“Where did we leave off?” Ogikubo Sensei asked.

I pulled my yellow legal pad out of my backpack and quickly thumbed through the pages until I reached what we had covered on October 16, 1997.

A Thursday.

We met each Thursday in Ogikubo Sensei’s office on the Kokugakuin campus. The room was spacious. His large desk was positioned under windows that ran the width of the back wall.

The other walls were lined with tall bookshelves, each shelf crammed with hard-bound books, volume after volume of Meiji-era literature. Sometimes when I asked about a reference in the story we were discussing, he would turn to the bookshelf, scan the spines for a few seconds and then pull out a tome.

“Here,” he’d say, opening the book to the page he wanted.

“She is referring to a famous senryū about widows who spend too much time on their hair.”

Pointing to a line in the book, he read it aloud: “Done up prettily, it invites scorn, the widow’s hair.”

The author we were exploring together, Miyake Kaho, had borrowed the senryū to enliven a scene dealing with the widow, Osada. Of questionable virtue, Osada had left the demimonde to marry a wealthy man. When he died, she set her eyes on the dashing young Yamanaka.

“Widows were supposed to remain true to their late husbands,” Ogikubo Sensei smiled. “If they spent too much time trying to look attractive, they became the subject of gossip.”

In Miyake’s story, Osada is conniving and shrewish—the perfect villain.

Ogikubo Sensei and I sat across from each other, hovering over a low coffee table in the center of the room. He had four chairs there, two on either side of the table. They weren’t particularly comfortable, but I was always too intent on listening to what Ogikubo Sensei had to say to notice.

“Sensei, last week we almost finished Part Six.”

“Oh that’s right. Let’s continue there then.”

We were working on Kaho’s debut work “Warbler in the Grove” (Yabu no uguisu, 1888), which was written in a glorious mashup of colloquialism and classical idioms. The story was delightful, but to decipher it all on my own would have taken time—time I did not have.

In February I had learned that my tenure case had failed. A few months later I learned that my bid for a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship had been funded.

Good news following bad.

If I worked like a fiend and managed to finish my manuscript on Meiji women writers, there was hope I could request a reconsideration of my tenure case by offering “new and substantial evidence” of my academic worth.

I returned to Kokugakuin University to do just that.

And it was my great fortune to be able to spend afternoons again in Ogikubo Sensei’s office. He helped me work through the wonderful tangle of Meiji literary prose.

Earlier we had read works by Shimizu Shikin. Now we were focused on Miyake Kaho.

There were twelve sections—or chapters—in “Warbler in the Grove,” and we tried to cover one per meeting. But occasionally the sections were so rich with word play and cryptic references, that it took more time to unravel them.
“This section is the heart of the work,” Ogikubo Sensei noted.

“It’s where Kaho’s true spirit shines through. It’s really wonderful, isn’t it? Here she enunciates her position on women, education, and marriage.”

I was always relieved when Sensei acknowledged the talent in these writers I had chosen to study. Few academics were familiar with their works—even academics as well read as Ogikubo Sensei.

When I first began my project on “Meiji Women Writers,” everyone I spoke to about it always assumed I’d work on Higuchi Ichiyō, and Ogikubo Sensei was no exception.

As surprised as he was by my choice of topics, he was still more than willing to work with me on the project.

The more time we spent reading through Kaho’s works, the more I could tell Ogikubo Sensei began to enjoy his new discovery.

In fact, a year later, when one of my own graduate students had an opportunity to affiliate with Kokugakuin University on a Fulbright scholarship, she took a seminar with Ogikubo Sensei. The subject of their reading that term? Miyake Kaho and “Warbler in the Grove.”

She shared her materials with me when she returned to St. Louis. What I would have given to have been in that class!

But then again, on those Thursday afternoons in the autumn of 1997, I had Ogikubo Sensei all to myself.

He would read a line of text aloud to me allowing me to hear the melodic way Kaho’s language rose up from the page.

Then, he would sit back in his chair, close his eyes for a minute, and paraphrase the sentence for me in contemporary Japanese, the kind of Japanese I could more easily comprehend.

If there was an item or image I didn’t understand, such as the type of footwear worn in Part 2 or the kind of tight-sleeved garments mentioned in Part 3, he would stand up, survey his books, and then like a magician conjure one off the shelf and onto the table between us. He’d open the book to an illustration.

“Here. She’s referring to clogs with a rounded bottom, like this. See how elegant they are? Usually these would be covered in lacquer,” he pointed to a hand-drawn illustration.

“These clearly would be worn by a lady, but usually a lady much younger than Osada!” he chuckled. “And next to those clogs at the entryway, there’s another pair.”

“Here,” he thumbed through the pages to another set of illustrations. “This kind of clog had low wedges. They’re roughly hewn. Not a woman’s footwear at all.”

He flipped back and forth through the illustrations.

“So what do you think it means, having these two geta side-by-side at the entrance to the house?”

“Sensei, it seems suggestive, doesn’t it? Perhaps a refined lady is visiting with a low-born man?”

“That’s part of it, surely. In scenes like this, footwear always represents the character of the people who own them. And notice they are not neatly placed, either. I bet when you enter a house, you’re careful to arrange your shoes neatly after you step out of them.”

“Well,” I could feel my face flush a little. I don’t think I was as conscientious as I should be. Going forward, I’ll need to pay more attention to the way I leave my shoes in the genkan!

“The careless way they’ve tossed off their geta tells us they are reckless characters.”

And he was right about that. Osada and Yamanaka were clearly up to no good. I quickly made a note about footwear being an indicator of character on my legal pad.

“Let’s continue,” Ogikubo Sensei said, reading the next sentence.

For six months we met like that on Thursday afternoons.

Professor Ogikubo was a wonderful gentleman with wire-rim glasses and thinning grey hair swept back from his temples. He always wore a sport coat, usually tweed. Once the autumn days grew chilly, he wore a turtleneck sweater.

Occasionally, on my way to his office, I would pass a shop selling Japanese sweets. The walnut treats were my favorites. Once, I bought some to bring to Sensei.

“Do you like these?” he asked.

“Oh yes! How about you, Sensei? Shall we have some now? I’ll make tea.”

“No, I think I will save them for the evening. They’ll go well with my nightly bourbon.”

I should have known Ogikubo Sensei would prefer bourbon to sake. He was just that cosmopolitan.

Without his help, I would never have finished my project on time.

And now, whenever I read my translation of Kaho’s novella, I hear Ogikubo Sensei’s voice, his measured tones, his patient cadences.

Others helped me as well. Adachi Sensei, also of Kokugakuin, would meet me at coffee shops in Shibuya and talk to me about Frances Hodgson Burnett. The librarian at Ferris Seminary in Yokohama allowed me free access to the archives of Wakamatsu Shizuko, Kaho’s contemporary.

There were others.

Thanks to them, but mostly to Professor Ogikubo, I was able to finish my monograph, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan in time for a tenure reconsideration.

I was successful the second time around.

Eventually, I published the work I translated with Ogikubo Sensei, “Warbler in the Grove,” in the collection Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, co-edited with Melek Ortabasi.