HAKOZAKI ON DEEP BLUE Poem by Masayo Koike

Nothing captured Hakozaki Ichirô's heart as much as deep blue flowers

One day
When he was waiting in front of the station for a friend
By chance his eye fell upon a nearby flower bed
There quite by accident
A mass of small blue flowers was growing
His line of vision
As if harvested by a vacuum cleaner was sucked into it
Hakozaki could not understand what had happened

Blue
Pierced Hakozaki's mucus membranes
Like an overflowing river it
Encroached upon his interior
Without exception every word that he possessed was drowned
After the profound silence only an exclamation mark
Was hoisted up like a small fish

Ah,
How deep was the blue,
Thought Hakozaki

It was at that time when he was assailed by a sharp grief
That made him want to weep loudly
There was no reason for this grief
In front of the station like this
He thought I should not break into tears all of a sudden
The self that Hakozaki had
Stifled firmly now
Turned him into
A newborn baby

Blue flowers the first thing the baby had seen since its birth

This was an instantaneous
Movement of emotion, an impulse
Far away from that thing called passion Hakozaki
Had never been as shocked by his own actions as then

It was only a colour
It was only blue

But Hakozaki was distraught
In his chest
There was a tightness
He felt as if he wanted to dive into the flowers
It was truly
That he was in love with the flowers, exactly that

‘Hakozaki, sorry for being late'
According to his friend who had said this, and then tapped him on the shoulder from behind
Hakozaki at that time
With a somewhat contorted face
Appeared to be saying something about blue flowers
In fact
It was the behaviour of a
Completely helpless baby

The sequel -

1 What befell Hakozaki after that I don't know.

2 When Asians are newborn a blue spot appears near their buttocks. It's a very pale blue mark like paint dissolved in water. We have blue in our bodies from the beginning.
When I was a child, on the lymphatic glands on my groin I had an almond-shaped blue spot. In the bath I used to compare mine with my little sister's. In colour and appearance my little sister's blue spot was slightly different. Now I can't find it anywhere, I wonder when, where and how it disappeared?

3 Once I used to stare feverishly at a blue convolvulus in my garden and I felt as if I was peeking at someone's crotch. Plant life revolves like a screw and bores into the depth of the life of the person who is observing it.

Like Hakozaki I also went into ecstasy over the blue convolvulus. This Western convolvulus had a warm yellow in its center. Around the centre there was an expanse of sad blue, inexpressively elegant and profound, while I was staring at it I felt consumed by the desire to plunge into the centre of convolvulus. The desire to plunge to one's death into the centre of the flower, a deep longing for blue, was this not the original expression of the emotion that drove many young people to travel?

4 At school the teacher used to say blue is for boys and pink is for girls. I hate the notion of dividing things up like this. When I looked around, everything - the sewing boxes, the calligraphy tools - was like this. But I don't like pink. As soon as I realized this, my mind was made up. I realized that amongst all the girls in the class, my sewing box was the only blue one.

Blue - you were the colour of my first modest resistance, for me who is a girl, you were a truly noble colour that gave me the first whiff of freedom.

5 Aren't I Hakozaki? Isn't Hakozaki me? We love blue.
A tanka poet, a youth who I met yesterday talked about Izumi Shikibu with a bead of sweat on the tip of his nose
‘Remembering you . . .
The fireflies of this marsh
seem like sparks
that rise
from my body's longing'*
In the white of the boy's eye there was a faint touch of blue.