The Circuit

MICHAEL FESSLER

“They said he was using those . . . what do you call them? . . . Little bitty . . . Bonsai, no, uh . . . those poems the Japanese like to write. . . . ”

“Haiku.”

“Yeah. Haikoo. He fooled everybody. They thought—what was his name? Killer, Kimble, Kaizer, something—”

“Kendall.”

“But it was a funny first name—”

The FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT sign came on. We were making our descent. Both of us buckled in. I finished the last of my wine, and said, “Otto John Kendall.”

“That’s it. Funny name. They said he was one of those types that went bamboo. Real character, but underneath, well, nobody knew.” The man chuckled. “Just between the two of us and that cloud out there, I always admire . . . but that’s off the record.”

For an instant something flickered in his eyes. A misgiving. Never know who you’re talking to on these Pacific flights.

“Off the record,” I said.

The plane banked smoothly, descended gradually, and before we knew it, we had touched down and were taxiing toward the terminal. We deplaned, passed through immigration, claimed our baggage, and then moved through customs.

“Say-o-nara,” the man said, once we were outside. “Don’t let the geisha bite!”

“Sayonara.”

I headed for the limousine stand. When the bus arrived, I took a seat in the back. As we started off for Tokyo, I opened my old leather bag and removed a book: Otto John Kendall. Underneath that, Volume III: The Life. And then came the name of the editor: Henry Stark. Who happens to be none other than myself.

Otto John’s secret is now a matter of record. When I first met him, though, no revelation could have strained credulity more. It had been my job at that time to interview Otto John Kendall for Ganbaro magazine. He was the premier haikuist in English of our era. The dossier that my editor had given me ran as follows:

Kendall, Otto John. 1931–. b. California. Ed: Cal. system. Terminal degree: Ph.D. Foreign languages: Spanish, French, Japanese, some Chinese. Residence abroad: London, Paris, Mexico City, Tokyo (current). Teacher & scholar. Widely published. Specialty: haiku and haiku criticism. Founder/editor of smalletters.

It was common knowledge that Otto John had created many enemies along the way. He was an independent scholar whose opinions were both strongly held and frequently divergent, and there had been many clashes with the academic community. It was rumored that he had indeed gone bamboo, as the man on the plane had said. I spoke with several Americans and Brits who had had contact with Otto John and arrived at this profile: he was completely abstracted, and a little batty.

I caught up with Otto John in the lobby of the Marunouchi Building in the spring of 1991. He was a slight man with graying reddish hair, and a triangular-shaped face. He wore a wisp of a goatee. One was reminded of Ho Chi Minh. He was smoking; his clothes (a brown suit) were dirty; a slight must emanated from his person.

“Otto John Kendall,” I said.

“Does this hallway go this way?”

“If you turn around, it goes the other way,” I said, feeling as if I had scored a point.

He coughed, shifted his shoulders, and kept on walking.

“Mr. Kendall, I’m Henry Stark. From Ganbaro. I wonder if you might have some time. . . . ”

His eyes looked dry, the sockets sweated out.

“Perhaps you’re a bit tired at the moment—”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You mean, you wouldn’t know if you were tired? If you wouldn’t, who would?”

He said nothing. I mentioned a restaurant at which we might discuss the matter of the interview. By then we had reached the end of the hallway, and he took a quick right; we were descending a staircase into Tokyo Station. Finally, he said gnomically, “There are numerous circuits.”

I acknowledged the truth of it.

“Good day,” he said, and walked off into a maze of pillars that had conveniently materialized. I let him go.

Well, that’s that, I thought. I won’t be interviewing Otto John Kendall, and thank goodness. The next day, however, I received a phone call from my editor. “Kendall wants to talk to you.”

I expressed my doubts about it.

“You interrupted his thoughts. That’s all. Tea shop called The Grape. Friday. At one.”

To my surprise, Otto John Kendall was actually there. He was sitting at a table in the corner and a woman with a gray pixie haircut was massaging his shoulders.

“Katakori,” she said in explanation.

