Cosmos Like Mine

The marketing copy for Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), the Japanese poet Yuki Tanaka’s debut collection, describes the book as defined by “timeless surrealism.” What exactly does that noun mean? In popular culture, surrealism is basically synonymous with the 20th century Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, whose work is rife with irrational and grotesque imagery: clocks that melt into dripping pools of gold, elephants that teeter on spindly legs, flesh that’s molded into horrific globs, and geometric patterns that recede toward the horizon. The vision of those surrealists in Dalí’s stead—Max Ernst and Andre Masson, among others—is ironically often too conscious of itself: the dark humor too clear, the Freudian references obvious.

There is another type of surrealist, though, arguably truer to the movement’s adherence to dream logic. These artists are drawn to the uncanny, the eerie, and the unsettling—painters like Giorgio de Chirico, Rene Magritte, and Gertrude Abercrombie. Tanaka is a surrealist in this manner, tipping his proverbial head-covering in the “The Village of the Mermaids,” in which he writes with Magrittian panache how “Some of us / have followed a man with a bowler hat,” evoking the most celebrated recurring figure in that Belgian painter’s work.

In Japan—which took to the European avant-garde rather fervently in the 1920s—a multitude of artists, including Harue Koga and Seiji Togo, “crafted a version of Surrealism that spoke more directly to their cultural realities,” as Mark Polizzotti writes in Why Surrealism Matters (2024). Japan, rather predictably, didn’t figure much in European surrealism, there being more of France in the verse of the Frenchman André Breton or of Russia in the Russian Tristan Tzara. And so, it makes intuitive sense that Japan appears in Tanaka’s poetry, as when he describes “Gingko trees . . . thriving in Tokyo,” or the “smell of soy sauce from a former distillery,” or the taste of a “bowl of udon with chopped green onions.”

Tanaka’s verse isn’t Japanese surrealism for those references alone, however. He also evokes the first generation of Japanese surrealists through his adherence to subtly uncanny dream logic. For example, consider Togo’s painting Surrealistic Stroll (1929), now in the collection of the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo, which depicts an abstracted white figure, simultaneously ghostly and fleshy, floating above a black-roofed house toward the glowing white crescent moon. Togo’s painting feels like flying in a dream. There’s a reason why the image appears on the cover of Chronicle of Drifting. Tanaka, like Togo, eschews Dalian excess. No melting, ant-covered clocks or fleshy protuberances—for Togo and Tanaka are true adherents of the unconscious flux, where images are more important than mere symbols.

“It is necessary for the poetic imagination to remain free,” Breton said during a 1935 lecture in Prague about prosody and surrealism. In ensuring that visionary poetry remains separate from the literalism of prose, Breton argued that, rather than rhythm or meter, enjambment or end-stopping, the poet really has “one tool, and one tool only, capable of boring deeper and deeper, and that is the image.” In this regard, Tanaka’s language—villages of mermaids, a boy drinking sake from his dead grandfather’s kneecap—is not just superficially surreal, but surreal per Breton’s command, because it dwells so completely in the power of image (though, of course, this would also be true of many poems not categorized with the adjective surreal).

In part, Tanaka accomplishes his surrealism through the use of the ambiguous simile, the metaphor in which tenor and vehicle are not completely yoked to one another, or at least not conventionally so. For Tanaka identifies a more essential quality in surrealism than mere eccentricity or strangeness, and that is in his focus on the oddity of language, poetry, and metaphor. Chronicle of Drifting begins with an epigraph from the eighth-century Japanese poet Sami Mansei, translated by Tanaka: “What should I compare the world to?” This question is often at the forefront of the collection’s strongest lyrics, where Tanaka makes explicit the incommensurability of being able to not just describe something in relation to something else, but to ever truly know what another person means. “I can’t invite anyone into my head because it is not comfortable,” Tanaka writes, a statement not of solipsism but of the ambiguities of both being and the self, while in that same title poem he considers a disdainful man he encounters in a coffee shop, concluding, “You can look into the mean man’s head and find cosmos like mine, perhaps more beautiful.”

