Our tanka co-editor Jo McInerney explores how linkage is crafted by a leading Australian poet in Japanese verse-forms – Hazel Hall – in a tanka sequence where nuance & coherence are developed through shifts in focus across modes of movement:
A New Awareness: Hazel Hall’s tanka sequence Passage through Japan
by Jo McInerney
Welcome to the second discussion at Catchment of a tanka sequence by a single author. The writer is Hazel Hall, an Australian poet, musicologist, editor, and international judge of short forms. The work we will be considering is her sequence, Passage through Japan, first published in Skylark 1.2 (UK, Winter 2013).
We will continue to explore what makes tanka sequences distinct – showing how they differ from a loosely assembled set of pieces, lightly linked by theme or location, and instead cohere to form a series within which ideas evolve and interact. In Hall’s sequence, each tanka contributes to a deepening sense of place, revealing the poet’s remarkable understanding of the cultural, physical, and historical landscapes she depicts, as well as how different perceptions interact to achieve a new perspective.
As an entry point, we will use a description of tanka sequences supplied in 2004 by the famed American tanka poet and academic Sanford Goldstein. In an essay drawing on his then forty years of experience as a writer and student of the form, Goldstein stated: ‘The tanka sequence is organic, has a beginning, middle, and end, and comes to a strong conclusion … about a dramatic change or a new awareness in the poet writing the sequence.’
Goldstein’s description of a tanka sequence suggests a progression within it from beginning, through middle, to end. However, Hall demonstrates that the sequence opening need not be a gradual introduction. Rather, her opening is a vivid and profoundly moving enactment of empathy and loss shared across cultures and time:
a lone flute
wails tamuke . . .
we did not know
a kamikaze
mother’s pain
The ‘lone flute’ wailing signals a mournful state beyond period and location: ‘wails’ portends great distress, intensified by the single notes of a solitary instrument. The capacity of music to give expression to feeling is evoked. However, ‘tamuke’ would give most Western readers pause. As Hall footnotes, the tamuke is a traditional Japanese lament. Hall’s translation confirms the initial sense of loss but displaces it slightly, making the grief less immediately shared.
Line three – ‘we did not know’ – seems to acknowledge that sense of cultural distance. Line four then does something quietly jarring. It introduces a historical figure which, for someone like Hall and many of her readers who grew up in the shadow of World War II, is likely to evoke an almost instinctive apprehension. The decision to isolate ‘a kamikaze’ on a single line is formally and thematically powerful. It holds the word still, distinct, in all its heaviness. It summons a deeply embedded post-war cultural image: the kamikaze as fanatic, monster, threat.
Line four then movingly subverts this recollection of fear and alienation, supplanting it with an image of shared humanity. The second half of the tanka reveals that what we did not know was the pain of Japanese mothers who lost their sons to suicide missions, with pilots – often still in their teens – dying in planes that could not be refuelled.
Hall’s speaker confronts inherited pejorative views, admits ignorance, and allows the preverbal language of music to break through prejudice and misunderstanding. The tanka becomes an act of witness, recognising the ubiquity of loss. It is the opening movement of a tanka sequence that goes beyond place, rising above cultural and historical divisions even as it acknowledges them.
Hall’s second tanka in the sequence moves from loss to cherishing and protection. In doing so, it shows how images from one location can shapeshift into another, with cross-cultural echoes creating a sense of familiarity and underlying unity.
hidden hands
guide puppets through
old rituals—
my grandson’s first
escalator ride
The poem subtly brings into alignment the ritualised control of traditional puppetry with the unseen, guiding presence of elders in a child’s formative experience. The puppeteers’ ‘hidden hands’ link with the generational and emotional significance of the last two lines, where the poet sees herself as shaping and steadying a young life.
The tanka opens by emphasising invisibility and tradition. It may recall for some readers Bunraku puppets, whose actions are guided by black‑garbed, hooded puppeteers, all but one of whom remain unseen by the audience. For an unaccustomed reader, the hidden hands may be slightly unsettling, suggesting mystery or latent threat, yet they are ultimately supportive, guiding without force or abruptness. For those familiar with such performances, there is pleasure in the ritual’s precision and continuity.
The final two lines achieve a subtle sleight of hand as they place the speaker’s grandson on a significant first ride. Though mundane in function, escalators in Japan are notable for their prevalence and height. Here, hands again disappear: the grandparents’ guiding hands on the child’s shoulders are implied but unnamed. The tanka thus mirrors its first three lines, some hands hidden yet acknowledged, some present yet unremarked, revealing a fundamental connection between apparently different acts of care.
Through this layering, Hall fuses cross-cultural and domestic imagery, showing how ritual, observation, and love can transform the ordinary into something quietly profound.
Hall’s third tanka in the sequence reads:
trees lean
to dangle green sleeves
in a stream—
fleeting images
of geishas dancing
Its opening is a simple image of trees over water. Mid picture, however, the implicit leaves, trailing in a stream, become green sleeves. For those of a Western background, particularly an English one, green sleeves may evoke the compound title of the traditional folk song dating from the 1500s. The image suggested is that of medieval women in verdant, full-sleeved gowns. The speaker is projecting human figures onto the natural world.
