A Garden of Forking Paths
- By Jim Hicks
Sometimes you just have to break the rules.
Some time ago now, one of our editors heard Karen Tei Yamashita read a truly stunning piece, “Borges & I,” a work which crosses the border between essay and fiction, and between history and poetry as well. When he told the rest of us about it at an editorial meeting, we encouraged him to see if the work was available. Word came back that it had been promised already, to an academic journal based at the University of the Ryukyus, in Okinawa. Not willing to give up so easily, I wrote to Tei Yamashita and asked if I might contact the journal editor directly. Certainly the readership of the Massachusetts Revew and the International Journal of Okinawan Studies were unlikely to overlap, I reasoned, and this was definitely a story that deserved the widest possible audience.
Through Karen, I thus had the pleasure of corresponding with Kazuko Takemura, the guest editor of a special issue of the Okinawan Studies journal, on the theme of “Women in Globalization.” Kazuko lobbied her best for us, and we originally hoped to publish the piece more or less simultaneously, but first the journal’s editorial board, and then its publishing house, informed us that this would not be possible. They would agree, however, to let us republish the piece three months after its original publication, rather than their usual standard of one year. At this point – feeling that they, and certainly Kazuko, had done all they could – we decided to go ahead, and to publish the story as soon as it was available.
An ocean and a continent away, at that point I had no way of knowing that this courteous, aimable, and learned colleague had only a few months left to live. Certainly her enthusiasm for the world of ideas never dimmed. When she inquired whether May Sarton had published in our journal, I sent her copies of three Sarton poems from our very first volume, and, later, a recent issue of MR featuring two stories by Takakashi Takako. In our last email exchange, Kazuko gave me two suggestions about new women writers for our journal.
Just a week or so ago, two copies of the IJOS special issue on “Woman and Globalization” arrived at our office. To put it simply: if the readership of the Massachusetts Review and the International Journal of Okinawan Studies have not previously overlapped, well, they sure should from now on. The issue is essential reading for anyone interested in the sweeping effects of global economic and political trends on the lives of women. Gayatri Spivak, a close friend of Kazuko Takemura, introduces the issue, and, in addition to Karen Tei Yamashita, it contains work from Pheng Cheah, María Luisa Femenías, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Each of these essays are brilliant, though markedly different in style and intent. Yet the real jewels of the journal are the two essays with Okinawan themes, Masami Yuki’s on the Japanese poet and essayist Morisaki Kazue, and, especially, Ikue Kina’s borderlands analysis of language and voice in the Okinawan writer Tami Sakiyama. Sakiyama, in particular, is described so vividly that readers will inevitably want to know more – to find and read her work, or, in our case, to publish her.
As editors, we sometimes just can’t resist proselytizing for work we love, and surely few have done it as well as the IJOS’s guest editor, the late Kazuko Takemura. Here’s how she described “Borges & I”: “Karen's piece is not only ideal and the very thing desired for our topic, […] but also very intriguing for its narrative style, which transgresses literary genres – prose, poetry, biography, critical essay, historical analysis, etc. – and then brings us toward somewhere known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar […] I hope (now personally) your journal and ours are together contributing to the introduction of Karen's magical world to a larger audience both in the US and Japan, and beyond.” Amen.
