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Aiaigasa
Aiaigasa—1. (adverb) under one umbrella 2. (noun) a romantically shared umbrella.
Here, under one umbrella, shared by author and illustrator, are poems, zuihitsu (essays) and illustrations from a three-week sojourn in Japan in the autumn of 2015.
Covering over a dozen locations between Osaka in the south and Naruko in the north, this travelogue now and then crosses the older path of Basho, geographically, and the footsteps of the travellers awaken echoes of the past, both cultural and personal.
Far from a guidebook, this is a bewilderment of detours and digressions, a celebration of the intersections of shared experience, and a time-steeped medit
Here, under one umbrella, shared by author and illustrator, are poems, zuihitsu (essays) and illustrations from a three-week sojourn in Japan in the autumn of 2015.
Covering over a dozen locations between Osaka in the south and Naruko in the north, this travelogue now and then crosses the older path of Basho, geographically, and the footsteps of the travellers awaken echoes of the past, both cultural and personal.
Far from a guidebook, this is a bewilderment of detours and digressions, a celebration of the intersections of shared experience, and a time-steeped medit
- GenresPoetry
164 pages, Hardcover
First published June 5, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 19, 2018
Contents:
013 - Poems
039 - "Zuihitsu"
159 - Glossary
163 - Map
Illustrations Catherine Crick
Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972 and is editor for Chômu Press.
Approximately a year ago I read and reviewed Quentin S. Crisp’s book about his 2007 holiday Paris titled “The Paris Notebooks” that Snuggly Books published. That book was presented in the form of a diary or notebook of Mr. Crisp’s thoughts, emotions and adventures in that city. I rather enjoyed that book.
This year (2018) Snuggly Books presents us a book titled “Aiaigasa” which kind of documents Mr. Crisp’s sojourn to Japan over the period of eighteen months from October 2001 to March 2003, during which time he lived in Kyoto and studied at the Faculity of Letters in Kyoto University.
This series of impressions and state of mind examinations is preceded by a series of poems that were created during the visit. Although the present volume actually predates the “Paris” book by a number of years the incites related in this volume compare quite favorably to that book. Imagine if you traveled to a foreign country, knew no one, and must exit in an environment of utter strangeness compared to what was your norm, yet the new environment is filled with beauty and fragility previously unknown.
Again we are bestowed with a lovely and personal book that Mr. Crisp is kind enough and sensitive enough to share with the unknown reader. This book is highly recommended.
Aiaigasa (Hardcover) is limited to 60 copies.
013 - Poems
039 - "Zuihitsu"
159 - Glossary
163 - Map
Illustrations Catherine Crick
Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972 and is editor for Chômu Press.
Approximately a year ago I read and reviewed Quentin S. Crisp’s book about his 2007 holiday Paris titled “The Paris Notebooks” that Snuggly Books published. That book was presented in the form of a diary or notebook of Mr. Crisp’s thoughts, emotions and adventures in that city. I rather enjoyed that book.
This year (2018) Snuggly Books presents us a book titled “Aiaigasa” which kind of documents Mr. Crisp’s sojourn to Japan over the period of eighteen months from October 2001 to March 2003, during which time he lived in Kyoto and studied at the Faculity of Letters in Kyoto University.
This series of impressions and state of mind examinations is preceded by a series of poems that were created during the visit. Although the present volume actually predates the “Paris” book by a number of years the incites related in this volume compare quite favorably to that book. Imagine if you traveled to a foreign country, knew no one, and must exit in an environment of utter strangeness compared to what was your norm, yet the new environment is filled with beauty and fragility previously unknown.
Again we are bestowed with a lovely and personal book that Mr. Crisp is kind enough and sensitive enough to share with the unknown reader. This book is highly recommended.
Aiaigasa (Hardcover) is limited to 60 copies.
