Weekend Beat: If you listen, Chiba hotel has secrets to tell

Passion, poetry, fire and forgiveness--it's the makings of an epic novel or, in this case, a beachfront high-rise hotel. On visiting the Kamogawa Grand Hotel in Chiba Prefecture, most guests have little inkling of the stories buried deep within the walls, hinted at in faded photographs.

Takeshi Suzuki's aim is to change this. His mission? To introduce hotel guests to the life of his late great aunt and step-grandmother (more on that later--it's complicated), Masajo Suzuki. A celebrated poetess and restaurateur, Masajo was a fiercely independent woman who refused to let era and circumstance dictate her lifestyle.

Born in 1906, Masajo Suzuki grew up in the seaside town of Kamogawa, the third daughter in a family of inn owners. She married in 1929 and gave birth to a daughter, Kakuko, in 1932. Two years later, Masajo was abandoned by her husband, a chronic gambler facing heavy debt. Around this same time, in 1935, her elder sister died of pneumonia.

Worried family members came up with what they considered a perfect solution--a marriage between Masajo and her sister's widower. The two married, leaving Masajo in charge of caring for a new husband, her young daughter, and the four children of her late sister.

The transplant of spouses did not take so easily. Masajo wasn't in love with her new husband. Worse, she loved another man, a guest whom she had met at the inn. He was a navy officer, seven years her junior.

The two began a love affair that would span four decades. It was also around this time that Masajo discovered haiku. Her poems from this period reflect sadness and longing:

"a glass of beer/ I serve it to a man/ I will never love"; "I let my hair down...it is drowning in desire/my autumn hair";

"luck with husbands/is something that eludes me--/autumn kimono."

Defying all social and ethical mores of the time, Masajo left her husband and children and fled to Kyushu to be with her lover.

Though she was at last with the man she loved, she eventually returned to Kamogawa, where she was accepted back into the folds of her family with little protest.

Takeshi Suzuki, president of The Kamogawa Grand Hotel, Ltd. and relative of the poet (his father is the child of Masajo's sister and second husband), speculates that she was accepted back into the family because it was easier than rejection or divorce.

Masajo lived in Kamogawa once more, raising her children and writing poetry. She found stability but never contentment. Still in love and in contact with the naval officer, she left her family for a second time in 1957, at the age of 50. This time, her children were adults, and the decision was final.

The 1950s were a difficult decade for the Suzuki clan left behind in Kamogawa. The family's inn, the oldest ryokan in town and the family business for 300 years, burned to the ground. The fire, started by a guest's cigarette, quickly engulfed the wooden structure. The family was left with nothing.

"At that time there was no insurance, no concept of insurance, so we lost everything," Suzuki says. "But when it was still smoking, the employees started picking out useful things from the fire, and they asked my father not to give it up and rebuild another one."

Helped by a loan from a local liquor shop owner, a former neighbor and supplier of the hotel, the Suzukis rebuilt. The new seven-room inn thrived and quickly expanded to 25 rooms.

Eventually, the family decided to sell the inn and its name, Yoshidaya. They moved to an undeveloped area of land further down the beach and rebuilt once again. "He (my father) thought the ryokan's time was over, and the concept of the hotel was needed," Suzuki says. The new hotel flourished, gaining a reputation as a vacation spot favored by the imperial family. Last year, the hotel expanded again, adding more rooms and an open-air restaurant featuring the creative French cuisine of Tokyo-based chef Niels Frederik Walther.

For years, Masajo's newfound independence caused bitterness within the family--her husband and children were again devastated by her departure.

After leaving her family for the second time, Masajo moved to Tokyo to make a new life, writing poetry and opening a small restaurant in Ginza, Unami. The restaurant quickly became a popular drinking spot for artists and intellectuals, and before long, the two tatami rooms and 12-seat counter were crowded, night after night.

Though the rift between Masajo and her family could have ended in permanent estrangement, Masajo apologized and, eventually, time helped to heal past hurts.

"I started knowing her after things were patched up," Suzuki says. He was a teenager when he got to know Masajo, and remembers her as a very active and lively woman. "She enjoyed her life. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what was good and what was bad. But knowing that, she did what she did because she thought being honest to herself was a virtue."

Honesty to herself may have brought Masajo certain joy, but it didn't spare her from loneliness. Masajo and her lover lived together for a period in Tokyo, but their life together was complicated by one major detail--he was married with children. "I still remember that Masajo got the news from someone that he died, but she couldn't even go to the funeral. And later on, she asked someone to arrange so that she could visit his grave," Suzuki says. "She was happy with what she was doing, but she was never 100 percent fulfilled. She always had to live with what she had done, and that is sort of connected to her feelings of sorrow and grief. People say that her poetry is very honest, that it shows her most honest feelings."

Over the years, Masajo's poetry received considerable recognition. Her book "Yubotaru" (Evening Fireflies) won the Haijinkyokai prize in 1976. In 1995, her book "Miyakodori" (Black-headed Gull) won the Yomiuri Literature Prize. In 1998, when Masajo was 92, her seventh book "Shimokuren" (Purple Magnolia) received the Dakotsu prize, a prestigious haiku award.

Her poetry also inspired the artistic works of others, including a novel by Jakucho Setouchi. "She led the same kind of life," Suzuki says of Jakucho, an activist, writer and Buddhist nun with a similarly checkered past. "They were good friends, and she wrote a novel in which the main character was based on Masajo."

In 2000, Masajo's poetry was published for the first time in English in the collection, "Love Haiku: Masajo Suzuki's Lifetime of Love."

When Masajo died in 2003 at age 96, Unami didn't close its doors. Her grandson--the son of her birth daughter Kakuko, who is now an actress--continued to operate the restaurant. Due to rising costs of rent, the restaurant was forced to close in January.

With Unami gone, Suzuki is determined to create a new tribute to Masajo, this time closer to her roots. This summer, he plans to open a gallery at the Kamogawa Grand Hotel dedicated to the life and work of Masajo. The space will feature poetry, photographs, a library, videos, and selected works of other artists and novelists from the area.

For Suzuki, the venture is both personal and professional. "A successful resort hotel needs to offer culture," he says. "People are fulfilled with so many things. In the past, people wanted refrigerators, TVs and cars. Now people have all of those things. Now what they want is education, for example, something invisible. They want to feel good about themselves, and culture is something which fulfills their needs."

Suzuki realizes that marketing his family's past could be painful at times. "In doing the gallery, we might have to touch on very sensitive issues to make it interesting," he says.

In creating the gallery, Suzuki hopes to convey to hotel guests all that went into Masajo's unconventional life and poetry. "It's about freedom, love, grief, feeling sorry, being a woman," Suzuki says, pausing. "I would say it's about accepting being a woman."

Perhaps Masajo described it best:

"were they dreams/or were they illusions--/autumn butterfly";

"I have stolen a man/but never a thing of value/I roll up the bamboo blind";

"no escaping it--/I must step on fallen leaves/to take this path."(IHT/Asahi: March 29,2008)