NANAO SAKAKI
The hippie movement was building to a crescendo during my high school years (1966–70), reaching to within 25 miles of our secluded “Leave It To Beaver/Ozzie and Harriet” suburban New Jersey town (100% white, except for Mrs. Duncan, the typing teacher. She taught at the high school but must have lived elsewhere). Greenwich Village may have been only 25 miles away, but those were long miles. I only remember one hippie in our high school: Larry Hopp. Larry had long hair and he’d been to the Village. That’s all it took.
The epochal Woodstock in 1969 was way beyond where I was at the time, but I did make it to Watkins Glen in 1973. With 600,000 others I saw the Grateful Dead (yes, Jerry Garcia), the Band and the Allman Brothers (well, at least Greg — Dwayne was killed in a motorcycle accident two years earlier).
Only years later, after discovering Jack Kerouac, did I realize the hippies owed a great debt to the beatniks who paved their way: Jack Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder — and their works are cultural classics.
Kerouac lived his life to the fullest and then pushed the boundary farther. He paid the price, though, mostly with alcohol. Sitting in his mother’s Florida apartment in his later years with a can of tuna fish and his daily allotted shot of whiskey his esophageal varices exploded in a bloody mess. And Jack left us. I think it was mountain climber Willie Unsoeld who said, “Death is not too high a price to pay for a life well-lived”. Unsoeld, who died in an avalanche on Mt. Ranier, called that one right.
And it was years later still that I found out the beatniks had a Japanese compatriot — Nanao Sakaki. Nanao seemed to be more a Japanese Walt Whitman than a beatnik, but definitions are fluid. Certainly, he is the most famous Japanese poet outside Japan (I have yet to meet a Japanese who has even heard of him).
Nanao wandered the globe, spending a lot of time in the American West. He accepted hospitality when he found it. And he wrote poems. Most were written in Japanese and later translated back into English.
Nanao’s signature poem, and the title of his book, is Break the Mirror. Nanao is an ageless child, filled with the wonder and awe of life, in a man’s aging body. It was a body he could not see, or be reminded of, until he looked in a mirror:
“In the morning
After taking cold shower
~ What a mistake ~
I look at the mirror.”
Nanao’s advice closes the poem:
“To stay young,
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To save the world,
Break the mirror.”
Gary Snyder concludes his forward to Break the Mirror as he describes Nanao: …
“he has bony knees, dark tanned face, odd toes, a fine chanting voice, a huge capacity for spirits, a taste for top-quality green tea, and four beautiful children. His work or play in the world is to pull out nails, free seized nuts, break loose the rusted, open up the shutters. You can put these poems in your shoes and walk a thousand miles”.
It was Denise from the Alaska-Tibet Committee (the same Denise who told me the Mongolians were coming) who called to alert me that Nanao was in Anchorage staying with some friends. Denise read some of his poems to me over the phone. I drove over one evening to meet him.
I’ve written a few haikus, but Nanao deserves a “double”, so I dedicate my first “double haiku” to Nanao:
Drinking white wine
with Nanao Sakaki in Anchorage,
I took no notes of our conversation.
Didn’t need to.
Nanao handed me
the Swiss Army knife
that Allen Ginsberg gave him.
I held it for a minute, then gave it back to Nanao.
It was enough.
In a July 2004 e-mail Gary Snyder promised to take my greetings to Nanao when he went to Japan later that year. Nanao lives in a small hut on the flank of Mt. Fuji.
