prose poem, which zooms in on a singular object, exemplified in poems like “BELTS”:

BELTS

hang from above        with different lengths         various hues
an incredible resilience        how they measure up       to their
own lengths                as they hang their tongues               in a
contest of lengths         in the ways of their material existence
is         a longing         from being forced inward          people
pause         passing in front of the old store           sensing tips
stirring      many words hang      enduring death        standing
ready to protect        the wavering words        I become        a
single coarse belt

But the “thing” poems occasionally break out of their boxed up, caesura-broken form as in “Room”:

ROOM

Extreme light particles pile in the room

Around the tatami seams under the table
Exitless time clings to me

Between the particles
Shadow and form solidified long ago
Now wake and breathe
Faint exhalations on my face

Particles overlap        attract
Display the building of a static white wall
Of routine        of living         of gestures       of love

Their utterances        intentions
Mingle with the scent of quiet desire
Like fluttering wings heard
From the depths of the wall

On top of stilled particles:
The light piercing my flesh
The strained time in the white wall

I overlay sheets of my emptiness
Burrow deep enough so I cannot move
In the square space of the room

Kora chooses sparse, tanka-esque form for a poem like “A Station / At Night”:

A Station / At Night

           1.
Machines whirl at the brink of night
Belonging to quartz and roses

           2.
Naked waters breathe on the plateau
Where electrical lines sway

           3.
A geometric clock upsets
The pleats of silence

           4.
On the night when the defeated scream
Shadowed troops mobilize

The most significant mode in Site is the long, lyrical sequences which bookend the collection. The explosive eponymous opening poem, “SITE,” merges the Pongian “thing” poem and the lyric, fusing both to create a narrative around a single object, which in this case, as I have read it, is the site of protest, confronting the meaning of collective existence and its deficiencies. This was a particularly pressing question for Kōra when she wrote the collection, having witnessed the rise and fall of the 1960 Student Protests and the death of a female college student, Kanba Michiko, who died participating in the demonstrations.

SITE   June 1960

Land lies on its side like aged skin luring
Objects to the surface using
Its own methods

Tree roots         Wooden benches
Hanging leaves on branches
The leaf points its delicate tip down
Exposes itself to air and
Flips

Dense weight and humidity of leaf tissue
Persistent but little-known magnetism of land

This is the site if something were to happen
Between hanging leaves and the layered dirt beneath
This undetermined space is where something may occur

Until days are sealed by the oppressive past
And handed over to our freedom
Chasing        Embracing        Pulling
Will remain violent and simple acts

Were something to happen…
But actions have lapsed         Land solidified
People struggling to live        Silenced and severed

Invaded by writhing cilia and artificial fingernails
He is reversed along with the space where he lived
Placed in dead man’s land           A repentant vacant lot
His dismembered limbs are pierced
By cilia and nails that then
Breathe        Sway         Thrive languidly

Dirt is devoted to clinging
Open to excavation.       Leveling        Invasion by trees
Pliable to all added pressure
Stuck together        Tugging anything it touches
Unconcerned with change
Old cloth        Dead skin

Dirt does not preserve a single tear nor memories of desire
It has forgotten the individual stones and the droplets that fell on them

“We observe everything
With compounded vision
Through fixed windows
Things present             Things past

The bouquet of gazes
Gathered from the dead girl
Witnesses the many scattered objects as one
It quickly detects movement
Though is unable to distinguish colors
It holds no memories
But measures and predicts the future
It is a chasm opened in the center of things
It is a piece of nothingness thinner than tears”

Flat compressed land
A ball of coarse air occasionally sweeps through
Rousing           Transporting
The cloud of dirt to other places
Cradling gravel and trees
Several wooden benches
The cosmos progresses            Moves
Discarding hardened shells bit by bit
Baring its enormous inner substance
To sunlight

“We only wanted a well-lived life
But some entity knew that a power
Colluding with death would push us out

We piled into the shadow of dense shrubbery
Savored our hatred         Then let it go
At last we became flat as membrane
Thin and coating the land”

“And death snuck up on us
Backed us with nothingness from behind
We quietly peeled ourselves off
Like currency from another land
Steeped in bygone sap changing hands
We are distinctly shadowed spaces
With our own boundaries
Though sometimes our veins rupture
From violent emotions…”

Here in this precisely cut and divided land
Will each pebble in the pile
Start fearing its harsh shadow?
Wear down nothingness
With existence unto itself?

We are here in large numbers
With the pebbles for it is necessary
To witness them
To stand with them

A single layer of writhing skin without seams or cracks
Is currently enveloping all surfaces and outlining
Countless ears and tops of heads in space
The skin pulses        Feels          Occasionally forces
Its shadow to brutally merge on the ground
That is our existence
That is the imperfection of existence
Notice         Pay attention
Scrutinize the space

As one reads commentary on Kōra by her contemporaries, it becomes apparent how eager they are to set her apart from other female poets. Asō Naoko recognizes her methodology as “one not yet seen by female poets at the time.” Ōoka Makoto attempts to psychoanalyze her, saying it is not surprising, given her discomfort of having been born a woman, that her bodily and biological constraints would inevitably manifest into her aversion for topics and language associated with femininity. (He condescendingly accredits her as the only female poet who is fit to write about politics).

Okaniwa Noboru places Kōra in a less gendered literary context as the rightful heir to postwar poetry. He argues that though she doesn’t necessarily inherit qualities of her predecessors, such as poets of the Arechi (“Wasteland”) and Rettō (“Archipelago”) groups, which were both interested in recovering “meaning” and bringing poetry back to interests of daily life, Kōra is a nonconformist who took on the unachieved and unaddressed ideals, and “dreams” of her postwar predecessors. The grounding of Kōra’s work in this predominantly male-led movements of early 20th century Japan contextualizes her seeming deviation from other female poets not as an anomaly, but rather as a logical continuation of her forebearers. To judge her work merely from the standpoint of a gender divide, however, rather than a larger literary chronology, is to denigrate the labor of Kōra and her female contemporaries. I believe it is important to frame Kōra’s work in the least restrictive, most diversified and daring context possible; it is the only way to honor her profound legacy.