Trish Shishikura’s poetry peers right into the wound platforms
All over Japan, especially in Shinto shrines, pocket trinkets known as omamori are sold as talismans designed for positive intentions. Sought out by the weary traveler and the expecting mother, the anxious board exam taker and the jilted lover, the omamori is an emblem of blessing, encapsulated in a tiny package that feels apt for a culture that places quite an emphasis on decorum and restraint.
In the debut poetry collection of Filipino-Japanese writer Trish Shishikura, the end comes on without a gasp, the fateful image of the omamori surfaces amidst a swirl of impending loss and unspecified emergency. We encounter the poet taking her friend, wounds still fresh from a breakup, out to the sea where they catch a glimpse of a man “found sprawled on the sand, unconscious but breathing.”
The poet’s instinct here is to capture this moment, to maybe chisel out the life-affirming juxtaposition from the chaos. But the instinct of a friend, Shishikura writes, with a dry bit of irony at her people-pleasing tendencies, sees this tragedy as a bummer: “I should’ve taken him elsewhere, maybe a place / where disaster is more palpable like Miyajima.” The poem parts with the slightest evocation of the omamori, imagining the waves washing over them, and her friend eventually healing, the “dolor drying out from his hands.”
In this compelling, oftentimes brutal, collection, Shishikura traces a life caught in a succession of losses with an urgency and attentiveness that meets the cruelties of our moment: a time when relentless cultural genocide coincides with ecological devastation, and when the body must make space for all of it: grief for the planet, our loved ones, our own rapidly changing circumstances that bring us ever closer to the edge.
As a Filipino-Japanese woman, Shishikura understands that the stereotypical markers of her identity can tend towards minimization, self-silencing. “We Japanese,” she tells me over email, “would stay silent about it for as long as we could, and we Filipinos would forgive and forget, but I refuse that kind of mentality.” In her poetry, this refusal carries inside it also an affirmation—of the lives and histories that remain unaccounted for, including comfort women and the wounds of Japanese colonial violence, her father’s grisly death, and the psychological and emotional impact of trauma.
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Shishikura illuminates, out of this grief, a traveling grammar of death, displacement, and disappearance. Her lyric practically glistens around the edges, an experience that’s like catching light upon a shore. The images glimmer, then fade out alternately. In a poem called “Fishing on the Moon,” resonances alight on each other, settling into a dream-like trance that unsettles location and time alike: “There is no gravity to pull you on your knees in despair here, / only lunar water and waves from a winter I have yet to see.”
I love the way the images telescope into one another. In a way, the book mimics this movement: personal grief slides wolfishly into reflections about historical and economic injustice, sometimes in the world of a single poem. In one of the book’s longer poems, titled “The Bubble Economy,” Shishikura attempts to pin down a “lexicon of death,” and finds that the English language cannot accommodate all of it, all of the death.
Key to making sense of Shishikura’s poetry is sensing the body as a text in and of itself, one that can be read and misread, interpreted and violated, isolated but also in motion. “I am interested in how systemic violence and ecological loss can parallel the personal landscape, and I aim to write about it until the body absorbs them all,” Shishikura tells me.
The idea of a nation, across Shishikura’s poetry, is also an embodied thing, and this is informed by a life spent straddling the identity borders as a Filipino and Japanese. She tells me about her childhood in Japan and the isolation she experienced at a young age: “When I was younger, I attributed that isolation to being a Japanese national living in the Philippines, but moving back to Japan as an adult didn’t dissolve that boundary either.” Shishikura introduced me to a label for this in Japanese: “hāfu, or half Japanese, or not really Japanese.”
Split into eight sections, the book’s structure and sequencing is intentional as Shishikura wanted to “create a portable object, something small enough to carry around in a bag, read in increments, set down, and returned to when you need space to reflect.” Like the omamori, Shishikura’s collection is a handy companion charged by the intimacies of desire.
A thesis statement for this collection arrives towards the end of the book, when the piercing wounds have scabbed and the fresh red of impact has bruised into purple: “I am born again and again with the gift of travel and despair.” Shishikura offers no resolution or teaching moment here, instead an acknowledgement—an insistence even—that these experiences are themselves a gift.
“While others see travel as romantic exploration, for me it is a form of geographic and psychological displacement,” she said, expanding on the passage I quoted to her. “Moving continuously between Japan and the Philippines forces me out of comfort zones and into a state of hyper-observation. This perpetual displacement is a default despair I carry, but it is also an intense, clarifying friction. It sharpens my perception, allowing me to view both movement and this type of despair not as burdens, but together, as a blessing that fuels the work.”
In a prose poem called “The End,” Shishikura leaves behind a country but carries its weight of violence, and expresses regret for perpetrating that same abuse:
Dear country, forgive me for leaving you without closure. How I lacerated your wrists, your legs, entered you and left without notice. How I lacerated your wrists, your knees, left your skin glowing the color of mangled flesh.
What do we do with the damage that has shaped us? “As an author,” Shishikura says, “I hope I have been able to package these narratives of violence into a form that can be carried around, honored, and remembered by those who read the book. These poems are physical proof that we were there, we survived it, and we didn’t look away.”
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The End Comes on Without a Gasp is available through Ateneo de Manila University Press.
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