Phantom in the Text: Some Literary Implications Revealed by the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
Mad Daughter and Big-Bang
December 25, 1945*Walking in the vegetable patch
late at night, I was startled to find
the severed head of my
mad daughter lying on the ground.Her eyes were upturned, gazing at me, ecstatic-like…
(From a distance it had appeared
to be a stone, haloed with light,
as if cast there by the Big-Bang.)What on earth are you doing, I said,
you look ridiculous.Some boys buried me here,
she said sullenly.Her dark hair, comet-like, trailed behind…
Squatting, I pulled the
turnip up by the root.*[In the aftermath of the bombing, many survivors moved into the foothills of the Chugoku mountains surrounding Hiroshima. This was the case with Yasusada and his daughter.]
This poem (complete with footnote) begins the book, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (11). The book was not published by Wesleyan University Press, nor were any of its poems anthologized in the celebrated Rothenberg/Joris collections of avant-garde writing, Poems for the Millennium.
These last two observations might seem peculiarly random if not for the fact that shortly after the debut of this work, both seemed likely to come true. In the mid 1990’s selections from the notebooks began appearing in respectable periodicals such as, Conjunctions, Grand Street, and the British journal, Stand, among others. Soon after, American Poetry Review did a spread on this newly discovered work and its newly discovered author.
It is here that the problems begin, for the author of the work came with a remarkable biography. Araki Yasusada, born 1907, had been writing since early adulthood and had maintained long-lasting, close ties with many experimental, Japanese poets and poetry collectives (in spite of the curious fact that he himself was never published). He was also a hibakusha, that is, a resident of Hiroshima who survived that fateful day in 1945. Nearly his entire family perished from the blast of the atomic bomb. This experience understandably came to haunt his writing. Fortunately for posterity his son stumbled upon the notebooks following his father’s death from cancer in 1972. A trio of Japanese translators got hold of the work and began rendering the motley collection of documents—poems, letters, shopping lists, and more—into English, annotating them with copious biographical and historical notes.
With a look at just the above poem one can readily sense some of the many sources of the work’s appeal. It begins with a certain quaintness of imagery: the scene is a vegetable patch at night. But immediately the tranquility is invaded by something sinister. The severed head of the poet’s mad daughter lay “as if cast there by the Big-Bang.” With just these few elements we are able to glimpse a microcosmic view of Yasusada’s poetic world, and also those traits that made him so gripping to American readers. We have the rustic garden, suggestive of the stereotypically peaceful, tidily ordered Asian life. There is the image of the Big-Bang, embodiment of the opposite forces of creation/destruction but even more importantly, curiously evoking western modernity with a (then still fresh) scientific theory of cosmogony. Finally, we have dark undertones suggesting the daughter’s rape and destruction, climaxing with a surreal moment that leaves us with a sense of confused ambivalence to the horror—much like the father in the poem. This Araki Yasusada was truly a rare find, possessed of that traditional Japanese elegance yet thoroughly modern right down to his knowledge and poetic use of up-to-date western scientific theory. Here was a witness to one of the most horrific events in human history, a witness that could inform us not in the dry, cold style of journalism, but rather one that could convey the emotional content of the experience with a nightmarish clarity that shone through even in translation. It all seemed just too good to be true. And it was.
Shortly after the feature in American Poetry Review, shortly after the offers of Wesleyan and Rothenberg/Joris, rumors about the work began to fly. Indeed, it turned out that Yasusada was a thorough fiction right down to his son and his Japanese translators. The only one immediately associated with the text whose existence was not in dispute was Yasusada’s American literary executor Kent Johnson, a professor at a small community college in Illinois. The word “hoax” was in the air and amidst its own fallout the text receded, overtaken by a clamor of voices, some angry, some delighted, some injured, some smug.
But is the text really a “hoax?” Is this not perhaps a facile label for something much more complex? In this paper it will be argued that the Yasusada notebooks represent far more than an easily dismissed trick. Rather, they are a sophisticated work representing a natural evolutionary step in postmodern literary expression, a step that has been long anticipated in both creative practice and critical theory.
