‘For SakÈ? Irish Whiskey’

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Notes

 1. See Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem; and Qian, Orientalism and Modernism.

 2. See the works cited in the reference list.

 3. Fitzsimons is Associate Professor of English Literature at Gakushuin University, Tokyo.

 4. Andrew Fitzsimons, interview with the author, 27 July 2004.

 5. Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350). Tsurezuregusa was published between 1330 and 1333.

 6. About 300 years earlier, around 1010, the court lady Sei Shōnagon (965/967–after 1010) had written Makura no soshi or The Pillow Book, a collection of anecdotes and observations which is often compared to Tsurezuregusa.

 7. Some critics are very sceptical about this theory. They find it difficult to believe that Kenkō's disciples could have gathered their master's thoughts in a unified whole.

 8. As Keene says in his Introduction to Essays in Idleness (XV), Kenkō tended to support opposing regimes simply to follow the political mainstream.

 9. As Keene says in his Introduction to Essays in Idleness, XX. Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529). Il Cortegiano was published in 1528.

10. See Lowell, Imitations.

11. Calza, Stile Giappone, 29.

12. Calza, Stile Giappone, 57. My translation from the Italian original: ‘i colori dell'oscurità’.

13. Fujiwara no Ietaka in Sen Soshitsu, The Spirit of Tea, 126.

14. Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, 164.

15. Fitzsimons, ‘What the Sky Arranges’.

16. Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, 143.

17. Fitzsimons, interview.

18. Fitzsimons, interview, reference to Vergil's Aeneid: ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ (cap. I: 462). Literally: ‘These are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart.’

19. Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, 26.

20. Calza, Stile Giappone, 35; Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

21. Montale's Ossi di Seppia was published in 1925.

22. Fitzsimons, ‘More Advice’.

23. Fitzsimons, ‘The Autumn Night.’

24. Fitzsimons, ‘The Human’.

25. Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, 25.

26. Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, 64.

27. Fitzsimons, interview.

28. Fitzsimons, interview

29. See Rosenstock, ‘Haiku: The Gentle Art of Disappearing’.

30. Fitzsimons, interview.

31. Chuzenji has been a religious site for 1,500 years. It was founded by a monk called Shodo Sho Min, who is considered the St Kevin of Japan.

32. Fitzsimons, interview.

33. Joseph Woods, interview with the author, 26 July 2004.

34. Fitzsimons, interview.

35. Sinéad Morrissey, e-mail interview with the author, February 2005.

36. Fitzsimons, interview.

37. For further reference, see Ohno, ‘Hokusai, Basho, Zen and More’.

38. Fitzsimons, interview.

39. Morrissey, Introductory poem, Between Here and There, 9.

40. It is more famously an August festival in Kansai and increasingly in Kanto.

41. Fitzsimons, ‘Worlds’.

42. Katsushika Hokusai, Old Tiger in the Snow, 1849, private collection, New York; Calza, Stile Giappone, 132.