Well, I'm going to read some poems next that
belong to Japan, more or less.
"Yase-- September."
Yase is a little village north of the old capital of Kyoto
at the foot of the mountain where
I lived for about a year and a half once.
"Old Mrs. Kawabata cuts down the tall spike weeds,
more in two hours than I can get done in a day.
Out of a mountain of grass and thistle,
she saved five dusty stalks of ragged wild blue flower
and put them in my kitchen in a jar."
This poem, or little group of poems,
is called "The Public Bath."
Maybe some of you saw this in Evergreen Review
a couple years ago.
In any Japanese city, if you walk
10 minutes in any direction, you're
bound to stumble on a public bath, a very convenient
institution.
You can get in and stay in as long as you
like for about five cents.
Now, up until about 1868 or so-- maybe later, about 1880,
I guess--
the sexes were not segregated in Japanese public baths.
And it was only to please what they thought
would be more civilized mores of the Western world
that they began erecting partitions
down the middle of the public baths
so that the woman went on one side and the men on the other.
However, they never bothered to send children, particularly,
to any one given side.
And also, as it happens, the area
where you dress and undress is not particularly segregated.
[LAUGHTER]
I went many hundreds of times to the public baths,
and so I was able to distill these six or seven
little [INAUDIBLE].
They're very short.
The first one is called "the bath-girl."
"Getting dressed in the mirror, the bath girl
with a pretty mole and red skirt is watching me.
Am I different?"
[LAUGHTER]