As with the second tanka, this is a shifting, dual process. In lines four and five the ‘fleeting images’ become those of ‘geishas dancing’. This second act of imaginative overlay suggests how cultural memory can shape perception, and how the aesthetic traditions of different locations are internalised by the observer and influence what is seen.
The tanka suggests that iconic cultural images can superimpose themselves on our view of the natural world. The foundation image here is likely to be that of willow fronds in water. To a poet such as Hall, deeply influenced by both Eastern and Western worldviews, and at this point travelling in Japan, what is imaginatively prompted by willow fronds indicates her dual cultural legacy. Unlike the two preceding tanka, this is a moment of symbolic transition rather than emotional unity.
The final tanka completes the act of human solidarity begun in the opening poem, where the enemy alien becomes the beloved son of a grieving mother, her plaintive cry echoing that of all mothers who have lost children. In this closing tanka, the amalgam is rendered as a visual rather than an aural trope, suggesting a shared human bond between native and visitor.
Shinkansen
through Sendai station—
on wet panes
passengers’ faces
mirrored over mine
The opening line accentuates a form of transport that has become almost archetypal of modern Japan – the Shinkansen, a bullet train that travels along lines designed to accommodate its high speeds. Again, as with ‘kamikaze’ in tanka one, ‘Shinkansen’ is placed in isolation on a single line. The emphasis signals both prominence and estrangement.
It serves as a marker of the extraordinary technical advancement of post-war Japan, in some ways placing it ahead of former adversaries who had emerged victorious from the war but were slower to rebuild.
‘Sendai station’ is a highly specific location. In 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami inundated coastal areas, including parts of Sendai, and caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Hazel Hall, giving permission for Catchment to write about this sequence, noted, ‘The last stanza was inspired by the Fukushima disaster of 2011. Sendai was still an eerie place when I wrote that tanka.’ It is also significant that in 1945 the city suffered a major US air raid, which devastated central Sendai.
For readers familiar with these events, the poem’s tone shifts: the Shinkansen no longer marks only progress but evokes both mass suffering and remarkable resilience. Line three – ‘wet panes’ – offers a subtle acknowledgment of what has been lost and endured with the presence of what could appear to be tears.
The image of passengers passing through Sendai station on the Shinkansen becomes a moment of existential reflection. Rain-blurred windowpanes serve as reflective surfaces in which the speaker sees other faces overlaid upon her own – ‘passengers’ faces/ mirrored over mine’.
Initially it might appear that the observer is on the platform, watching commuters speed past. However, that supposition does not hold. Passengers and the speaker are both apparently within the same hurtling carriage, so that her image and those of her fellow passengers are reflected on the inner surface of the window.
The result is a momentary collapse of self and other, suggesting a shared humanity that transcends national or cultural identity. This is a quiet but profound image of connection – lonely yet inclusive, personal yet collective.
Returning to Sanford Goldstein’s judgement that a ‘tanka sequence comes to a strong conclusion … about a dramatic change or a new awareness in the poet,’ Hall’s Passage through Japan rewards readers with a series of skilfully revealed new insights.
In three of the four tanka, the speaker’s perception is altered by an internal response: emotional resonance, memory, or empathy draws the observed world inward. These tanka offer a form of assimilation in which the gap between self and other narrows through feeling and memory. In the third tanka, the direction is reversed: the speaker imposes a culturally resonant image (the geisha) onto the natural scene.
This difference is important. It reveals how perception can be shaped by internalised cultural archetypes, raising subtle questions about how meaning is made through overlay and association.
The sequence is also deeply concerned with how the self encounters and processes difference. Hall resists the temptation to treat Japan as exotic or alien. Instead, her speaker remains open, reflective, and emotionally responsive – allowing moments of connection, humility, and shared experience to arise naturally. There is a moral quietness to the sequence, grounded in restraint and attentiveness rather than appropriation or sentimentality.
Hazel Hall’s tanka sequence exemplifies the form’s potential to reveal a new awareness. Through carefully crafted shifts and resonant images, she creates a poetic journey incorporating four specific locations, one that is both outward and inward.
Each poem stands on its own, yet together they form a contemplative arc exploring empathy, memory, perception, and connection. The sequence rewards close reading and invites meaningful interpretation, marking it as an exemplary instance of contemporary tanka practice.
Hall’s complete sequence is reproduced below, as originally published in Skylark:
Passage through Japan
a lone flute
wails tamuke . . .
we did not know
a kamikaze
mother’s pain
hidden hands
guide puppets through
old rituals—
my grandson’s first
escalator ride
trees lean
to dangle green sleeves
in a stream—
fleeting images
of geishas dancing
Shinkansen
through Sendai station—
on wet panes
passengers’ faces
mirrored over mine
Note: tamuke is a traditional Japanese lament for the shakuhachi
(Japanese bamboo flute)
Hazel Hall, Australia
Skylark 1.2 (Winter 2013)
Editor: Claire Everett
The Sanford Goldstein tanka sequence definition can be found in:
GOLDSTEIN, Sanford (2004): ‘Tanka String and Tanka Sequence: A New Twist’ in – Annual Bulletin of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Keiwa Gakuen University, no. 2, Niigata: Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Keiwa Gakuen University, pp. 17–33.