Author: Simon Elmer

Restaurant or shrine Not a sign the place is full But how you should queue — Tokyo, January 2025 • • • • • The queue in Tokyo, whether at a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine, outside a restaurant or shop, into a museum or through an airport security check, and which can stretch for … Continue reading A Tokyo Queue

XXXXXXXXTatami mat XXXXXXXXSix feet by three XXXXThe length and breadth of a body XXXXBuilding block of the residence XXXXOn which the residents recline XXXXUnit of its composition Rationalisation of construction Three-hundred years before modernism XXXXPossibilities infinite XXXXBy their arrangement limited XXXXAt each change of scale remaining XXXXProportionate to the building XXXXXXXXEight to a room XXXXXXXXWarp, … Continue reading Taguchi House

Snow falls from the trees White roofs of the town below This winter temple — Takayama, December 2024 • • • • • Our guide on this, our first visit to Japan, was Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (1970), which I had first read many years before, but had left little impression on me at … Continue reading Sunrise Mountain Walk

An autumn leaf Falls from a tree To the moss floor Of the forest Red stars glinting In a green sky Heap of colour Which two women Wielding twig brooms Will sweep away. — Kyoto, December 2024 • • • • • The Philosopher’s Path (哲学の道) runs along the foot of the Higashiyama (‘Sunrise Mountain’) … Continue reading The Philosopher’s Path

The apparition of these faces in the crowd XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX— Ezra Pound Chinese schoolgirls dressed all in white Ivory pawns on a chessboard Mirrors hung in a pool of light The raised faces of Chinese girls A vein of quartz running through rock The white necks of Chinese women The swaying hips of Chinese girls Ticking … Continue reading A Chinese Woman

There’s the hill on which, fifty years past, I crashed my bike, swerving — said the driver Who put us both in the back of his car — Towards the road. Towards the trees! — I lied, Nursing my grazed elbows and knees. My dad Didn’t listen, and grounded me for a week For the … Continue reading Dolce Domum

Sitting in a Hong Kong cemetery Reading to the dead Chinese poetry In translation by an American Who calls lorries ‘trucks’, petrol ‘gas’ and Motorways ‘highways’ — to Hell or Heaven? Alas, America! America, Alas! What have you done to my language, My culture, my nation, this warring world? What evil has not sprung from … Continue reading Alas, America!

Something like my age (though with Chinese women It’s hard to tell), her black hair still silky And tied in a bun from which every luxury Had been wrung. But her hands, small and rubbed raw, Told me that her age were better measured Not in years lived but in decades of labour. She wore … Continue reading Mass Transit Railway