While the illustrious haikuist’s shoulder-ache was being tended to, I took a seat, though no one had asked me to.

“You don’t object?” I asked, taking out a tape recorder.

“I object to many things.”

“Bad writing, for example?”

This led to a discussion of the internecine haiku-wars, which reminded me of ant-fights. The most recent had originated over the use of a phrase—Otto John referred to one of the combatants as “the woman who wanted to copyright two o’clock.” Amusing as this was, I tried to steer Otto John onto some personal topics and matters concerning his writing. I quoted one of his early poems:

In a warlike voice

a man shouts

Peace!

War,

a man says

in a peaceful voice

“This poem is a little unusual in your canon. I’m not sure that it could be called a haiku. It contains no kigo, season word, for example. But I’ve often thought of it as a kind of double haiku in the shape of an hourglass. . . . ”

The notion seemed to travel directly to Otto John’s shoulders. The woman grasped them and kneaded away.

“Moreover,” I heard myself saying, “it has a political dimension that is lacking in your work. Perhaps—”

Otto John’s eyes glazed over, and he seemed to have fallen into a trance. Well, no need to press.

“I’ve heard,” I said, attempting another angle, “that you run seminars at some of the Japanese and international hi-tech companies in the area. Has this had any influence on your writing? The haiku as microchip, so to speak. . . . ”

Otto John, however, had already stood, and the two of them started for the door. Marched toward it would be more precise.

“Ichi ni ichi ni,” the woman counted.

“Next Friday,” Otto John said.

Did this hallway go this way?

Over the next six months of Fridays I got my interview. Otto John was always at The Grape with the woman, and she was always massaging his shoulders to relieve his katakori. There were times as he sat with his green tea in front of him, hardly taking a sip, when his body took on the appearance of a vertical haiku, slight and wispy. Along with the mystery, however, there gradually came clear and direct answers to questions I put to him about the journal he had founded, smalletters, and his haiku life in general. Moreover, as I became accustomed to the format and venue, I ventured more, though not always with success. Once I mentioned that there was a sayonara party for a poet whom he undoubtedly knew and surprisingly had never attacked. He dismissed the idea of attending with a curt shake of his head.

“You’ll be missed,” I said.

“I’m not leaving. He’s not staying.”

It was an odd way of putting it, but it gives the flavor.

In the summer of 1991 Otto John Kendall, crossing the street absent-mindedly, was hit by a car and died. He was sixty at the time. Thus did this slight other-worldly poet, whom I had gradually been getting to know, pass from the interviewer’s net. Naturally, it was quite a shock. My editor phoned in a panic, asking that I get the “deathbed” (no less) interview to him immediately. Fortunately, the bulk of the work was ready, so I rounded it off and faxed it. Otto John had died on a Sunday and the obits came out on Monday. On Tuesday Ganbaro brought out its cover story on Otto John. My interview was the featured piece. On that Friday, not knowing just what to do, I went to The Grape as usual. There sat the woman, with no one to massage. She had two boxes, and she handed me a letter. I opened it and read:

To: Henry Stark

I would like you to be my editor. Kendall Zenshu, if you will.

Otto John Kendall

3.16.91

I looked up.

“I am Koko. Otto John was my husband. In these boxes are the haiku. If you wish sexual gratification, I can provide it. My late husband felt that a spiritual transfer might result, and aid you in this, his life’s work,” she recited, as from a script.

“I’m honored,” I said goofily. “But no.”

No sex, that is. I agreed, however, to edit Otto John’s works. It seemed the fitting thing to do. She informed me that money was available, and that I would receive expenses and payment.

“Six months,” she said. “This place.”

I looked down and coughed.

She was gone.

The boxes were surprisingly in perfect order. I had anticipated a mad mess. The title page read:

/Haiku/Otto John Kendall/The theory is in the writing./

What followed on A4 sheets, with a good many penciled-in revisions, were the haiku. In the first box were haiku categorized as Juvenilia and Transitional; in the second, Mature. The haiku were arranged seasonally by kigo. They started with haiku from January 1958 and proceeded down the years to the summer of 1991 when Otto John had died. Pagination was continuous.

