Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada is the most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Lingua Franca devoted a special section to it. The Boston Review hosted a forum of responses to it. The American Poetry Review featured an insert of Yasusada's poems preceded by a portrait of the writer. On August 9th 1997, Asahi Shinbun , Japan's leading newspaper, published a front page story on Araki Yasusada. Poems and letters from the book have appeared in major literary journals in the U.S., England, Australia, Russia, Spain, Israel, and Italy. And yet Araki Yasusada, the diarist from Hiroshima, the zennist, the member of a prominent literary group called Layered Clouds, the Jack Spicer afficcionado conversant in French and English, the family man whose family was devastated by the nuclear blast, the writer whose moving poems, letters, and notes comprise the text of Doubled Flowering, this Araki Yasusada apparently never existed.

Despite suspicions that the Yasusada materials were generated by Kent Johnson, the self-proclaimed literary executor of Yasusada's main translator (whose reality is also dubious), no one has yet claimed to have written the book. Although jobs, careers, and notoriety are all premised on authorship, all we know for sure is who did not write Doubled Flowering , for the book's addendum makes clear the pseudonymous nature of Araki Yasusada. Now that the book has been published and Yasusada's fiction acknowledged, why hasn't the real author avowed his or her work? The time for a hoaxster's revelation has come and gone. But Yasusada is more than a hoax.

Most of the individual poems were published in journals, with their fictional authorship intact, as the work of Hiroshima survivor Araki Yasusada. Along with Yasusada's own purported writings, there are numerous footnotes, scholarly commentaries, and references that weave, in the manner of Woody Allen's Zelig , documentary facts (for instance, references to actual Japanese poets, literary groups, and ordinary affairs in Hiroshima) with Yasusada's fictional biography. While there seem to be enough anachronisms (for instance a reference to snorkling gear in a poem dated before the invention of such) and outright mistakes (a Japanese woman given a name that would only be used by a man) to suggest that something is awry, the general impression is of scholarly thoroughness and detail. As a result, many editors published Yasusada believing that he was, indeed, a Japanese poet and nuclear bomb survivor. Many of those editors have been quite angry later to learn that they were taken in by an elaborate fiction. Some have suggested that no one who has not experienced an event as cataclysmic as the bombing of Hiroshima has the right to "pretend" to have done so, that such a pretense demeans the people who truly suffered there.

But before we launch into that furiously raging debate, let's consider the work itself which, before questions concerning its authorship waxed full, provoked only wide ranging international praise. The book's introductory note serves to identify the bulk of the text as translations made by three Japanese scholars of Hiroshima poet Araki Yasusada's recently discovered notebooks. The ensuing assemblage of diary entries, Zen exercises, English class assignments, letters, and drafts of poems coheres loosely around themes of loss and authorship.

The first poem, for example, begins with the speaker conversing in a garden at night with a turnip which he mistakes for "the severed head of my/ mad daughter lying on the ground." References to the death of Yasusada's daughter and wife recur hauntingly throughout the book. At one point in "Suitor Renga" the author says "You are a little girl with blistered face, pumping your legs at a great speed beside the burning form of your Mother." In another poem, "The crying girl sounds like a loon." Yasusada makes references to "grief stones" and to the place where "a temple once stood./ As seventy thousand voices are fused by a sphere and." The sentence stops there. In a modernist parataxis, this fragmentation, the lopped-off sentence, iterates on the syntactical level the speaker's loss by intimating a world come prematurely to an end.

Equally rife, if more subtle than the invocations of loss, are Yasusada's observations regarding the nature of authorship. The preface to the book, a small paragraph, is worth quoting for its loveliness and for its elaborate multiplication of authorial perspectives:

"In this novel before me there is a painting in a book the protagonist is reading, in which a woman holds a mirror. Behind the reflection of her face is the reflection of a mountain, made tiny by the distance. I wonder what she could be thinking, thinks the protagonist, looking up from the book. I wonder what is happening on the hidden face of that mountain in the mirror…."

Elsewhere, Yasusada's purported reluctance to submit poems to a journal is described in a footnote by his translators as evidence that "supports our conviction that his anonymity was purposely cultivated." In "Assignment 20," Yasusada even explains his response to an English assignment, telling his instructor, Mr. Rogers, "You kindly asked us to write in the voice of another. I believe, very frankly, that all writing is quite already passed through the voices or styles of many others. This, I believe in my heart, is the very marrow of writing." Clearly, Yasusada was anticipating the debate that would attend the critical reception of his book.

But to say that the book's themes concern loss and authorship isn't any more significant, really, than observing that the theme of Shakespeare's sonnets is love. Theme is only a minor aspect of poetry, and whether in the form of grammar exercises, zen aphorisms, haibun, or diary notations, the bulk of Yasusada's work is poetic. For most readers, what counts is a poem's representation of inner life. Let's consider a Yasusada poem and ask ourselves whether the fiction of the poem's authorship makes it less emotionally authentic, or whether the poem's revelation of human experience and feeling is exaggerated by our presumption that it was written by an actual Hiroshima survivor and not by someone else. Here is the complete text of "Dream and Charcoal":

Dream and Charcoal

And then she said: I have gone toward the light and become beautiful.

And then she said: I have taken a couple of wings and attached them to the various back parts on my body.

And then she said: all the guests are coming back to where they were and then talking.

To which she said: without the grasp handle, how would you recognize my nakedness?

To which she replied: without nothing is when all things die.

Which is when she had a wild battle with the twigs.

