Collection of Japanese Death Poems

The Collection of Japanese Death Poems enters Dorrigo Evans’s life both as a ceremonial gift and as a private talisman. A delegation of Japanese women gives it to him while apologizing for Japanese war crimes; later, its translation of a poem painted by the dying poet Shisui stays with Dorrigo as an image of circularity, mystery, and return. The book thus joins a public encounter with wartime responsibility to the intimate habits through which Dorrigo tries to pass safely through sleep and memory.

Presentation and purpose

The book is one of the gifts brought by the Japanese delegation, whose visit includes ceremony and video cameras. It contains translations of Japanese death poems, a tradition in which poets compose a final poem. The gift’s subject is therefore death, but its arrival is also attached to an act of apology for war crimes. The novel places these elements together without making the book itself a resolution of that history: it is at once a cultural object presented in a public gesture and a volume Dorrigo later keeps close in private.

The book fits into Dorrigo’s broader attachment to reading. He has returned in middle age to the habit of keeping a book beside the bed, and he distinguishes between a good book, which makes a reader want to read it again, and a great book, which makes its reader examine his own soul again. Such books seem rarer to him as he grows older, but he continues searching for them, imagining the search as another Ithaca toward which he remains bound. The death-poem volume belongs to this search not simply because of what it says about dying, but because one poem continues to work on him after he has closed it.

A book kept beside the bed

Dorrigo places the gift on the darkwood bedside table next to his pillow, carefully aligning it with his head. The arrangement belongs to a habitual practice: wherever he sleeps, he keeps a book beside him. He believes books have an aura that protects him, and that without one nearby he would die. He can sleep without a woman, but never without a book. The distinction makes the volume more than reading matter; in the night-time setting, it serves as a protective object, familiar and watchful even when he does not open it.

He reads late in the afternoon and almost never looks at the book at night. Its role then is closer to that of a talisman or a familiar god than a text to be actively consulted: it watches over him as he enters the world of dreams. That distinction gives the Collection of Japanese Death Poems a double presence. During the day it offers language and images to read; beside the bed it is reassuring precisely as a book that can remain closed. In a later dream, Dorrigo imagines Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx, an image that accords with the book’s proximity to sleep and death without turning the book into a stated cause of the dream.

Shisui’s circle and The Line

Browsing the volume earlier that day, Dorrigo is taken by the story of Shisui, an eighteenth-century haiku poet. On his deathbed, after requests for a death poem, Shisui takes up his brush, paints a circle, and dies. His followers are shocked by what they see on the paper: the final poem is not a written verse but a shape. Dorrigo carries that image into his subconscious, where the circle suggests a contained void and an endless mystery, as well as the great wheel and eternal return.

The circle acquires force through its contrast with The Line. Elsewhere, looking down at railway pegs, Dorrigo struggles to make the railway’s meaning comprehensible. A line can be defined simply as a length proceeding from one point to another, but that definition does not convey what he sees in it: passage from reality toward unreality, from life toward hell, and finally from life toward death. The poem’s circle offers the opposite form—not a route with a beginning and destination, but a figure of return whose meaning remains inexhaustible. The book does not explain away the railway or undo its violence; it supplies Dorrigo with an image that makes the railway’s apparent direction less absolute.

Leaving the book behind

The volume’s talismanic importance becomes visible when Dorrigo leaves it behind. After kissing Lynette Maison, he dresses quickly, drinks the last of a miniature bottle of Glenfiddich, and searches for his missing sporran. He finds it beneath the book of Japanese death poems, takes his car keys, and departs without the book. The practical detail briefly displaces the object from its carefully maintained place beside him: the sporran is recovered, but the book is forgotten.

That departure marks a small rupture in a habit he has described as nearly inviolable. The book’s protection is a belief, not a guarantee; in this instance Dorrigo goes out into the night without it. The scene also returns the volume to the tension at its center. Its poem presents death through a circle, while the book’s physical presence has been bound to the nightly passage into dreams and the wish to survive them. Left on the bedside table, it remains behind as Dorrigo resumes his movement through the world.