In my spare time from Tozai University, I did the necessary bibliographical work. My tasks were indeed formidable. Not a few times I reflected on the dry methodical process of recording, aligning, etc., and contrasted it to the mysterious and wispy life of OJK. (He had become his initials by now.) On the other hand, I was well aware that behind every chromatic poet was the plodding scholar who kept him alive and before the public year by year.

Within the allotted six months, I had all the poems on floppy disks. They were prefaced, chronologized, footnoted, and indexed. I noted in the preface that Kendall Koko had been the source of the manuscripts and that I had worked from the materials that she had provided. I omitted any mention of the “spiritual transfer.”

I returned to The Grape on the appointed day, and there sat Koko-san. I presented her with the disks and a statement of my costs. She handed me my fee (a nominal one), checked my statements cursorily, and reimbursed me for my expenses right there in cash. Then she picked up two more boxes from under the table.

I think I must have slumped back in my chair.

“You want sex?”

I declined again.

She stood, bowed, said, “Ichi ni ichi ni,” and marched out.

One two one two. Odd way of doing scholarship. On the other hand, better than being interfered with.

Boxes three and four were more like the man I had known, so I had my work cut out for me. Since Otto John had requested a Zenshu, or Collected Works, all of this needed sorting out and ordering. In the meantime, The Haiku came out. It was a hardback, handsomely produced, and had been designated Volume I. Included were off-sets of various holographs with Otto John’s calligraphic Zen circle, or enso. I felt that my scholarly judgments in the preface sounded right. The success of the edition was gratifying and I derived energy from it, which I needed. Boxes Three and Four contained mainly prose, about half of it typed. The typed pieces were, however, replete with corrections and marginalia. Those essays that were in long hand were occasionally very hard to read, and I had to purchase a magnifying glass to decipher them. Again, the work of scholarship, the work of detection. I divided the prose writings into two volumes: The Criticism (II) and The Life (III).

Volume II, The Criticism, included Otto John’s columns from smalletters, various essays published in periodicals and anthologies, attacks, objections, etc. Much of this was already part of the public record. Nonetheless, I dutifully gathered the work together, bringing up a few new things in the process.

The writings that came to make up Volume III, The Life, were another matter. The first thing that differentiated them from the other works was that none of them had been previously published. Secondly, a large proportion of the writings was fragmentary. Unfinished essays. Lacunae. Truncated passages. One of the first essays I encountered concerned his father. According to this essay, his father had been an herbalist and an amateur magician. As to the latter activity, OJK wrote:

The audience believes it is observing the magician. This is the magician’s art.

It is he who is observing them.

The elder Kendall had been an outsider and in spite of his skills had died in penury in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Otto John had interpreted this as a rejection of “the superior individual by corporate dominated society.” The essay in general was a little bitter, and clearly unfinished. I put it in the most readable shape I could.

* * *

It was about halfway through Volume III that something began to feel wrong. One Sunday I sat down at my desk and pulled out a manuscript from the box. The subject was the university in the ’60’s: sit-ins, rallies, agitprop, bullhorns, rapping. Otto John made the point that this was all child’s play:

Upper middle-class kids had a party, their protest-habit supported by their fathers.

He drew this lugubrious contrast:

In the mornings their fathers left for corporate HQ: my father went off to gather camomile that dogs had sullied.

In the margin was the hour-glass haiku that I had queried him about at our first meeting, but which he had been reluctant to discuss: militant doves, pacific hawks—Otto John’s somewhat detached view of means vs. ends.

A lot of the scenes had to do with the undergrad angst and politics of that period, but by this time Otto John was in his thirties, hanging around the old U. long after he had graduated. He seemed to be trying to learn something about computers. There was a confusing section about work in which he stated that everyone wanted recognition for his accomplishments, but that this for some reason would be denied him. “Big Biz will subsidize the Arts!” he wrote unexpectedly. Then followed some oddly conflated identifications: na no hana=Hibiya, ajisai=Machida. . . . It was a strange jumble: California in the ’60s and flowers and place names in Tokyo. I turned the page and noted the penciled marginalia: kiku, Tuesday, cash.

