Working through grief with tanka poems

Aki Omori / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

When a family member is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, should relatives put on a brave face in the hope of sparing their loved one further anxiety, or should they openly grieve together? There is no easy answer for people faced with such a difficult situation.

Kazuhiro Nagata, 64, is a writer of somonka love poems, which consist of two tanka poems--one an expression of love, and the second a response by another person. He lost his wife, Yuko Kawano, also a poet, in August 2010 to breast cancer. She was 64.

Nagata, who is also a cellular biologist, said that although their marriage was emotionally unstable between her diagnosis and the recurrence of the disease, he was able to express his feelings through tanka, and his wife was surrounded by family when she died in their house in Kyoto. However, he regrets he did not express his innermost feelings to her more frequently.

"I think my wife was an interesting person," he said.

"Tatoeba Kimi," a collection of tanka the couple wrote, was published this summer by Bungeishunju Ltd. While preparing the poems for publication, Nagata was surprised to find his wife had written more than 500 tanka in the 40 years since they met, and that he had written just as many to convey his feelings to her.

"The exchange of poems continued without a break for such a long time, even though many of them had been composed when we were not as passionate as at the beginning of our relationship. That's because we both felt the other was interesting," he said.

In late-night conversations, Nagata and his wife would go from one topic to another. "She was a very forthcoming person, so I felt I could say anything to her. I realized anew that she brought the best out of me," he said.

Nagata, a former professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences, is now the head of Kyoto Sangyo University's Faculty of Life Sciences. He also leads the tanka group To (tower).

It was in September 2000 that his wife's breast cancer was discovered. She felt a lump under her left arm and asked him, "What's this?" He asked one of his colleagues, a professor, to examine her. The professor informed him about her illness before telling her directly about the result.

"I intuitively felt it was going to be bad news, and it was," he said. "When I met her on her way home from the hospital, I did everything I could to hide the shock I was in." But she composed a tanka about how she understood the mental distress behind his look at that time. "It's still painful for me to remember the tanka," he said.

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Speaking through tanka

Following his wife's diagnosis, Nagata took a somewhat unsympathetic attitude toward her. "If I'd worried about her illness to the extent that she did, she would have felt even more devastated. I felt very strongly that I had to be mentally tough," he said.

He kept himself busier than ever at work, not wanting to confront the seriousness of her condition. However, such an attitude ended up causing her psychological distress, and ultimately put further strain on the family.

In addition to the physical toll an operation would take on his wife, the anxiety and sense of isolation over her death unsettled her sensitive mind. For several years, she regularly took sleeping pills and lashed out at Nagata and their children, her mind still fuzzy from the side effects of the pills.

She then underwent surgery to have her breast removed. When she expressed worry about her illness after the operation, Nagata lightheartedly turned the conversation to another woman without thinking about her feelings, causing her to become mentally unstable.

"I got the impression that she found it unacceptable to see me and the children living normal and comfortable lives and enjoying time outside the house," he said.

When he tried to clear up misunderstandings, she told him, "You try to justify your behavior with arguments." He fell silent. "You're a coward," she would say. Under such circumstances, he often did an about-turn when he arrived at the front gate of his house and returned to his office to avoid such quarrels. His children suggested he divorce her, but he never considered it.

It was her tanka poems that swept away the turbulent times for several years. In one of them, she wrote: "When I was mentally broken, you held me tight and cried. There was nothing else to do," he recounted. "If it wasn't for that tanka, I might not have been able to get through the hard times."

After she saw a psychiatrist, her mental health began to improve. However, when the cancer returned in July 2008, Nagata feared she might become mentally unstable again. To his surprise, she calmly accepted her condition. He assumed she had thought about her death for a long time.

"I had no latitude in concealing my inner grief. I sometimes cried in front of her. She seemed happy [when I did] because she could feel a sense of togetherness," he said.

As they had little time left, Nagata wrote two tanka to cherish their time together and lament over the day when he would lose her.

"I hesitated to write such a tanka because I thought it would shock her that I wrote them on the premise that she would die. I also feared she would find them and read them," he said. "But I had the courage to do it. Even if we couldn't speak to each other directly, we continued to communicate through tanka."

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Mutual support

Suffering from her condition, his wife entered Kyoto University Hospital in June 2010. The treatment with anticancer drugs had no effect. The couple once considered transferring her to a hospice, but she finally chose to receive treatment at home and was discharged the following month.

"I wanted her to remain a part of our lives," Nagata said. She wrote her tanka on prescription bags and tissue boxes. Perhaps she felt someone would find them. I don't think she wrote them for their own sake, but as messages for the family, especially me." She bid farewell to her family after patting each member on the head and holding them.

"I should have told her more often how beautiful she was and praised her more as a poet, wife and mother," Nagata lamented. "Human beings can't live without the security of being looked out for by another. Yuko was my moral support, and I hers.

"She was a difficult but interesting partner. And now in her absence I feel such a strong sense of loss."