“Letters from the Haruki Murakami Library”―ローレル・テイラー（Laurel Taylor）

“Letters from the Haruki Murakami Library” は「早稲田大学国際文学館（村上春樹ライブラリー）を訪れて、だれかにお手紙を書くとしたら？」という発想で、国際文学館に滞在いただいた方に執筆いただくシリーズ企画です。
「国際文学館翻訳プロジェクト」で2025年11月～12月に当館に滞在いただいた、米国在住の翻訳家、作家のローレル・テイラー（Laurel Taylor）さんに手紙を書いていただきました。

Dear Ono no Komachi,

I write to you in a language that doesn’t remotely resemble the languages that were primarily spoken and only rarely written in Europe when you walked this earth. My ninth-century peasant ancestors in the Holy Roman Empire were probably tucked away in corners of West, Middle, and East Francia, and Deheubarth (modern-day Germany, Belgium, France, and Wales), but though those farmers and millers and tailors were almost certainly illiterate, they were still blessed, just as you were, with the power of poetry and story. I imagine they told tales over fires in Old Welsh, Frankish, and Old High German, not to mention smatterings of Vulgar Latin, Church Latin, Old Dutch, Old Frisian, Gallo-Romance, and who knows what else. The lines between languages back then were not so neatly delineated as we like to pretend. (Nor are they now. Don’t believe what scholars say when it comes to the borders between languages.)

My ancestors’ tongues and histories are a mystery to me, save for my guess that they were all humble. With last names like Taylor (the Tanaka of English) and Kommes (a mysterious Germanic name that mostly like derives from “kommen,” “to come”) in my family lineage, I can hardly hail from some great dynasty or other. But I was never interested in knowing my ancestors’ depths and nuances and sociocultural peccadillos. At least not the way I was interested in your history, Komachi. In you and your literary peers and descendants I was interested enough that I’ve spent the better part of twenty years studying you all and learning a language that has almost nothing to do with my contemporary English. (Though we do have Japanese loan-words—did you know? Tycoons and skoshes and such.)

In contrast to my ancestors’ mystifying and unfamiliar tongues, the fact that I can pick up your work, Komachi, and with comparatively little effort, read it, enjoy it, and dissect it seems nothing short of a joke played by Time. There are somethings between us, across the chasm of thousands of miles and a millennium. On my end, an obsession with the etymologies of words and the traces in their marrow, even in languages I didn’t study obsessively. On your end, a fondness for fiery wordplay and wit and a reputation that far outstripped your living truth. (Because when I speak to you, Komachi, I of course mean you, but I also mean Sotoba Komachi and Kayoi Komachi and all the rest. You are as Threefold as the Fates.)

In the thousand years since you lived, your fame has transformed you into figures and forms that I don’t think you could have anticipated in your own lifetime. You became a beggar woman gone to seed yet still trapped in her vainglory and a hollow-eyed skull in a field wailing for the pain of her afterlife. A certain poet even transformed you into a heaving-bosomed vixen. Given the breadth of your presence in Japan and beyond, I wonder if I may find your ghost even in the unfamiliar roots and branches of the Indo-European literary tree? What do you have to say to your contemporaries halfway round the world and what might they have to say to you? I wonder if they could possibly have imagined your silks, your rice, and your fishing boats, or if you could have imagined their wool, their fritters, and their dairy cattle.  (But again, we shouldn’t trust the territorial lines these pesky scholars draw. Even in your century, the Silk Road was a vital artery stretching from Francia to Japan. My thought exercise in worlds unknown is already a fallacy.)

So Komachi, curiosity roused and wanting to tell you of far-distant poetry, I rooted through fields not my own and fields not your own in search of you, in search of how my forty-two-generations-removed ancestors might also commune with you. In Y Gododdin, aided greatly by A.O.H Jarman’s English translation, I read:

Er pan want maws mur trin,
er pan aeth daear ar Aneirin,
nu neut ysgaras nat a Gododdin.

やさしい御方おんかたが、戦いの壁にあい、殺されたため、
アネイリン様がもう土に被らされたため、
今は歌がゴドスィンの人々から分かれてしまった。

I have only guesses as to the discreet meanings of each crumb of Old Welsh. Aeth, earth? Daear, to cover? Or perhaps to bury? (The appendices illustrate my own ignorance to me, for “daear” means “earth” and “aeth” is apparently a conjugation of “myned.”)

But even foreign, Aneirin’s nat still sings, does it not? How close is a nat to your uta, Komachi, or your uta to my poetry, or my poetry to our ancestors’ histories? And what do you make of Aneirin’s fallen-warrior odes and battle-sung eulogies? Do you appreciate the end rhyme or the fixed rhythms of the syllables or is the violence of the work too unseemly for you? Do you sense through the utterly alien language the beating heart of verse that Tsurayuki claimed even frogs and birds sing? I like to think so.