June 19, 2018
"Japan's a wind-up music
Box, circled by crows"
In the autumn of 2015, Quentin S. Crisp and a traveling companion (identified here simply as "Bee-chan") embarked on a three-week trip to various cities in Japan, seeking out the Japan of "...autumn leaves and kappa," but finding something very different instead (although a kappa does appear, albeit not in the expected manner). This book, which begins with poems and proceeds to essays (and which is charmingly illustrated by the aforementioned Bee-chan: I especially like the drawing of the meditating frog statue at the start of the "Space Heaters" chapter) is the end result. The voice of the narrator is somewhat similar to Quentin's fictional efforts, which is to say somewhat morbid and melancholy, yet with unexpected moments of happiness and spiritual transcendence. In some ways reading a Quentin S. Crisp book is a little like wandering around a haunted house during the day: one slinks through rooms of gloom and shadow, yet every now and then one also comes across a window letting in a ray of soothing sunlight. This, I think, mirrors a statement that Quentin makes in this very book, about his desire to be a friendly ghost (now there's a rich idea for an old franchise ripe for a creative re-imagining: the Adventures of Quentin the Friendly Ghost).
As usual, the prose style is to my taste: to cite just one example, I love how Quentin describes the changing color of leaves on trees in autumn as "...a kind of metachronal wave of ephemeral poetry." The fleeting ephemerality of things is one of the main themes of the book; this, combined with its porcelain prose, gives it a delicate sense of fragility, and one is almost tempted to handle the book with padded forceps lest it crumble... yet even the most fragile of artistic emanations can have the power to shake the fundaments (as the book in question is full of asides and digressions, allow me to present one of my own: it's really annoying me how Goodreads is refusing to believe that "metachronal," "ephemerality," and "fundaments" are actual words). And certainly there are many scenes here that will stick in my memory for a long time to come: the solitary priest beating on his drum in a ritualistic manner in a turret room at night, the tiny bar in Sendai, the tale of the two umbrellas, and, most especially, the long discourse on train stations, the latter of which I found to be especially captivating and page-turning (I will profess to finding train stations in general magical places, perhaps because it's so infrequent that I ever actually use trains to travel).
Reading this most autumnal of books at the start of the summer was a slightly disorientating experience, somewhat similar to my experience of watching the film Call Me By Your Name (which is set in the heart of summer) earlier this year, during a particularly bleak New England winter. But it was a welcome respite, and having read it it I almost felt as if I had taking a vacation myself, or perhaps a vacation by phantom proxy, and should I ever wish to return to Japan, all I need do is pick up this book and read it again, in much the same way that des Esseintes "traveled" to England by reading a Dickens novel in Huysmans' Against Nature.
Box, circled by crows"
In the autumn of 2015, Quentin S. Crisp and a traveling companion (identified here simply as "Bee-chan") embarked on a three-week trip to various cities in Japan, seeking out the Japan of "...autumn leaves and kappa," but finding something very different instead (although a kappa does appear, albeit not in the expected manner). This book, which begins with poems and proceeds to essays (and which is charmingly illustrated by the aforementioned Bee-chan: I especially like the drawing of the meditating frog statue at the start of the "Space Heaters" chapter) is the end result. The voice of the narrator is somewhat similar to Quentin's fictional efforts, which is to say somewhat morbid and melancholy, yet with unexpected moments of happiness and spiritual transcendence. In some ways reading a Quentin S. Crisp book is a little like wandering around a haunted house during the day: one slinks through rooms of gloom and shadow, yet every now and then one also comes across a window letting in a ray of soothing sunlight. This, I think, mirrors a statement that Quentin makes in this very book, about his desire to be a friendly ghost (now there's a rich idea for an old franchise ripe for a creative re-imagining: the Adventures of Quentin the Friendly Ghost).
As usual, the prose style is to my taste: to cite just one example, I love how Quentin describes the changing color of leaves on trees in autumn as "...a kind of metachronal wave of ephemeral poetry." The fleeting ephemerality of things is one of the main themes of the book; this, combined with its porcelain prose, gives it a delicate sense of fragility, and one is almost tempted to handle the book with padded forceps lest it crumble... yet even the most fragile of artistic emanations can have the power to shake the fundaments (as the book in question is full of asides and digressions, allow me to present one of my own: it's really annoying me how Goodreads is refusing to believe that "metachronal," "ephemerality," and "fundaments" are actual words). And certainly there are many scenes here that will stick in my memory for a long time to come: the solitary priest beating on his drum in a ritualistic manner in a turret room at night, the tiny bar in Sendai, the tale of the two umbrellas, and, most especially, the long discourse on train stations, the latter of which I found to be especially captivating and page-turning (I will profess to finding train stations in general magical places, perhaps because it's so infrequent that I ever actually use trains to travel).