When one looks into the Yasusada texts, it is difficult to imagine how they managed to pass for anything other than a work of fiction. Naturally, it could be argued that this is easily averred from the privileged position given by foreknowledge of the work’s fictional status. Still, there are elements woven within the letters, poems and all else that seem to cry out as to the true nature of the text—particularly, one would think, to those in the business of professional literature. Apart from the oddities of expression unlikely to be yielded in Japanese-to-English translation, apart from historical anachronisms and impossible neologisms (all features Marjorie Perloff has seized upon in her essay “In Search of the Authentic Other,” reprinted in Doubled Fowering 148-168), there are “literary” clues within the text. For example, Yasusada makes reference to Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs in a letter dated before that work was even written (79). There is a similar inconsistency in Yasusada writing on poet Jack Spicer in a letter dated 1965, a time when Spicer was little known outside of his home city, San Francisco (62). It is worth noting that this obscurity was by Spicer’s own contrivance: he limited the distribution of his work to the Bay Area, making it difficult to obtain even on the U.S. East Coast (not that it was in demand or even known there at the time), much less Japan.
Apart from the inconsistencies of date, there is a quality of conceptual giveaway to these two literary figures. In 1968 Barthes penned his celebrated essay, “The Death of the Author,” in which he challenged the conventional dogma in reading which would have that “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (Image 143). In the final paragraph of this essay, it is as though Barthes is prophetically announcing Yasusada: “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue” (148). The specific work of Barthes’ that Yasusada finds appealing is itself an example of this cross-cultural dialogue. In Empire of Signs, Barthes turns his considerable tools of interpretation to the culture of Japan. But this work is more an act of creativity than discovery, for the Japan that Barthes unravels is the one of his imagination, the one formed from the admittedly fragmentary knowledge of a western observer. At the work’s outset, Barthes states that rather than constructing a nation that is an outright fiction, he might just as well, “isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features, and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan” (Empire 3). If Barthes had chosen to center the same project on an individual rather than a whole nation, one must wonder if his end product would have resembled Yasusada.
Yasusada’s poetic kinship to Jack Spicer is a similarly revealing act of self-reflexivity. Indeed, this is fitting, as self-reflexivity was a hallmark of the Bay Area poet’s style. One of Spicer’s early works that is mentioned in Yasusada is a set of “translations” of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca. In After Lorca, Spicer intersperses the translated poems with letters of correspondence between himself and the Spanish poet on the nature of the project and the process of poetry as a whole (Spicer 11-52). After Lorca is a peculiar case of art hijacking reality and one worthy of Yasusada’s attention, for by the time Spicer penned his work, Lorca had been dead for decades. Yasusada shares in Spicer’s love for this kind of textual circularity. With this in mind, one begins to see another of Yasusada’s fetishes—the slippery dividing line between representation and reality—as less a mere theme of the notebooks, and more a self-commentary.
Throughout the Yasusada text there are embedded references such as those mentioned that point to the work’s true fictitious nature. This has led theorist Brian McHale to defend the Yasusada notebooks by way of forming a taxonomy of literary hoaxes. McHale maintains that there are in fact three distinct types of literary “hoax” (236). A look at these genera and their place in the development of modern literature reveals something for consideration with respect to Yasusada.
McHale’s first class of trickery consists of the ones he calls “genuine” (236). By this he means those literary stunts that are contrived to deceive and hopefully to endure in their deception. Choice examples of this type of hoax are the Ossian poems of James Macpherson and the “Hitler Diaries” penned by Konrad Kujau. Without disregarding the incredibly complex psychological motives that can drive such deceptions, this category is perhaps still the most pernicious of intent. For although oftentimes the hoaxers are talented or intelligent enough to accomplish a convincing artifact, their primary desire is to exact worldly gain for their efforts (sometimes in lieu of the recognition for which they feel cheated).