You see, there are indefinable somethings between us, Komachi, and between all writers and versifiers and story tellers, and those somethings make themselves known to us. In my recent visit to Tokyo, to Waseda University, to Musashino, to Azuma, to the International House of Literature, to the Eastern Frontier, to the Murakami Library, to Et Cetera (etc.) I sensed you and our somethings. Those lands and their literary spirit roused your ghost. Our somethings, it turns out, are nothing so empty as the twin chasms of Time and space. They are links in a chain, as islands are links and languages are links. Each is forged discreet yet intertwined and inseparable, binding us all loosely (but not too loosely) to that which came before. Hiromi and I had a serendipitous moment, you see, while we were talking about experimentation and language. We discovered a point at which our links touch when I told her I had experimented with you, and she told me she had done the same.  (I should say, Komachi, that “to experiment” can be a euphemism in English. Take that as you will. I hope you take it well.)

Sensing you, wondering how my worlds and my ancestors’ worlds and links intersected with yours, I look back at the few leaves you left us and see you wrote あはれてふことこそうたて世の中を思ひ離れぬほだしなりけれ. I also see that placed in answer to you in the pages of the Kokinshū, an anonymous singer was made to cry back あはれてふ言の葉ごとに置く露は昔を恋ふる涙なりけり.  In your two voices, the longing for bygone days and the pain of knowing your longing holds you fast—no lotus flower for either of you. Aneirin, too, sang of the past as he lamented men fallen on the battlefield.

Whether in Deheubarth or the Yamato court, there is still loss in the stag’s cry.

But my ancestors were not only of the Welsh persuasion. I wonder, Komachi, what you might make of another woman’s work? I don’t imagine you and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim would have had much in common. Hrotsvitha would have probably felt more kinship for Akazome Emon or Empress Sōshi, both of whom took Buddhist vows relativley early in life. But even so, Komachi, you still wrote of your own desire to leave suitors at the door, and there is kinship in that. Hrotsvitha’s favorite theme was also a demanding male suitor or two pitted against an unwilling woman or three:

CALIMACHUS: Primum de amore•
DRUSIANA:       Quid de amore?
CALIMACHUS: Id scilicet•quod te | prae omnibus diligo•
DRUSIANA:       Quod ius consanguinitatis•quᶒve legalis conditio institutionis•　compellit te ad mei amorem?
CALIMACHUS: Tui pulchritudo•
DRUSIANA:       Mea pulchritudo?
CALIMACHUS: Immo•
DRUSIANA:       Quid ad te?
CALIMACHUS: Pro dolor hactenus parum•sed spero quod attineat postmodum•
DRUSIANA:      Discede discede leno nefande•confundor enim diutius tecum verba miscere•quem sentio plenum diabolica deceptione•

カリマコス：　まず、愛をすること。
ドルシアナ：　愛といえば？
カリマコス：　いうまでもなく、すべてよりあなたを。
ドルシアナ：　何の親族関係、または法律的な状況が私へ愛をと言わせるのですか。
カリマコス：　あなたの美しさが。
ドルシアナ：　私の美しさだと？
カリマコス：　いかにも。
ドルシアナ：　それはカリマコスに何の関係ですか。
カリマコス：　残念ながら今まで何の関係もなかった。しかしこれからはあるように望んでいる。
ドルシアナ：　やめて、出ていけ、陰湿な女衒よ。私を混乱させてしまうから。あなたと長く言葉を交わすのは困ります。カリマコスの魔性の偽り言はよく理解しました。

Hrotsvitha’s words are less foreign to my ear than were Aneirin’s. English’s extensive borrowing from Latinate languages and my own excessive education mean that unlike Old Welsh, I have a foothold in Hrotsvitha’s dialogues (though still I draw on aid from Larissa Bonfante’s somewhat decorative English translation.) “Discede” is probably related to “desist,” “verba” to “verbal,” and “diabolica deceptione” is very obviously “diabolical deception.” How lovely to have an educated guess, even if I have no true sense of the work.

Because, Komachi, Hrotsvitha’s rhythms are a different bear, and I cannot rock to them the way I can to Aneirin’s. Her grounding in the Latin works of Plubius Terentius Afer is, her scholars insist to me, a key influence on her plays, but though I have done some reading and fumbled some ad hoc parsing, the classical Latin rhythms confound (confundor) me. There is meter here, but it slips through my unsteady grasp without catching. I am reminded of how it took many years, Komachi, for me to begin to hear fives and sevens in Japanese and to recognize them as a poetic cadence. These prime number groupings ring so different from Western European linguistic traditions, which cling to and uphold even-numbered syllable counts. Shakespeare’s beloved pentameter is, after all, the beat of ten rather than five.

