A classic winter scene, seen from the threshold of the house: the lyrical self looks at the white surface of snow and tracks the tracks in the snow with its gaze: fox and hare, a skillful overpowering of the prey by the hunter.
The scene is sensually present in its spatiality through the gaze movement into the distance and the onomatopoeic visualization of the traces and their originators.
At the end of the poem the scene seems to repeat itself in parts, with different actors.
The hunter who strays into the vastness of space is a male you.
What about the loot?
The lyrical self, the poetic woman, bares her feet, blood and hair emerge.
The word “ke” - “(human) hair” can also mean “fur”, “fur”, “wool”, “feather” or “fluff” in Japanese.
In the middle part of the poem a communal writing situation, but the poet refuses to communicate about the resulting texts.
But the poet, with all her admiration for the others, is not a victim.
The final scene exudes calm, serenity and self-assurance.
The hunter loves the hunt and not the prey
Hiromi Ito, born in 1955, was thirty-three when she wrote this poem. She had quickly made a name for herself with her utterly fresh, explosive poetry since the late 1970s. Her texts with surprising, novel topics and the blunt and everyday, but clearly poetic and musical language, attracted attention in poet circles early on. With a work in which physicality and nature, sexuality and death, motherhood, family and conflicting emotions were illuminated in a variety of tones, she soon advanced to become a “poetry shaman”. She repeatedly rejected the label of femininity and feminism; her writing was literature, and categorizations only unnecessarily narrowed it down.
Early on, she had cast a spell over the orally influenced Japanese literary tradition with songs and legends. Two longer stays in Warsaw, 1982 and 1988, with her husband, the Slavist and comparativeist Masahiko Nishi, broadened the horizon. In Japan the family moves to the south island of Kyushu, to Kumamoto. The first daughter was born in 1984 and the second daughter in 1986. Her poem "Killing Kanoko", which brings up the complex feelings of a young mother in a drastic and rhythmic way, attracts attention and is included in numerous anthologies. The songs of the indigenous peoples of America become the occasion for trips to the United States, where she finally founds a new household in California with the British artist Harold Cohen (1928 to 2016) and her now three daughters.
Ito, who has also established herself as an essayist, narrator, illustrator, manga critic and translator, leads a hectic life between continents. Not only is she in demand as a performer of her texts and commentator, as the only daughter she is also responsible for caring for her sick parents back home.
In one of her best-known works, the novel poem "Togenuki" (Thorn Extractor), published in 2007, all the many themes and strands of tradition are intertwined in a virtuoso manner, and so it seems only logical that a poetry as well as a fiction- Prize was awarded. It is currently being translated into several languages and has just been published in German. Ito has been invited to international festivals for many years. It embodies most gracefully a cosmopolitan literature that is at the same time deeply rooted in its own tradition. What was read on the occasion of the first translation into a foreign language still applies: Ito writes radically and without sparing his own biography and in a surprising way turns the reader's shock into knowledge.