The second category in McHale’s set is what he terms the “trap-hoax” (236). Among this class are those tricks designed to educate, or perhaps more honestly put, to punish. These hoaxes are necessarily to be found out, and their aftermath is intended to prove a point or humiliate person or persons thought deserving. One classic example of this is the Ern Malley hoax. In 1944, two young Australian poets decided to make a stand against the modernist tendencies their nation’s literature was starting to exhibit. James McAuley and Harold Stewart, both on military service in Sydney, launched their campaign against editor/poet Max Harris and his avant-garde magazine, Angry Penguins. They constructed a body of poetry using cut-and-paste technique and submitted it to Harris under the name Ern Malley, a (supposedly) tragic, lower-class, autodidact of the poetic arts, recently deceased from Graves disease. The collage-composition technique of McAuley and Stewart differed from those experiments-in-indeterminacy of later modernist writers such as John Cage, Jackson Maclow, William Burroughs or Brian Gyson. Stewart and McAuley deliberately selected and juxtaposed jarringly disjunctive lines to generate verse that they thought was meaningless and bad—i.e., modernist. Harris fell for the trick and devoted a generous portion of the next issue of his publication to the fabricated poet.
There was precedent for this Australian deception on the other side of the Pacific. In early 20th century United States, a pair of poets contrived a “trap hoax” similar in intent, manner and effect to the Ern Malley affair. Sickened by modern poetry and the “charlatanism” of its various schools, Arthur Ficke and Witter Bynner decided to join the ranks of the new style under false pretenses. The duo holed-up in an Illinois hotel and, suppressing their genuine feelings about poetic attention to craft, spent ten days spitting out what Bynner would later describe as “a sort of runaway poetry” (Smith 18). Among their first offerings in this new manner of writing was “Opus 40,” a poem featuring both the free-associative drift that the two poets were after, and something of that elitist, reader-be-damned hostility thought to accompany so much modernist verse:
I have not written, reader,
That you may read….
They sit in rows in the bare school-room
Reading.
Throwing rocks at windows is better,
And oh the tortoise-shell can with the can tied on!
I would rather be a can-tier
Than a writer for readers.I have written, reader,
For abstruse reasons.
Gold in the mine…
Black water seeping into tunnels…
A plank breaks, and the roof falls…
Three men suffocated.
The wife of one now works in a laundry;
The wife of another has married a fat man;
I forget about the third.
(Smith 100)
Of course, for this verse-run-wild, the pair also had to create the “creators,” Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan. They then attached a modernist-styled manifesto by Knish to their perceived doggerel and unleashed it on the world. But whereas the creation of the phantom Australian poet’s life and total output cost McAuley and Stewart the labor of a single afternoon, the “Spectra” hoax would take up more than two years of Bynner and Ficke’s time and attention. Their effort, however, was richly rewarded, for the poetry duped writers, scholars and general readers alike (Newark mayoral candidate Thomas Raymond even made readings of Spectrist poetry the centerpiece of his campaign rhetoric—and he won).
The real “payoff” for both the Ern Malley and the Spectra hoaxes lay not so much in the dupe itself, but in the revelation and subsequent humiliation of the targets. Absence of this cruel satisfaction is the basis for McHale’s third classification, what he calls the “mock hoax” (237). In this category it is expected that the “deception” will be discovered (sometimes it is even hinted at in the very text) but the consequent “exposure” is not intended to be at anyone’s expense. Motivation for the “mock hoax” is therefore not personal enrichment, nor punitive value, but lies rather in its aesthetic properties.
McHale positions the Yasusada text in this final category. Next to this good company he also places the enigmatic, modernist, Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. This aptly named writer (Pessoa in Portuguese means “person”) is notorious for his use of the “heteronym.” Polyglot and gifted with a number of fully developed poetic voices, Pessoa created his own modernist literary sub-school, peopled by poets and critics all of his own creation. The Sensacionismo movement had a tremendous number of “adherents,” and Pessoa even went so far as to create fictitious literary newspapers to give his heteronyms poetic, critical and journalistic voice.
It is here, in light of this last, more amiable of McHale’s categories, that we might stop and frame the aftermath of the above-mentioned “trap hoaxes.” For in both the Ern Malley and the Spectra incidents, there were consequences unforeseen by the conspirators. The Malley case truly climaxed not in the revelation of the actual authorial identity behind the work. The poems (and poet) had taken hold of the literary community to the extent that some more conservative readers were outraged at their impact. One such self-appointed guardian of Australia’s literary purity was a policeman who managed to have Harris brought into court on obscenity charges. At the trial Harris produced testimony from various literary notables such as Sir Herbert Reed and T. S. Eliot who confirmed the editor’s claim of quality for the Malley poems (Smith 56). Stewart and McAuley had inadvertently stumbled upon a technique for writing that yielded deep poetic resonance for the day’s more adventurous readers. In spite of their malicious intent, judgement on the work was pronounced by its audience: the poems had merit. The two poet-hoaxers had fallen victim to their own gag while Ern Malley became a mascot heralding the arrival of Australia’s avant-garde literary scene.
