Yuki and the One Thousand Carriers
Previously unpublished. First
written in August of 2008.
Yuki
and the One Thousand Carriers by Gloria Whelan, illustrated by Yan
Nascimbene. New York: Sleeping Bear Press, 2008. $17.95, hardback, 32 pages,
9.25 by 11.25 inches. ISBN978-1-58536-352-0.
The book tries to be literary in
its use of haiku, or so it seems, yet it doesn’t quite measure up. Whelan’s
book is gorgeously illustrated by Yan Nascimbene in telling the story of Yuki,
the daughter of a provincial governor who has to travel from Kyoto to Edo (now
Tokyo) along the 300-mile Tokaido Road. Because Yuki’s father is such an
important political figure, he and his family travel with 1,000 attendants or
“carriers” who protect them, carry them on palanquins, and bring along their
possessions. Yuki misses her home but uses haiku to record her impressions of
the trip, and thus ease her homesickness.
The story, in both words and
pictures, gives a sense of what the life of royalty and privilege must have
been like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for travelers of the
famous Japanese road. The illustrations at times echo famous Hiroshige or other
Japanese prints, as with an expansive image of fishing boats on a bay, or
Nihonbashi Bridge, from which, we are told, all distances in Japan are
measured. Whelan acknowledges that her inspiration for the story was viewing
Hiroshige’s “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road,” and the images were
undoubtedly an influence on the book’s artist, too. Along the way, we see inns
and rivers, snow-capped Mt. Fuji, castles, valleys, and a seascape. The moody
and evocative watercolor paintings loosely alternate between vast expanses of
landscape and closer images of Yuki or the view from her palanquin. Sometimes
the landscapes lack the intimacy that many children’s books employ to hold a
child’s interest, but they are breathtakingly beautiful. The vastness of the
landscapes, however, serves to heighten Yuki’s alienation and longing for home.
Yuki appears in many of the
images, always dressed in a different kimono, and with her she brings her
puppy, Kita, who lends several of the pictures energy and warmth. For its story
and illustrations, Yuki and the One
Thousand Carriers comes well recommended.
But what of the haiku? The book
offers nineteen poems, interspersed among prose paragraphs that unfold the
story in a manner much like haibun. Here’s the book’s first poem:
Once outside the gate
how will I find my way back?
Will home disappear?
The poem speaks to the girl’s homesickness, and thus presents her feelings as
the journey begins. But it has little to do with haiku. It lacks a seasonal
reference. The poem’s two-part structure (missing in most of the book’s other
poems) seems accidental. The reference to the gate gives the slightest of
visual images, but the poem is essentially cerebral rather than intuitive and
experiential. It’s an example of a haiku written with a purpose or agenda—in
this case to further the plot of the book, or at least to add an overt emotional
viewpoint to the story. But the agenda makes this poem, and especially other
poems that follow, subservient to the agenda rather than the needs and
traditions of haiku as a literary art.
Rain coaxes flowers
pear blossoms will soon bloom here
I will not see them.
This poems does a little better, with stronger images and emotions, a seasonal
reference, and a bit of a turn in the last line. But the poem seems padded to
fit the unnecessary 5-7-5 pattern, or why else are flowers and pear blossoms mentioned? The first line offers an interpretation
of the rain, together with an intellectualization of the imagined blossoms-to-come
rather than showing the first bulges of buds on a pear tree that would be more
immediate and experiential.
With a full stomach
even the wooden pillow
holds my head softly.
I suspect the author didn’t mean to suggest that the wooden pillow has a full
stomach (imagine that), but that’s what the poem says. Blame it on an attempt
to compress. The skilled haiku poet will know how to compress without such
grammatical danglers. The story’s point of view is clearly Yuki’s, and that
it’s her who has the full stomach,
but the poem is presented as a sentence, so grammatically it’s the wooden
pillow that is magically given a stomach. By relying on the technique of using
a kireji (cutting word), the poem
easily could have been improved. Removing “With” (or saying “my stomach full”) and
ending the first line with a dash would have made this a more effective haiku
in the literary tradition, even though the poem still lacks a seasonal
reference.
Other haiku uses overt similes
(willows leaning over the river “like women / washing their long hair” or that
a mountain path is somehow a “strong hand”), judgments and personifications
(saying that a river is “busy” and “doesn’t look back”), and failing to stay in
the present moment (describing her bed at home lying empty because she’s not
there). One poem (“At the mountain top / I see my father on his horse / far away
from me.”) is simply a sentence.
Throughout the book, the poems
dwell on Yuki’s longing for home. We do see her longing soften, but the poems
still fail to succeed as literary haiku. For my part, I long for children’s
books that show a greater awareness than this book of literary expectations for
haiku. Nevertheless, the story is intriguing, the illustrations beautiful, and
the taste of historic Japan very inviting to those with such inclinations.
Pseudo-haiku abound in some
children’s books, and Yuki and the One
Thousand Carriers, despite its many other strengths, is among them. Here,
though, is one poem that rises above:
Grass under my feet
plum blossoms drift down on me
just for a minute.
If all the poems had been like this, I could also have considered recommending
the book for its haiku.
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