During World War II, Nanao Sakaki was drafted into the Japanese Navy. He worked as a radar analyst on an island off the western coast of Japan. On the morning of August 9, 1945—a Thursday—Sakaki identified the blip on his screen as B-29. Three minutes later the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Imagine seeing that blip and knowing what it represented. After the war, Sakaki became a rambling poet, first in the mountains of Japan and, later, around the world. He especially loved the American west. I found his book—Break the Mirror—deep in the stacks the other day. A North Point edition published in 1987. There’s an introduction by Gary Synder, who writes, “His poems were not written by hand or head, but with the feet.”
The book doesn’t appear to have been checked out in many years. Might be a lucky thing I nabbed it. Dartmouth College is in the process of what is called “deaccession”—meaning they are systematically removing books from the shelves. One of the criteria used to determine whether a book will be discarded is it’s not having been checked out in a certain number of years.[1] So, I make a point of checking out neglected and overlooked books. A small gesture, a hand against the tide.
These poems have a rare sort of purity, as if Sakaki is completely free of the influence of those who’ve come before. Of course, he’s not. He owes a debt to other more famous wanderers such as Bashō and Ryōkan. And yet, still, I have this sense that Sakaki isn’t beholden to anything other than what he sees in front of him. Maybe what he saw symbolized by that blip on his screen cured him of any over-reliance on metaphor.
Examples:
“Travel Light”
In East China sea
On the beach of a tiny island
I find myself
Sitting in a cave
With a hundred human skulls
Who died by the smallpox
Three hundred years ago.
One by one
I listen to their stories.
All night long.
“An Abandoned Farmhouse”
huge piles of dung
underneath trees.
*
for ten years
no man here
And from his experience as that twenty-two year-old radar operator in 1945:
Due north. 30,000 feet high. 300 m.p.h.
Three minutes later
my soldiers shouted,
“Look, a volcanic eruption!”
In the direction of Nagasaki
I saw the mushroom shaped cloud
with my own eyes.
With my own eyes. Sakaki translated his own work into English. He died in 2008 at the age of 85.
[1] To be fair, there are other criteria as well, and my collegial and hardworking librarian colleagues deserve all the credit in the world for holding the line and maintaining the integrity of the library in the face of what I understand are significant budget cuts. This said, I’ve made my objections to some of the deaccession criteria clear, and when a book was checked out shouldn’t be one of them.
Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of eight books, most recently the novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, named a best book of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, and the story collection, Maggie Brown & Others. He's been called “a master of the short story” by the New York Times. His collection of essays, Am I Alone Here? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and his second non-fiction book, Still No Word from You, was a finalist for the Pen Award for the Art of the Essay. Peter’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, and received four Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Dartmouth College, and lives with his family in Norwich, where he’s a volunteer firefighter.