Reading this most autumnal of books at the start of the summer was a slightly disorientating experience, somewhat similar to my experience of watching the film Call Me By Your Name (which is set in the heart of summer) earlier this year, during a particularly bleak New England winter. But it was a welcome respite, and having read it it I almost felt as if I had taking a vacation myself, or perhaps a vacation by phantom proxy, and should I ever wish to return to Japan, all I need do is pick up this book and read it again, in much the same way that des Esseintes "traveled" to England by reading a Dickens novel in Huysmans' Against Nature.
June 4, 2018
I like the poems which are dated and can be correlated with the prose of Aiaigasa which occasionally refers back to them. ‘On the path I kissed/You, but didn’t say/How I felt like an actor’ epitomises self-consciousness. ‘The Café de Paris was/Closing in thirty/Minutes. I left. Then came back. /“Tomorrow?” I asked. “We’re closed,” amusingly shuts the door on that afterthought. ‘As/Time passes so you/Begin to doubt free will.’ It is only conscious, I remark. By then I’ve worked out 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 is the tanka syllabic scheme. ‘Poetry’s a thing/Of such high definition/You can keep zooming/In, endlessly. This is how/We slow time.’ Telepathy is/how we slow time to a stop. ‘Time ...does not stop,’ he says. It does, when you think fast enough.
Quentin S Crisp’s travelling companion is Beehive Crick who provides the good illustrations.
‘I knew, as I might know of someone I loved, that however I stared and caressed, I could not finally possess them because I could not become them.’ He’s talking about ceramics. Why possess who you love? Is the assumption of possession that he’s making true? As a child I was interested by love and asked my mother why she loved me. Because I was hers. Would that answer do? It’d have to since it was the only answer she had. That would seem to corroborate his assumption of possession if not that of a drive to become the beloved. A piece of pottery? Not all children are lovable, she went on, so a child could be intrinsically lovable and incite love, along with the wish to possess. I don’t think I want to possess whom I love. I don’t know I love anybody. I might do but if so it’s a different kind of love from past ones and not possessive. Anything such in the past I left to my unconscious which did possess others with their consent to further its ends. It did possess an inanimate object once, the shaft of spade I’d borrowed, found the weak point, broke it, so that it was hanging by a thread when I returned it.
He interprets another’s tanka: that the poet, ‘like the pines [at Takasago beach]’ still stands and I agree ‘But,’ the poet goes on, ‘they are not my friends.' They don’t know him from those long gone days, nobody does. That poet was lonely, as was ours, writing prose, when a student in Japan, feeling like a ghost in relation to the other students. He’s only saved from becoming a ghost by being recognised by another human being, a homeless alcoholic. He seems to be taking his reality, not from his own spirit, but from others’ recognition of it. Rich used to keep his eyes on me, either to ensure his own existence or confer existence on me, I was unsure which. My intimation was his unconscious thought itself king but had difficulty placing me in its self-conception. The narration of Aiaiglas is a bit too consciously deliberate – laid on thick - to be taken as true to fact, a suspicion substantiated when he admits he did have a friend after all.
On p 46 it should be ‘heedless’. P 51 a ‘be’ is missing after ‘smell’. I questioned ‘(How else could I bear to be English?)’ to explain why the rationalisation that the reality of a Japan deformed by social repression is a sophisticated culture persuades him. I’m British, so that doesn’t affect me. Interesting that Japanese farmers were of higher status than artisans or traders. The writer explains why an epigram equating a butterfly’s taking wing with the leaves (that its caterpillar ate) taking wing might indicate how an intuited benevolence intrinsic to existence unfolds into life. I see.
I could only exclaim ‘for god’s sake’ at the solecism of a misspelt ‘benefited’ on p 63. ‘In a reliquary are kept some bones said to belong to the Buddha.’ Yeah, right.
