Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, “Ōshū Adachigahara Hitotsu Ie no Zu” (奥州安達が原ひとつ家の図), illustrating the legend of an ogress who drank the blood of unborn children. A print banned by the Meiji government in the 1880s.
A riff on Haruki Murakami’s novel “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.”
In Fukushima Prefecture in Japan,
A cannibal ogress once roamed
Who plucked babies from their mothers’ wombs.
Radioactive spillage there now fangs the sea,
And in Murakami's invented public library,
The books have all been replaced by old dreams
Which only a certified Dream Reader can read.
Hoi polloi, it seems, no longer read at all!
Where I live these days, it’s kind of the obverse:
Old dreams have been replaced by smart phones
Which all and sundry fish up from the deep,
While I—qualified Dream Reader that
I am!—call upon in sleep
Old books that anyone at all can read,
Evoking fetal dreams that cannot spill their seed.
The onibaba, or ogress, depicted in Toriyama Sekien's 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō ("Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons")
Thursday, January 9, 2025