The Spectra hoax, as per plan, played out over a longer time period. Ficke and Bynner seem to have wanted the trickery to last until they had squeezed plenty of modernists into the ranks of the fooled. Indeed, although perhaps not accurately labeled “admirers,” among those who at least took the work seriously were William Carlos Williams and Imagist, Amy Lowell (said to be the central target of the whole deception from the first). The initial book, Spectra, generated a taste in the American readership for more poems of similar type. Bynner and Ficke continued their offerings but could not keep up with demand. Because of this, and a general desire to expand the Spectrist school, they sought help by auditioning a number of comrade-poets to write in like vein. All failed at the free-flowing style until the established Chicago poet Marjorie Allen Seiffert, who succeeded only after long and painful labor to shed her native voice and produce the poems of Spectrist, Elijah Hay. Eventually the hoax was found out, but not before Spectra had made its effect on the poetry scene and the hoaxers themselves.
The consequences of both the Malley and Spectra incidents raise serious questions concerning authorship. The first of these is whether authorial intent has any bearing upon a work’s reception, with the attendant question of whether or not it should. In the Malley case the answer seems to be a resounding “no.” For not only was the poetry usurped from the hoaxers by the literary community of their time, but it even resurfaced later in the U.S. as a poetic model for Kenneth Koch and John Ashbury of the New York School. In this reception by its audience, it was effectively retrieved from its status as “trap hoax” and made “mock hoax” in spite of its “authors’” intentions. The Spectra incident perhaps lacked the lasting literary impact of Malley, but before its controversial “outing,” it generated positive enthusiasm and activity for the poetry scene of its day. Thus even though it succeeded in generating its intended shame and embarrassment, its effects cannot be seen as wholly bad.
The second issue concerning faux authorship is the potentially positive effect that it can have on creative method. In the Malley case, Stewart and McAuley were trying to produce work that would be deemed “bad” by any reasonable person of poetic taste. They abandoned their “skilled” techniques, their previously proven tools to ensure quality, and embarked on a compositional method that neither would dare try under his own name. The results were not only valid, but even earned Malley fame and a literary legacy. The Spectrists “suffered” a similar paradox. Being freed from their own identities meant the liberty to embrace a fresh approach to writing none would have otherwise tried. Bynner described it thus: “Sometimes we would start with an idea, sometimes with only a phrase, but the procedure was to let all reins go, to give the idea or the phrase complete head, to take whatever road or field or fence it chose” (Smith 17,18). This freedom, the freedom to let the work take charge and determine its own direction without interference from any “author,” is a resonant echo of what Darlene Sadlier discovered in her study of Pessoa and his heteronyms. Among other functions, for Pessoa, diffusing and displacing authorship, “offered him the chance to participate in a kind of masquerade in which he sometimes could experience emotions he did not allow “himself” to feel” (4). While none of the Spectrists were willing to admit this much, all reported positive results of stylistic exhilaration from the experiment. Perhaps this unforeseen benefit, as much as anything else, contributed to its lengthy run. Still, one must wonder if there is not a trace of sentiment akin to Pessoa’s in Ficke’s wistful admission to Bynner, “Do you know, some of my best work is in Spectra” (Smith 43).
In surveying these various hoaxes, we see the paradox of two tendencies in relation to authorship. On the one hand these “experiments” have the effect of pulling authorship farther away from the work, on the other hand, they bring authorship closer by subsuming it into the creative process. The malicious intent behind both Malley and Spectra did nothing to prevent either from being initially perceived as literature and to function that way for some time after (particularly in the case of Malley). In each case, from Malley, to Spectra, to Sensacionismo, the liberty wrought by pretended identity produced fruitful procedures that otherwise would probably have remained unexplored.