Aiaigasa is an umbrella built for two and I could’ve done with more interaction between the two it sheltered or shaded. But that’s me. I was delighted – ‘heh, heh, heh’ in the margin – at ‘It had been her’ Beehive’s ‘suggestion ...to stay in a ryokan [inn] at some point whether it was strictly necessary or not and this room [in Nagoya] appeared to be exactly what she had in mind.’ Starving, I devoured that morsel. The next bit of this chapter of the travelogue, The Robot, the writer read out at the book launch. Reading it is different but the impression it gives, if subdued, is much the same, of good writing. ‘That I was seeing one [a robot] now naturally suggested that this world and that of science fiction had merged.’ Oh, ‘naturally’! I wrote in the margin and I couldn’t’ve done that at the hearing or thought to. Nor did I note then the American spelling of ‘sceptically’. It’s not as if he hasn’t been told!
‘To know how indifferently I am forgotten by the world, and how hard is the ground I must tread while I’m alive – this is to meet death. ...And what then? Well ...if it is possible, I will then come back as a ghost for you, dear reader, whose eye too seldom I meet with mine ’ to which affectation this reader can only reply, No, you won’t, I assure you.
‘It is one ...skill to recognise what is evocative for oneself ...but ...another ...to judge what will be evocative to a broad mix of people [and] linked to ...understanding of the dreams ...humanity shares.’ He believes that’s what TS Eliot meant by the objective correlative. I looked it up. The purpose is to express a character’s emotions by showing rather than describing feelings, thereby creating an emotion in the audience [of a play] through external factors and evidence linked together and thus forming an objective correlative, producing an author’s detachment from the depicted character and uniting the emotion of the work. Eliot thought ‘King Lear’ met this criterion and ‘Hamlet’ didn’t. It couldn’t since Hamlet characterises the conscious will and the author his unconscious Will. Does Aiaiglas? The emotion I’m experiencing at this point, Local Trains and Place Names, is I think exasperation. The only thing the two railway lines, one in Japan, the other in Devon, have in common is that the author rode them. The umbrella theme goes for a burton unless he’s the umbrella but where’s the romantic connexion?
He asks if we could explain to an alien why ...’Life’s Not Hollywood, It’s Cricklewood’ is funny, implying we couldn’t. I think we could. He has an inexplicit romantic memory of Eggesford his friend doesn’t share. He spins a conscious fantasy about Morchard Road. Then has the cheek to suggest the reader spend time alone in a quiet room or on a train journey to examine the lists of station names and to dream of what they might mean, to which the only answer is - in the margin - no. Oh, really? He’s compelled only by artistic integrity to narrate another fantasy he remembers having when first learning Japanese in which he giggles at the inherent supplication in saying ‘water, please.’ I had to laugh, however, when he describes the irony entailed in using a space heater; when you turned it off, you had to open a window to get rid of the fumes – and the heat. His Proustian madeleine is the fumes of a paraffin stove.
It’s more interesting for me when Bee-chan’s involved. She likes her lie-ins and he doesn’t, occupying himself with morning things but taking less trouble to be quiet as time went on, making me laugh. There really was nowhere else he wanted to be and no one else he wanted to be with. Ah! He thought some hours are golden because we let them slip, retrospectively gilded. He lost the umbrella! symbol of their shared journey and felt helpless distress. Oh just accept it as an unconsciously deliberate symbol. He ditches another umbrella.
Describing a standing bar as slightly larger than the wardrobe on one side of the hallway of his small flat is not useful to a reader though the elaboration does evoke Night Hawks. Interesting that Japanese wear masks to protect others from their germs. Abdul always shakes my hand but wouldn’t because he’d a cold till I insisted. I knew what was causing the locker’s smell, as will you. ‘These - are a nightmare,’ says B in a pickle, throwing them away and making me laugh. There’s a glossary and her map of the voyage, usefully dated.
Quentin S Crisp’s travelling companion is Beehive Crick who provides the good illustrations.
‘I knew, as I might know of someone I loved, that however I stared and caressed, I could not finally possess them because I could not become them.’ He’s talking about ceramics. Why possess who you love? Is the assumption of possession that he’s making true? As a child I was interested by love and asked my mother why she loved me. Because I was hers. Would that answer do? It’d have to since it was the only answer she had. That would seem to corroborate his assumption of possession if not that of a drive to become the beloved. A piece of pottery? Not all children are lovable, she went on, so a child could be intrinsically lovable and incite love, along with the wish to possess. I don’t think I want to possess whom I love. I don’t know I love anybody. I might do but if so it’s a different kind of love from past ones and not possessive. Anything such in the past I left to my unconscious which did possess others with their consent to further its ends. It did possess an inanimate object once, the shaft of spade I’d borrowed, found the weak point, broke it, so that it was hanging by a thread when I returned it.
