Most Hustle & Desire

Was it also during your childhood that you became interested in yokai ghouls? Yes, yes . . . (Non-non-ba) knew a lot about yokai . . . but my knowledge of ghouls mostly came later, from reading the works of [folklore researcher] Kunio Yanagida. The ones I heard about from Non-non-ba were limited to traditional ghouls like akaname (a monster who would appear and lick the scum off wooden bathtubs if they were not well cleaned) . . . yokai were much more active back in the Edo Period. They say yokai disappeared as electric lights came in. Monsters prospered in the pre-electricity days, when people used andon (a standing lantern with a wooden frame and paper shade) and oil lamps. Electricity was too bright for yokai to survive. The darkness, with a touch of light like that of paper lanterns and oil lamps, was great for yokai, and it inspired people to imagine yokai. In New Guinea, old people believed yokai were really alive because there was no electricity. In fact, whe...

“It was rare that I escaped the confines of Columbia when one fine fall Saturday in October 1943, demerit free, I was given a 12-hour pass starting at noon. I wasted no time in abandoning ship and hotfooting it over to 128th Street to catch the subway bound for Times Square, the heart of the great U.S. metropolis. With a quickstep, I boarded and held on in wonderment as the electric-powered marvel, like a giant mole, sped through dark tunnels. At each stop, more people squeezed in than out so that we hung suspended from straps gripped firmly in hand while those without were kept in place by bodies closing in on all sides. At Times Square, all exited en masse into the brightly lit station, where throngs more were waiting to get on. I couldn’t distinguish which of the passages was egress and was carried by the crowd up and out of the mole’s hole into the crisp autumn air tainted with the exhaust of cabs, buses and some private automobiles. I stood on the sidewalk as long...

But we still had Eddie, part Golden Retriever. Ginger taught him good manners. Eddie, the wolf dog, howls at coyotes. Eddie, the mutt, pisses on Dad’s pine seedlings. Eddie, the faker, plays dead to a finger pistol and Bang . Eddie, the laggard, naps on the country road, on winter afternoons. Eddie, run over today, lies split, in the gut in the garage in January. Eddie, stupid dog. Part two of the poem “Dog” from the book of poems Poor Manners , admired by a great aunt pictured here with her dog on a threshing straw stack