Which is when the charcoal was passed from her body to mine.

Which was how she rose into the heavens, blinding the pedestrians.

Which was how our union was transposed into a dark scribble.

Which became the daughter calling, calling my name to wake me.

The poem starts with a modernist move, an "And," as though it had begun prior to our appearance as readers. It ends with the familiar device of the speaker waking from a dream. But what occurs in the middle rescues the poem from cliché. The accumulation of death images "gone toward the light," "a couple of wings," "when all things die," "she rose into the heavens" is interrupted by contrasting images of guests at a party, of a woman playing with twigs, and by enigmatic questions and assertions. One emotional texture is spliced with another in a manner that suggests both the distrust for a unitary speaking voice and traditional narrative development typifying literary modernism AND the contrastive tonal patterns and heuristic leaps typifying classical Japanese renga. The book borrows modes, images, and forms from both Japanese and Western literatures, complicating presumptions concerning its authorship. In this cultural encounter, Yasusada's work seems to stress the simultaneity of creation and transformation, of resonance and influence.

Several sentences in "Dream and Charcoal" have that lexical awkwardness and syntactical formality suggestive of inexpert translations. No native speaker, for instance, would say "the various back parts of my body" or refer to the body's "grasp handle." The very strangeness (and, for me, the strange beauty) of the poem in English only emphasizes its supposed translation. The English has been subverted by a foreign language; foreigness and nativeness, then, are consubstantial in the sense and syntax. We might even say that in Yasusada's frequent"translatese," the union of two languages has been "transposed into a dark scribble." The very grammar conspires to merge authorial identities.

And yet despite disjunctions in tone, grammar, form, and structure, despite the indeterminate pronouns (Are there two women who speak or does one reply to her own questions and assertions? Can we assume that the last speaker is the husband?) the poem communicates an undeniable emotional power. And elements of scenario and agency do cohere. We might infer, for instance (and this inference is bolstered by other poems), that the woman having a "wild battle with the twigs" is the poet's wife observed in a moment of childlike playfulness. References to her "nakedness," to her beauty, and to something being "passed from her body to mine" eroticize the relationship. When she dies, "rose into the heavens," the poet's love for her continues as a writing, a "dark scribble." As Shakespeare tells us, poetry is a miracle of presence if "in black ink my love may still shine bright." By writing about her, Yasusada keeps her alive, even if she never lived. Even if he never lived. This Yasusada poem seems to me as accurate in its representation of longing and grief as those poems by Petrarch, written in Laura's lifetime, imagining Laura dead.

Finally, the pages of Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada are stunning as poems and failures as the historical documents they turn out not to be. They are alternately funny, poignant, ironic, irreverent, bitter, and passionate. I do not think that they add up to a kind of joke, as some critics have argued, by seducing North American readers with their Orientalist exoticism, by fooling us into liking them for all the wrong reasons, or by taking advantage of our desire for Western clichés of Japanese and Chinese writing. Clearly, though, the poems do make jokes, setting up puns, proposing anachronisms, making purposeful factual and typographical mistakes, and juxtaposing versions of translations from classical Japanese poetry, novels, Hiroshima literature, and zen manuals with formal concerns dissonance, collage, ellipses, fragmentation associated with literary modernism. But the book does not merely "play into the residual guilt of contemporary American readers" or serve mainly to poke fun at the American market for "authentic" witness poetry by parodying it, as one critic, Marjorie Perloff, suggests. Sentimental references to kimono sleeves soaked with tears, to moon and hair and perfume may seem parodic, but they occur often enough in the poems of the Manyoshu, and Yasusada always complicates such images. Another critic argues that Yasusada "plays into the American idea of what is interesting about Japanese culture . . . and gets it all wrong, adding Western humor and irony." But I think he misses the point too.

Instead, Yasusada proposes a radical contemporary aesthetical response to one of the worst human atrocities, what Noam Chomsky and others have amply demonstrated as the absolutely unnecessary nuclear bombing of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American military forces. Using modernist strategies, the author(s), steeped in translations of Japanese literature and feeling uneasy, even-if they are Americans-complicit with the U.S. foreign policy that generated such mass destruction, invented an imaginative, political, and poetic act of empathy. To write poems concerning Hiroshima, they felt it necessary to imagine themselves as the other, "the enemy." They relinquished their own identities as authors and became invisible, as the Hiroshima victims themselves disappeared. It is an impossible gesture of solidarity, since one cannot become someone else and since one cannot truly imagine one's way into an actual culture considerably different from one's own. But nevertheless, it is a gesture worth making if its resultant poetry is worthwhile as art, as poetry, as-finally-contemporary Western poetry. In this gambit, Doubled Flowering is an astonishing success.

As to whether the application of a pseudonymous history to such a work is, as one editor claimed, "a criminal act," or whether Hiroshima's vastness and horror exceeds any common understanding of subjectivity, I leave it to you, tender and merciless readers, to determine for yourselves. After the one hundred twenty pages of Yasusada's notebooks, there are forty pages more of critical commentary and interviews which help to focus the issues at stake. You might want to add your response to what is already a kind of Talmudic document published with commentaries around translations of notebooks written by an author who does not exist about a place that was once blotted out. Modern art is something with which to think. Bernard Berenson once noted, "A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the non-self that there is no self to die."

Today, March 3, 1998, flipping through the book's pages again, I'm drawn to a poem toward the end titled "March 3, 1970." It reads as a suitable, if bathetic, postscript to this review:

Where our house once stood
the pinecones have fallen
among the pinecones