World Communities

Returning to consciousness always felt like death to Miki.  Bewilderment as the dream-people ebbed away (never faces, only hands that hurt her), light crept in, and she became aware. Always a stack of cardboard, enough to crush into vague comfort, the asphalt beneath unyielding.


Those are the opening sentences of "Miki's 19th Birthday," from SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN.  They were written by Stefan Hammond, who co-authored the first-ever book in English about the astonishing world of Hong Kong movies.  Stefan wrote his story in Hong Kong, where he lives.

I first encountered [Basho's] The Narrow Road to the Deep North in a box of books I bought for a fiver at a "bomb damage" sale in Smithfield Market, Belfast.  The black Penguin cover was singed and the final pages of the book were missing.


Adrian McKinty wrote those words in Australia, where he now lives with his family.  I've never laid eyes on Adrian and I haven't seen Stefan in years, but both of those stories -- Stefan's and Adrian's "Matsushima Bay" -- found their way into SHAKEN.

In every way, SHAKEN -- a Kindle e-book designed to raise money for Japan disaster relief. available for $3.99 here -- is the product of world communities.

First of all, the basic mechanism: global media brings me (in real time) horrifying images of the destruction.  The e-book, that newest and most widely reviled (by some) of publishing developments, makes it possible to unite a worldwide group of writers in collaboration and get the book to a global audience less than three months after the earthquake and tsunami.  (The book came out yesterday, June 10, and today is the three-month anniversary of the quake.)

These writers form an instantaneous and highly productive partnership, communicating by 20-way e-mail sometimes as many as three or four times a day.  There were NO solo decisions on this book.

This kind of instantaneous multi-point collaboration was never possible before.

The next miracle happened when Adrian's piece suggested to me the idea of using Basho's haiku to link the stories.  So I Googled "haiku" and came up with a bunch of sites, the best of which for my purposes was thegreenleafcompanyuk, which has a great, great selection of the master's works.  I needed to get permission to use some English translations, and Ashley Wood at the Greenleaf Company gave me the open sesame that opened doors into the global haiku community.

Four days later, I had permission to use translations of Basho from Jane Reichhold, whose 2008 Book, Basho: The Complete Haiku, has set a new standard, and David G. Lanoue, who provided exquisite translations of poems by Issa.

loneliness

hung on a nail

a cricket

That's Basho.  Here's Issa:

lightning flash --

only the dog's face

is innocent

And, finally, another community, the Japan America Society of Southern California, adopted the project for its 2011 Japan Relief Fund, which has already sent $750,000 to organizations involved in the rebuilding effort.  And they'll talk about the book and put it on their web sites, and bring it into the consciousness of their extended world community.

So now -- all together, so to speak -- we bring the book to this community, at Murder Is Everywhere, and to the worldwide community of readers who rub their hands in front of the pixilated bonfire of Amazon.  And they're buying it.  At the time of this writing, SHAKEN is the sixth most popular story collection for Kindle.  Yeeeks.

All I can say, it that this has been both a privilege and a lesson to me.  It'll probably take a while for me to work out the complete meaning of the lesson, but to a confirmed old soloist like me, it's a deeply felt sense of the power of community.