And yet, Komachi, even as rhythmically different as you and Hrotsvitha are, you too wrote of turning away a persistant suitor (or perhaps even persistant suitors?) A certain man wrote 秋の野に笹わけし朝の袖よりもあはでこし夜ぞひちまさりけり and in tales and collections you were made to reply みるめなき我が身を浦と知らねばやかれなで海人の足たゆくくる. That certain man was not the true recipient of your poem, but I think I can safely I assume the paramour you wrote to still was not welcome. Given that outside your poetry the only verifiable fact about you that has survived to my time is that of your beauty, I’m sure you knew more than enough men who couldn’t take a hint.

Hrotsvitha took vows as a young woman and lived at Gandersheim Abbey surrounded by women for most of her life, so her struggles with men came not in the form of amorous advances but in doubts and crimes the clergy lay at women’s feet—women were inherently weaker than men, Hrotsvitha was told, and women should be held at fault when men strayed from God’s path. She, however, argued that women too could be virtuous and that to write of their virtues was worthwhile work, even if it meant that Hrotsvitha had to expose herself to texts not befitting a chaste woman. “Unde ego Clamor Validus Gandeshemensis•non recusavi illum imitari dictando•dum alii colunt legendo•quo eodem dictationis genere•quo turpia lascivarum incesta feminarum recitabantur•laudabilis sacrarum castimonia virginum iuxta mei facultatem ingenioli celebraretur•” 伝統的なプブリウス・テレンティウス・アフェルのいやらしくて汚い女性についての台本が今でも広く読まれて、よく思われているとわかっているからこそ、私、ガンダースハイムのつよいさけび、は尊い純潔のえらい乙女を祝うために遠慮せずあの脚本家の芸を真似して書いてきた。She was a proud woman, you see, though pro forma she decried her own pride and craft, as did the men who later “discovered” her. Like you, Komachi, she burned too hot. (Her passion, however, was for Christ rather than some mortal man.) Given that in your own culture chastity was not yet a virtue, Hrotsvitha and you would have found this the point at which my metaphorical chain links form a boundary rather than a connection.

Because for all my pretty talk about found family and literary somethings, Komachi, it is important, too, to acknowledge our differences. If my ancestors had been born into your world, they would have been fixed in their peasant status, presenting rice and hemp to their lords and living from harvest to harvest, singing perhaps, but not for your noble ears. And if you’d been born into a moderately wealthy family in my world, Komachi, I doubt our paths ever would have crossed. I’m still too working class to rub elbows with the rich, and poetry doesn’t pay in my time and culture like it paid in yours. Your family would have set you on a path of business or medicine rather than the arts, though given your way with words and your beauty, maybe you would have made it as an influencer. (I can see your Instagram now, tastefully minimalist save your smattering of houseplants and carefully cultivated quotes.) Of course, we were each born when and where we were, and for that our differences are greater still.

Yet it is in these points of disconnect that I find myself most fascinated and puzzled. Each mystery lost to time is a rich vein of ore, and to melt that treasure into the vast hungry furnace of my own colonizing culture would be to destroy its contrasting beauty. Can you see and sense each of these troves, Komachi? The classical Latin dactyl and the rhyme of Old Welsh? The passion of a courtier awaiting her lover and a canoness’ steadfast belief in the necessity of female virtue? The fascination of a decidedly white, American woman choosing to study a culture a millennium and a world away?

Komachi, I’ve gone on too long, I can’t seem to help myself. And I have no way of knowing if your literary spirit lingers still in this world to have seen a lick of what I’ve written. All of these words to you may just be words to myself and a ghost of my own making. But if that is the case, then in a way I’ve succeeded in bringing my ancestors to you. Because if your ghost is within me, Komachi, then she already knows all the ink I’ve spilled here, and moreover, she’s understood, at least in part, the language I’ve teased her with. Not the meaning of each separate word, no, but rather the beating heart of verse that lives on. She’s heard Aneirin’s wailing and Hrotsvitha’s shouting, the frog song and the bird call. And now she’s even heard a moonlit katsura, sighing in the breeze.

Until the next time I call on you, Komachi,

Laurel Taylor

ローレル・テイラー（Laurel Taylor）

米国コロラド州生まれ。現在翻訳家、作家、デンバー大学で日本語・日本文学の専任講師として勤務。アイオワ大学修士課程修了（文学翻訳）、ワシントン大学セントルイス博士課程修了（日本文学・比較文学）。バチェラー八重子、松田青子、藤野可織、瀬尾まいこ、様々な作品を英訳。川上未映子の『黄色い家』(Knopf)の由尾瞳と共訳が2026年3月出版。詩集『Human構造』(七月堂）2024年出版。