I read on and began to see what the haiku circuit was about.

The following Friday I went to The Grape.

“You want sex?” Kendall Koko asked.

I coughed humbly.

“Come,” she said. We walked along as if we hardly knew one another. Finally, we arrived at a stairway, and went up. There was the faint, oily voice of someone singing enka at a karaoke bar. Once we were inside the apartment, I put my briefcase on the table.

“Sex now,” she said.

The life of the scholar. I held up my hand, removed some pages I had printed out, passed them over, and asked if she approved of them. She studied them for about ten minutes and said, “Good.”

“Your husband was quite a writer. This is very fine.”

She agreed.

“Did your husband ever ask you to help him in his work?”

“I give him massage. Katakori . . . ” Otto John must have had the sorest shoulders of any man who had ever lived. By now I had a good idea what had been making him tense.

“How did you feel about his training programs at hi-tech companies?”

“Katakori,” was all she said.

I thanked her and stood.

“You want sex?”

I declined again. I had played a dirty trick on her, but the failed reading test might keep her out of prison. “Mata ne,” I said, and put the printed sheets from Humphrey Todd’s Adversarial Biography (London, 1958) into my briefcase. Then I left.

The bibliographical ethics of the situation were ticklish. I decided to follow through with Volumes II and III. The former had no direct bearing on the issue. As to The Life, I would simply let the evidence speak for itself. For the next three months, accordingly I labored over the essays in Volume III, photocopying, inputting, producing a clean, readable text. Order from disorder. When I had completed the work, I returned to The Grape and presented the disks to Koko-san. She bowed, paid my fee in cash, looked over my statement of costs, and reimbursed me for them in cash also.

The Criticism and The Life were published within two months by a small arts press in Kanda. I had, as before, corrected the proofs. It was obvious that neither the printers nor Koko-san understood much of what was in the texts. Subsequently, all three volumes (The Haiku; The Criticism; The Life) were reissued in a gilt case. A very elegant publication. Otto John Kendall Zenshu. Edited by Henry Stark, M.A.

For some time there was no reaction. Then, as I had expected, when readers and editors began to look again, the impact of the text was felt. The drama, you might say, was in the footnotes. There were two types of interviews. The first were from journalists. I played down the matter, which naturally persuaded them to sensationalize it. The second were official. I told it exactly as I knew it. Not a few companies and individuals had been stung.

At Tozai, I teach a course in contemporary East-West intellectual history in which I include the works of Otto John Kendall. The inclusion is controversial. OJK was involved in industrial espionage. He was, you might say, a major poet but a minor spy. Incredibly, and perhaps preposterously (in part, his cover—Otto John was hardly absent-minded), he was sending messages over the haiku circuit. The season words of a number of his haiku designated drop-off points. To be sure, scientific developments in the hi-tech industry move very swiftly, but certain strategic concerns do not. These OJK monitored and passed on to people interested in them (occasionally out-and-out rivals). It must have pleased him to have worked the back streets of the information highway. Psychologically, I think OJK was avenging his father’s treatment by society, which he blamed on big business. (“Big Biz will subsidize the Arts!” he had written.) OJK was also a proud man and therefore wanted his secret divulged: he had spied without getting caught. No doubt this was the reason for his titillating hints about “the circuit” and his retention of compromising but exulting details in the manuscripts.

Questions remain, however. Throughout literary history one often finds writers whose work is unassailable but who were otherwise blackguards. In OJK’s case the work itself (artistically right, ethically wrong) was tainted. Tainted but beautiful. Therein lay the terrible tension. Initially duped myself, I tried to right things. I footnoted these conflicts in Volume III and adverted to them in the Preface, making known that the questionable poems had served a double purpose. I was performing a trick within a trick. I “bugged” the Collected Works, you might say. Such literary sabotage verges on casuistry, however, and cannot explain away the fact that the elegant three-volume edition was almost certainly subsidized by OJK’s spying activities. It has left me not without a certain tightening in the shoulders.

[1995]