There is also a creative dimension in the very formation of the identities, and one suspects, an attendant creative satisfaction felt by conspirators constructing such elaborate fiction. The tragic vividness of Malley’s short life becomes wrapped up as part of the artistic project and its effect. In the same way, both the poems and the poet-persona come alive through the pedantic but bizarrely original intellect of Anne Knish as she uses her manifesto to describe her commitment to the benefits of Spectric method:
Just as the colors of the rainbow recombine into a white light,—just as the reflex of the eye’s picture vividly haunts sleep,—just as the ghosts which surround reality are the vital part of that existence,—so may the Spectric vision, if successful, synthesize, prolong, and at the same time multiply the emotional images of the reader. The rays which the poet has dissociated into colorful beauty should recombine in the reader’s brain into a new intensity of unified brilliance. The reflex of the poet’s sight should sustain the original perception with a haunting keenness. The insubstantiality of the poet’s spectres should touch with a tremulous vibrancy of ultimate fact the reader’s sense of the immediate theme … In practice this will be found to be the vividest of all modes of communication, as the touch of hands quickens a mere exchange of names. (Smith 78)
Pessoa took these creative dimensions of faux authorship to the extreme, behaving for years as if the heteronyms were real people, real poets. He even publicly proclaimed the superiority of his fictive heteronyms’ poetry in relation to his own (that is, poetry published under his own name). Upon his Sensationist creation Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa even deferentially bestowed the title “master” (Sadlier 7).
While all of these aforementioned examples could be decried as mere poetic perversities, one can argue that they are cases of a well known and fully described literary phenomenon that has simply entered unnoticed by the backdoor. Of all the monstrosities generated by modern literature perhaps none is so monstrous as the critical theories that have developed beside it. As Structuralism gave way to Deconstruction, New Historicism, Post Colonial and other approaches, the field of literary theory arrived at a state of autonomy from literature. No longer was a literary text per se even a prerequisite to critical inquiry. More and more it seemed that modern theory was less about literature and more about such concerns as philosophy, politics, identity and language generally. Because of this, certain of its theoretical pronouncements that did address literature directly, often seemed, at the same time, distanced from it—perhaps interesting to contemplate, but of little practical value. Of this ilk are various critiques that radically question the role of authorship.
One version of this type of critique, Roland Barthes’, “The Death of the Author,” has already been mentioned in connection with Yasusada’s textual clues. Another more radical and thorough version of this inquiry into authorship is to be found in Michel Foucault’s essay, “What Is an Author?” (Foucault 113). This essay connects directly with concerns raised by the Yasusada text. It could even be speculated that it was the inspiration for the ragtag, everything-included, textual contents of the Yasusada notebooks, for in it, Foucault posits the question: if we are compiling an author’s “complete works,” just where do we draw the line? “…what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his (sic) works? Why not?” (118,119). Yes, why not? It is just such minutiae, up to and including graded and returned composition assignments from an English class, that makes Yasusada so human, so appealing, so “real.”
In his essay, Foucault challenges more than just issues of editing. He undertakes an analysis of the problems surrounding the very concept of “author”. Along the way he urges the reader to ask, “under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse…?” (137). This “subject,” for Foucault, is less a function of author than of reader: “…these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author…are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions that we practice” (127). Thus our reliance on the author as a clue to textual meaning is inherently flawed; meaning resides in a state of circulation between the reader and the text. Foucault continues, analyzing the fluidity of that thing that we call author/subject: “…it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.” (131). Here Foucault is not denying the existence of a text’s “creator,” but rather, he is denying the essential existence of that subject within the text. Moreover, he is cautioning us readers that if we look to the author for a text’s meaning, we are not approaching its “truth,” rather we are simply adding another textual layer. Further, this added layer is almost certain to be a distortion, for it is not the author at all, but only our projection of who the author is or should be.
