FOREIGN WIFE ELEGY
By Yuko Taniguchi
published by Coffee House Press, 2004, Minneapolis
Softcover, 82pagesReview by Angela Narciso Torres* for PALH-EZINE
In Yuko Taniguchi’s debut collection of poems, the reader is treated to an intimate view of a world as seen through the eyes of a foreigner struggling with identity and displacement in the U.S. The daughter of a Hiroshima survivor, Taniguchi was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1975. She came to the U.S. alone at age 15 and eventually married into the country and culture. Her poems are an attempt “to make sense of her foreign-ness” while trying to situate herself as an “outsider” in this country, and to overcome her early inability “to master the ‘American way’ of living.” The result is an honest, often searing, and generous commentary on how an individual copes with loneliness and detachment from one’s own family and culture, and ultimately the triumph of compassion and hope over desperation, as seen in poignant portrayals of how her Japanese past interweaves with her present life in Midwestern America.The book is divided into four untitled sections, each reflecting the different worlds of the self. The first section, which may be the book’s most potent, consists of poems about the self as the “foreign wife” in the book’s title poem. The poems “He Said” and “Foreign Words” reveal the contrast between the speaker’s (Japanese) and the husband’s (Midwestern) backgrounds—the barriers of language and geography. In the poem “Blue Eyes” the speaker longs for blue eyes to see the world as her husband does: “I dropped my eyes into a blue bottle/ and asked my husband to carry it around.” There’s a genuine, almost childlike desire to completely join the world of the other. In this way these poems become subversive love poems at their deepest core. Several poems describe her husband’s encounters with patients in the hospital where he works as a nurse. It is interesting that she finds comfort in these raw, and at times, brutal encounters with disease and death. With unblinking eyes, she describes a woman with countless open sores “curled up like a dried rose,” a man whose head crashes into a windshield “the way we crash open an egg.” These images, while not for the faint-hearted, are never included simply for shock value, but to reveal the underlying compassion she learns from watching her husband, as seen in the prose poem “Kathleen.” “After Kathleen’s death, my husband sat still like a white rose on a thin, straight stem. What holds the layers of rose petals together is not strength, but a fragile hope that grows on and on out of nothing…”
In the second section, the poet reflects on family, memories of her childhood, and the apparent disconnect in her painful relationship with a distant mother, a bitter grandparent. Again, it is the poet’s direct eye, her unblinking honesty turned inward, that powers these short, spare lines. The running thread is hope, the hero being nature, music, or the indomitable goodness of the human spirit. In “New Year’s Day” she uses a long-distance phone call with her father as a metaphor for the feeling of disconnect from her family of origin:
On the phone,
my father’s voice
arrived a second
later, like an echo.
A thin wire ran between
us. I told my father
not to move. Do not
disturb the wire
pulled under
the ocean for
thousands of miles.
The distance between us
grows emptily inside me.
This terrible space
is all I have today.
The third and fourth sections delve more deeply into the self as an individual, no longer defined by outside relationships with husband or family. In these poems we see a tremendous sense of self-awareness that is remarkable in someone so young. The boundaries of the self are explored in solitude: the writer, alone with a new pet in the apartment (“Sam”), or the poet being moved by a piece of music (“Elegy for Cello and Orchestra by John Williams”). We see the poet contemplating sunshine as forgiveness in “Under the Sun,” and using rain to describe the emotional experience of listening to a Suite for Violin and Orchestra (“Rain Dance”). Often, it can be daunting for a writer to describe the complex emotional reactions that spring from listening to music. Not for Taniguchi, who does this expertly several times in the book, using metaphors that are surprisingly fresh and accurate. From “Elegy for Cello and Orchestra:”
"Strings rub each other as his sorrow slips from the cello;
he closes his eyes. The pain of a minor overflows from his
fingers. He breathes in between f and a. Then d rushes into
the stormy day, e breaks a berry on the falling night, f holds
a dying light, a slides into a silver bowl, d erases a shadow
with burning wood, e curves black night with silver rain."
Taniguchi’s voice is never characterized by self-pity or melodrama. She casts a cool, almost detached, but truthful glance at illness, human frailty, the inevitability of death (including her own and her husband’s), without undermining the seriousness of living. Consider the poem Foreign Wife:
My husband asked me where I would go if he dies.
Foreign wives are homeless without their husbands.
We give up our homes at the wedding.So where do foreign wives go after the death of their husbands?
I would walk into our bedroom. The smell of his presence has no
name, but its warmth would remind me that I am not alone, that I am
alone. No one would know that I was sitting on the bed.
Taniguchi’s poems remind us of the fragility of our own existence, but instead of being led to despair, we are called upon to pay close attention to everything around us: the rooms, the objects, the containers of our brief, precious lives. In the recent bumper crop of immigrant literature, Foreign Wife Elegy stands out as a distinct voice, ringing true and clear. It is the voice of one whose feet are firmly planted in her Japanese roots, with a triumphant fist raised high, towards life. Hers is a voice that the reader continues to hear long after closing the book._______
* Angela Narciso Torres’ own poems may be read in the North American Review (NAR), The Asian Pacific American Journal and in the anthology Going Home to a Landscape, (Calyx 2003, eds. Villanueva, Cerenio). She was awarded Second Prize in the James Hearst Poetry Prize 2004, sponsored by the NAR.
