Fiction Reviews
A Samurai’s Pink House,
by Sonia Saikaley
Toronto: Innana Publications, 2017
120 pp
The Samurai is often associated with honour, courage, aristocracy—and violence too. Being the military high men in feudal Japan, Samurais were bound to a strict code of conduct, the Bushido, literally meaning ‘the way of the warrior’. Their idealized behaviour demanded from them a bravery and a perfection where the softness of the emotions, those intelligences that want to exit the body-politic and its calcified duty, to break the cords that insist on keeping us tied down, could not be fully exposed, only occasionally allowed in acts of kindness and compassion expressed toward the ‘weak’ of society. Restraint and measure were the ways. Perhaps A Samurai’s Pink House is about restraint and the measured ways too, albeit in a different fashion.
In this collection of connected poems Sonia Saikaley navigates through the ancient traditions of Japan, still present in modern day, either via memory or expressed in all kinds of living materialities. Ancient and modern Japan appears intertwined with memories of Canada and also the world—and all that extends beyond the world, the vast cosmos. Everything is bound together, tied up in an intimate and gentle oneness, where the part, feeling the laceration of separation, cries for the whole, like a child does for the mother. As we read through these poems, we have a full sense that we are not alone, we are not, cannot be separate entities, and if sometimes it appears that we are, we feel a void, a yearning and we act quickly to fill it, to repair that broken beautiful egg that we know we are and were meant to be. Like in any good poetry, the local and the here and now are used to feel, apprehend and comment on the universal, the cosmic, the transcendental. The personal surfaces as a letter of intimate loneliness written to a lover that we are trying to call, recover, or just reconnect with via the power of words and the memories that they carry and are capable of conjuring. We move through these poems and ponder upon what it means to be alive, what it means to be a man or a woman, what if feels to be in love or experience the profound longing for what one has lost or anticipates losing when we leave a place, a friend, a lover and go back to our old life, as if this voyage through Japan, was but a brief ephemeral moment—to be remembered in these trenchant and soft words later on, when we are absent from the place that brought them to life. Because to write is to seize moments, make them forever recapturable through the magic of a poetic alphabet that constantly reinvents itself.
As the title may anticipate, this collection is also about women trying to escape from the trappings of patriarchal entrenched networks of Japanese society (or any society) to reach a place, real or imaginary, where they are and can be warriors: the Samurais of a new world order where the colour “pink” has the same value as the colour blue. “A Samurai’s Pink House” is that incubating sanctuary for a new and necessary order that calls for genders to be equalized, in their difference. Is it that envisaged sphere where men and women can grow out of each other, where the other is the Same and the Same is the other, where we discover ourselves in the difference of the other, naturally, gradually, suspending thought and judgement, the ‘grammar’ that has insisted on defining us and which equates violence, a violence to our being, our beingness.
The clear, smooth and crystal-like language of Sonia Saikaley falls on us like gentle kissing cherry blossom petals, calling us to enter what Luce Irigaray calls a “silence”, an “openness that nothing or no one occupies, or preoccupies—no language, no world, no God” (17) in I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History—so that we can BE, experience being without a restrictive a priori. In this space of silence and openness we are called to the responsibility of finding the self in the non-self, the other in the self and the self in the other, all in a delicate beautiful dance that erases and suspends hierarchies, allowing us to be like the Great Buddha, enter and call upon us the great nothingness that is a very rich everythingness: “In simple robes,/no frills, no boa-feathered scarves/Waiting for a long-lost lover’s embrace,/Waiting, waiting, waiting.” The collection is filled with images that conjure up love, expectation, yearning—that eternal and patient waiting of the Great Buddha who knows that the Way can and will arrive. We just have to be resolute and work toward it: it is our responsibility to do so by getting out of ourselves and entering a wholeness that fills and fulfils, a wholeness that is kind to each part that makes it.
The world that the poet takes us into is filled with indigo blue skies, cherry tree blossoms, soft breezes, snowflakes gently kissing our skin, ancient temples and shrines, poets singing to the frogs and frogs singing to the poets, women’s rebellious or passive agency disguised as acquiescence, the live scents of warm tea, its vapours perfuming our souls in an act that merges matter and spirit annihilating our partition, the stunning colour of saffron skies, bodies in daring forbidden acts of love… All of this, offered to us in a gentle bath of words, singing with persistence into our ear, into our soul, calling us to a higher order. We are invited to feel and feel and feel: the sorrow, the beauty and deep pain that life is, the great longing for what it could be. Immersed in the body, with its calling carnal desires and the weight and pain of the material, we yearn to take off in flight, becoming, becoming, entering the Great Buddha state and exiting the body material. A Samurai’s Pink House speaks of a love—a beautiful love that demands. A love that knows we are beings of the universe and possess a spirit that calls.
Works Cited
Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. New York: Routledge, 1996.
