SOURCE: Kugé, Shu. “Addressing a Dead Body: From Dedication to Tele-Community.” Mosaic 34, no. 4. (December 2001): 183-98.

In the following essay, Kugé analyzes a poem by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (Man'yōshū no. 358) on the subject of communing with the dead.

Shore 1:

What does it mean to dedicate a poem to a dead body? What compels a poet to compose a poem for a corpse? A dead body's presence is haunting. Its being-there does not produce “knowledge” but a distance, both material and imaginary, which exposes us to the limit of knowledge and simultaneously to the experience of finitude. Weaving this sense of mortality into the drifting flow of language, our poet presents relationality to the dead as the promise of an open community still to come.

A dead body lies between life and death, at the undeterminable threshold, the constant risk of becoming our “it.” Every representation of this body...