The grammar in the line is odd but meaningful; the absence of an expected article before “cosmos,” whether a definite or indefinite one, gestures toward the possibility of some kind of collective connection, the universe existing between two skulls, or even a pantheistic reality of self equal to all there is. In such divisions, the main concern becomes incommensurability, ineffability. Not just for that which we think of as indescribable, but in fact, everything. And so, in “Exhibition of Desire,” a group of geishas is described as “quiet as dry starfish,” the mind of one as a “sick planetarium spinning in her skull.” The poem’s speaker notes how “Cappuccino rings inside my paper cup look like a Baumkuchen universe,” the reference to the German cake that’s popular in Japan, here elevated into the cosmic.

These metaphors, surprising though they may be, are still largely understandable through conventional rhetoric. But when Tanaka crafts verse that echoes the stream-of-consciousness style associated with the previous century’s avant-garde, where the poet clearly relishes the interplay of assonance and consonance, then the aural beauty of the sounds themselves are privileged over mere semantic comprehension. “There is a spell in every sea shell,” says the aforementioned bowler-hatted man, quoting American modernist poet H.D., who, if not a surrealist, understood the significance of the unconscious as she laid on Freud’s Viennese couch during her European travels (Tanaka’s academic scholarship is on the Modernist poetics of H.D.’s contemporaries Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes). What Tanaka searches for is the proverbial spell in the sea shell, the conjurations that exist in the relationship between phonemes, in the uncertain interplay of sound and sense.

And so in “The Village of Mermaids,” we read of how “a bag of skin casts a pattern / of blue veins on the dry street,” or in “The Exhibition of Desire” how “a muddy river in the distance / saturated me as the soul lingers in the body / to feel its sinews unravel, raw - / my little island at war.” The love of language’s sound—arguably the origin of any genuine poem, far beyond wishing to express simple meaning—is at the core of Tanaka’s most decadent and luxurious lines. In “The Village of the Mermaids,” he describes “Perfumed doorsteps, / marmalade in a glass hive, a sunlit bed / like a saffron-filled coffin – come back to this / jubilance.” What Tanaka emphasizes isn’t the literal meaning of the nonetheless-visceral imagery, in part because the imagery itself is genuinely surreal, but rather the relationship of sounds within the line: the way the “m” in perfumed is echoed by its siblings in the trisyllabic “marmalade,” the anapestic wave of “sunlit bed / like a saffron-filled coffin,” the mirroring of the fricative from “saffron” in its near-rhyme “coffin,” even the triumph of the quasi-archaic multisyllabic “jubilant,” which almost has to be spit from the mouth. The line isn’t devoid of semantic meaning—certainly the goldenness of a sunlit bed compared to a saffron-filled coffin has a discernable meaning beyond absurdity—but sound remains more important than sense, in a manner evocative of Tzara, or the surrealism of early Bob Dylan, for that matter.

There is, in the purest sense of this description, an aesthetic quality to Tanaka’s work, a valorization of beauty by the most radical means. In “I was Born in a Mountain Next to My Brother,” Tanaka describes how the “moon is a butterfly caught / in our retina,” while in the title poem he depicts the “fringe of his right thumbnail a red crescent.” Even more striking is the beauty and ingenuity in recounting the moment when a geisha in Missouri first encounters a common American beverage: “She drinks peppermint tea for the first time / It cools her as if winter hurried just for her.” It is crucial not to mistake aestheticism for being neutered, however, because a deep political vein also runs through Chronicle of Drifting.

This vein manifests most clearly in the collection’s second section, where Tanaka eschews surrealism in favor of a relatively straightforward cycle that recounts the real-life history of thirteen geishas who were exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the same event at which the famed Pygmy tribesman Ota Benga was displayed in a racially dehumanizing manner. Tanaka’s speaker says “we, / mice in silk kimonos, rustling across / a fragile bridge. Nearly identical, sick / of the vast, Midwestern sky.” The “we” here aren’t adorable mice in gauzy robes—they are women subject to an Orientalizing gaze, reduced to frightened, albeit cute, animals in a warning about the dangers of metaphor.

