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Onsen
To Iain Little and David Fuller
Is there a world outside
This cascade-cleaved
Red-mapled valley
With steam
Clouded pools?
Monkeys bathe here.
And today it's us -
Investment analyst,
Fund manager
And stockbroker,
Disembodied heads
Wearing crowns of
White hand towels.
Far from the daily
Hurly-burly of markets,
Weightless, subsumed
In blistering hot water,
It's best to lie still,
To be no-one.
A maple leaf, rock, cascade.
Now back in the ryokan
Wearing new-born faces
And cool yukatas
We drink ice-cold kirin
And laugh helplessly,
While the chef of this
Remote onsen
In the off-duty calm
Of the afternoon
Studies Tooshi Radar charts
Of Tokyo stock prices.
Notes:
Onsen: a Japanese hot spring resort.
Ryokan: a country inn.
Yukata: a light summer kimono.
Kirin: a Japanese beer.
Tooshi Radar: a weekly book of share price graphs, subscribed to by almost everybody, as this poem shows, during the time of Japan's period of strong economic growth - the so-called 'bubble economy' - when the poem was written.
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