He interprets another’s tanka: that the poet, ‘like the pines [at Takasago beach]’ still stands and I agree ‘But,’ the poet goes on, ‘they are not my friends.' They don’t know him from those long gone days, nobody does. That poet was lonely, as was ours, writing prose, when a student in Japan, feeling like a ghost in relation to the other students. He’s only saved from becoming a ghost by being recognised by another human being, a homeless alcoholic. He seems to be taking his reality, not from his own spirit, but from others’ recognition of it. Rich used to keep his eyes on me, either to ensure his own existence or confer existence on me, I was unsure which. My intimation was his unconscious thought itself king but had difficulty placing me in its self-conception. The narration of Aiaiglas is a bit too consciously deliberate – laid on thick - to be taken as true to fact, a suspicion substantiated when he admits he did have a friend after all.
On p 46 it should be ‘heedless’. P 51 a ‘be’ is missing after ‘smell’. I questioned ‘(How else could I bear to be English?)’ to explain why the rationalisation that the reality of a Japan deformed by social repression is a sophisticated culture persuades him. I’m British, so that doesn’t affect me. Interesting that Japanese farmers were of higher status than artisans or traders. The writer explains why an epigram equating a butterfly’s taking wing with the leaves (that its caterpillar ate) taking wing might indicate how an intuited benevolence intrinsic to existence unfolds into life. I see.
I could only exclaim ‘for god’s sake’ at the solecism of a misspelt ‘benefited’ on p 63. ‘In a reliquary are kept some bones said to belong to the Buddha.’ Yeah, right.
Aiaigasa is an umbrella built for two and I could’ve done with more interaction between the two it sheltered or shaded. But that’s me. I was delighted – ‘heh, heh, heh’ in the margin – at ‘It had been her’ Beehive’s ‘suggestion ...to stay in a ryokan [inn] at some point whether it was strictly necessary or not and this room [in Nagoya] appeared to be exactly what she had in mind.’ Starving, I devoured that morsel. The next bit of this chapter of the travelogue, The Robot, the writer read out at the book launch. Reading it is different but the impression it gives, if subdued, is much the same, of good writing. ‘That I was seeing one [a robot] now naturally suggested that this world and that of science fiction had merged.’ Oh, ‘naturally’! I wrote in the margin and I couldn’t’ve done that at the hearing or thought to. Nor did I note then the American spelling of ‘sceptically’. It’s not as if he hasn’t been told!
‘To know how indifferently I am forgotten by the world, and how hard is the ground I must tread while I’m alive – this is to meet death. ...And what then? Well ...if it is possible, I will then come back as a ghost for you, dear reader, whose eye too seldom I meet with mine ’ to which affectation this reader can only reply, No, you won’t, I assure you.
‘It is one ...skill to recognise what is evocative for oneself ...but ...another ...to judge what will be evocative to a broad mix of people [and] linked to ...understanding of the dreams ...humanity shares.’ He believes that’s what TS Eliot meant by the objective correlative. I looked it up. The purpose is to express a character’s emotions by showing rather than describing feelings, thereby creating an emotion in the audience [of a play] through external factors and evidence linked together and thus forming an objective correlative, producing an author’s detachment from the depicted character and uniting the emotion of the work. Eliot thought ‘King Lear’ met this criterion and ‘Hamlet’ didn’t. It couldn’t since Hamlet characterises the conscious will and the author his unconscious Will. Does Aiaiglas? The emotion I’m experiencing at this point, Local Trains and Place Names, is I think exasperation. The only thing the two railway lines, one in Japan, the other in Devon, have in common is that the author rode them. The umbrella theme goes for a burton unless he’s the umbrella but where’s the romantic connexion?