It is easy to see that in Foucault’s take on things, the “author” is always a fiction. In terms of its historical relation to both Yasusada and the various classes of hoax, one can say that the general theory exhibited in both Barthes’ and Foucault’s articles is at once prophetic and extremely perceptive. Both articles can be seen as rather cautionary in tone. They warn the reader not to fall into the commonsense trap of believing that the author is a key to meaning. But there is also the more positive implication to this theory, the one that is generative, the one that informs Yasusada. If the “author” is but another textual layer, an instrument available for the reader’s projection of her/his own consciousness into the fabric of text, then this opens a new level on which the creator of a text may engage the reader’s attention. It expands the writing of a “text” to include the writing of a text’s “author.” This level of creativity is akin to writing the scene in which a story is set, but it operates on a kind of collaborative psychological level between a text’s reader and the one who actually devised the work. Exploration of this “new” literary domain has been called for in the wake of the Yasusada notebooks. The prominent Russian theorist/critic, Mikhail Epstein, has dubbed this largely unexplored, creative avenue, “hyper-authorship” (Doubled Flowering 140), with the created author-persona taking the term “hypernym” (139). Whether or not one wishes to grant such legitimate status to Malley or Spectra, both events demonstrated the benefits of such a creative endeavor. In this sense Yasusada, the moment’s shining example of hyper-authorship, can be said to have a theoretical basis as well as a sort of lineage.
Of course, not all critics have responded to Yasusada with Mr. Epstein’s enthusiasm. The controversy over the notebooks has provoked varied and heated response. The fact of the notebooks’ instant taboo status upon questions of their origin reveals the challenge that they pose to many recent trends in literature and its theory. In spite of the sophisticated suspicions about the role of authorship posed so long ago by early Poststructuralists, there has been a gradual re-valuation of authorship as identity’s safeguard and expression. It is as though, heedless to the problems that are known to hover over text, readers and critics are still trying to desperately tie words on a page to some objective set of circumstances under which those words were penned. Even in those critical approaches such as Postcolonialism and New Historicism, in which the individual human is considered “textual” and shifting, there is still the assumption that those textual strands meet in the body of a real person. To these approaches, Yasusada stands as a reiterated warning to be cautious in not allowing one’s analysis to privilege the “author-text” over the “reader text.”
But an even more profound retrieval of authorial reign, and one that is directly questioned by the Yasusada project, is the modern trend toward “witness poetry.” In her collection of witness poetry, Against Forgetting, the genre’s preeminent anthologizer Carolyn Forche lists as the first in a set of criteria for inclusion, “poets must have personally endured such conditions” (Forche 30). While this may serve as an interesting motif for structuring anthologies, it is not a very good criterion for guaranteeing poetic quality or artistic success. Direct, first-hand experience of an event does not ensure the effects of that event’s subsequent representation. The fact is there already exists a healthy body of genuine hibakusha witness poetry (Treat 155-197). Like a good deal of other poetry written to depict a witnessed atrocity, given its monstrous magnitude, the event comes to dominate the writing. Hibakusha poetry is moving in being direct in its report of the horror it takes as its subject. It is conservative and testimonial in form. It is not a poetry of interior tone. The concentration is on the painful event itself rather than a pained psychology in its absorption of that event; but this psychology is just what Yasusada does offer. It portrays a human mind as it grapples to put art to its most prized use: the communication of seemingly ineffable states of emotion. In this way it is a necessary fictional supplement to portray an historical horror that threatens to defy depiction. Just like Defoe’s “false” diary of the plague, Yasusada’s notebooks rest in that uncomfortable place between truth and falsehood that is the home of resonant representation.
In a Yasusada forum in the Boston Review, prominent poet Charles Simic argued that the notebooks implicate us as a culturally illiterate nation, for anyone with a genuine knowledge of modern Japanese poetry could never have been taken in. This may be. But we are implicated in a lot more than this. We are a culture dependent upon text and with a long history of questioning what that dependence entails. The Yasusada notebooks are challenging because they illustrate something that we know but refuse to face up to: text is not a transparent window projecting the thoughts and emotions of an individual across time and space. Text is far more autonomous than this. And its construction is far more complex. Text is more like a place of intersection where possibilities for meaning gather. We as readers engage it, supplying much of its sense through our prejudices, our expectations, and what we wish to find. And for as long as our expectations shall include finding some objective, distant author in the words of a text, phantoms like Yasusada will reappear, happy to oblige us in our search.
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