Politics isn’t reserved for historical set pieces in the collection. Just as the first generation of surrealists reacted to the traumas of the Great War and the subsequent rise in authoritarian politics, so too does Tanaka respond to our current apocalyptic moment. “Death in Parentheses” references a power plant in an unnamed land:

Outside the window, the plant 
looms over the village. It looks prettier than I thought, 
which makes me want to kiss it, but I know it will 
burn my lips and I won’t be able to speak to anyone 
with my charred mouth.

The burnt lips and the charred mouth, this cancerous leprosy, recalls the experiences of the hibakusha, the survivors of the American atomic bomb attack eighty years ago. Here is a poetics of Hiroshima and Fukushima, of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. A poetics not just of nuclear holocaust, but of the Anthropocene as well, in which the plant is responsible for “recent deaths . . . tomatoes not as plump as they used to be, / the maple trees discolored, their branches / like veins with no fat around them,” a process of tabulation familiar to all of us suffering grief over the immeasurable daily losses due to climate change. There are those who are responsible for this current affliction, as Tanaka writes in “Discourse on Vanishing”:

I will start with modern inventions: growth, 
abundance, which brought out a world 
filled with the dying . . . 
The waves, 
claiming unity, unrelieved rhythm, 
progress breaking on the shore.

Death thrums through the collection like an idée fixe. The nearest Japanese poetic analogue is the jisei, the “death poem,” composed by monks in the last moment of their lives. Not literally, of course, but Tanaka’s crystalline rendering of mortality is similar to jisei. (And lest this be read as critical imposition, note that one of the few proper nouns in the book is a reference to the writer Yukio Mishima, notorious for his 1970 seppuku). In “I Was Born in a Mountain Next to My Brother,” Tanaka writes that “A man drowned in a river. / We scoop up the water / and look at his face. Inside / his egg-shaped head, a white / spasm – death looks like a birth,” while in “Like One Who Has Mingled Freely with the World,” he claims that “Death / might cheer me up, make me feel / more human.” Both lines are exquisite paradoxes about the same idea: inverting death and imagining the finality of the tomb as containing the promise of the womb. In the second line, “Death” is the last word of the line, which leads into that counterintuitive observation, the stanza-break afterwards leading to the contradiction that our demise makes us “more human.”

Nothing is as surreal as death because, excluding birth, it’s the only truly universal human experience, but also the only thing that nobody alive could properly circumscribe in language. Death is the ultimate act of defamiliarization, which serves to demonstrate how the body is matter—and matter, despite all of the insights of physics and chemistry, remains as mysterious as spirit. In “Aubade,” named after the genre traditionally associated with a celebration of morning (or in this case mourning?), Tanaka conveys the deep strangeness of death, but also its wondrousness. First, though, he considers the uncanniness of being a body in space interacting with other bodies, animate or not. “I sit on a chair and the chair touches me back. / According to my chair, I have two hips / and bones inside them as hard as peach pits.” Matter, whether alive or not, may interact with other matter, but here it’s the insentient chair that evaluates the anatomy of our speaker. A chair transformed into a thinking being, at least by implication, just as death transforms an actual thinking being into flesh, carrion, meat, matter.

“In the ancient past of my village,” Tanaka writes, skeletal kneecaps were used “as drinking cups: a boy sipping sake / from the kneecap of grandfather.” Not as an act of disrespect, but of reverence, of the body’s remaining instrumentality even after extinction. “When he was alive, / he wasn’t much of a man – thin, boneless, / his shoulder soft as a berry-bearing ivy,” writes Tanaka. “Funny he seems more alive now, / this trembling bone under the cold water.” There are no dry bones, because all bones are capable of dance, just as there are no dead words, for poetry serves to make inexplicable existence at least briefly legible. That is the ever-generative absurdity of poetry, of all communication, those attempts to enter the inner cosmos of another and to briefly convince oneself that you have. If there is a deep wisdom to the incongruities and bizarrities and beauties and wonders of verse such as Tanaka’s, it’s this: all poetry is surreal because everything is surreal.