He asks if we could explain to an alien why ...’Life’s Not Hollywood, It’s Cricklewood’ is funny, implying we couldn’t. I think we could. He has an inexplicit romantic memory of Eggesford his friend doesn’t share. He spins a conscious fantasy about Morchard Road. Then has the cheek to suggest the reader spend time alone in a quiet room or on a train journey to examine the lists of station names and to dream of what they might mean, to which the only answer is - in the margin - no. Oh, really? He’s compelled only by artistic integrity to narrate another fantasy he remembers having when first learning Japanese in which he giggles at the inherent supplication in saying ‘water, please.’ I had to laugh, however, when he describes the irony entailed in using a space heater; when you turned it off, you had to open a window to get rid of the fumes – and the heat. His Proustian madeleine is the fumes of a paraffin stove.
It’s more interesting for me when Bee-chan’s involved. She likes her lie-ins and he doesn’t, occupying himself with morning things but taking less trouble to be quiet as time went on, making me laugh. There really was nowhere else he wanted to be and no one else he wanted to be with. Ah! He thought some hours are golden because we let them slip, retrospectively gilded. He lost the umbrella! symbol of their shared journey and felt helpless distress. Oh just accept it as an unconsciously deliberate symbol. He ditches another umbrella.
Describing a standing bar as slightly larger than the wardrobe on one side of the hallway of his small flat is not useful to a reader though the elaboration does evoke Night Hawks. Interesting that Japanese wear masks to protect others from their germs. Abdul always shakes my hand but wouldn’t because he’d a cold till I insisted. I knew what was causing the locker’s smell, as will you. ‘These - are a nightmare,’ says B in a pickle, throwing them away and making me laugh. There’s a glossary and her map of the voyage, usefully dated.
August 21, 2022
Quentin S Crisp’s Aiaigasa is a collection of essays and poems, based on his 2015 sojourn in Japan.
It’s obvious from his fiction that QSC has a deep bond with Japan. If not always in subject matter, then in the tone and spirit that infuse his writing. The opening essay here reveals that it was his first encounter with the country as an undergraduate that was instrumental in shaping his sensibilities, and imbuing him with an “appreciation of delicate details and atmospheres.”
Surprisingly this education in aesthetic sensibility comes not from meeting the idealised Japan of beauty and mystery, but from the bitter disappointment of the reality of the country, brutally modernised, its past paved over by “commerce and convenience”.
“I have learned from Japan to be a connoisseur of the dreary, the deficient and the underwhelming, of all that frustrates the straightforward consummation of expected pleasure.“
Aiaigasa is full of subtle and keen observations, and indeed delicate details and atmospheres, as QSC reveals the beauty in the minutiae and the mundane.
It’s obvious from his fiction that QSC has a deep bond with Japan. If not always in subject matter, then in the tone and spirit that infuse his writing. The opening essay here reveals that it was his first encounter with the country as an undergraduate that was instrumental in shaping his sensibilities, and imbuing him with an “appreciation of delicate details and atmospheres.”
Surprisingly this education in aesthetic sensibility comes not from meeting the idealised Japan of beauty and mystery, but from the bitter disappointment of the reality of the country, brutally modernised, its past paved over by “commerce and convenience”.
“I have learned from Japan to be a connoisseur of the dreary, the deficient and the underwhelming, of all that frustrates the straightforward consummation of expected pleasure.“
Aiaigasa is full of subtle and keen observations, and indeed delicate details and atmospheres, as QSC reveals the beauty in the minutiae and the mundane.
August 27, 2019
Un viaggio in autunno, in Giappone.Un libro che inizia con alcune poesia, e termina con un racconto affascinante. Non e' una guida, non e' una cronaca di viaggio. Ma un insieme di sensazioni e di scoperta, che ti fa incuriosire ancora di piu' rispetto a un mondo, il Giappone, alieno e allo stesso tempo conosciuto dall'autore. Da leggere d'un fiato.
January 27, 2021
A WONDERFUL BOOK, as much from its fallibilities of thinking aloud as from its sophisticated philosophising of travel – plus its bewilderment and recurrently momentary self-discovery of what one is thinking or wanting or needing. A treasuring of the moment. Each moment unique.
Now for some alcohol for me to preserve or delete it.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
Now for some alcohol for me to preserve or delete it.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews