A FEW DAYS ago, near the end of her winter vacation, I played an indoor game of shuttlecock with my fifth-grade daughter. She had seen me working somberly at my desk all day and worried that I wasn't getting enough exercise.

"Let's play shuttlecock," she said.

"It's dark outside. And the yard's all muddy."

"We can play inside," she came back.

Rather dubiously, I got up to give it a try and discovered that it could indeed be done. After we had batted the shuttlecock back and forth for a while, we decided to count how long we could volley without missing.

Our longest volley made it to fifty, but most of the time one of us goofed up before we reached thirty. I watched the shuttlecock closely as it flew to and fro, noticing how it started out with the wooden ball up, but then flipped over as it came to the top of its flight and made its descent with the feathers up and the wooden ball down. It traced a graceful arc.

Ahhh, I thought as I continued to bat the shuttlecock back each time it came. What fine aesthetic sense our ancestors had, to have invented a game like this for girls to play at New Year's, batting a pretty little shuttlecock back and forth. What genius to have thought of attaching birds' feathers to the small, polished wooden ball in order to moderate its flight up and down and to make it clearly visible through its full arc.

I suppose it hardly befits a grown man well into middle age to be so impressed by such a thing.

At any rate, as we kept trying to extend our record, often ending up sprawled out on the tatami floor from having vainly dived after the shuttlecock like volleyball players diving after a spiked ball, I recalled an important rule. Each time the shuttlecock came my way, I needed to keep my eyes on it to the very last instant.

I discovered this principal two winters ago while practicing my tennis returns against the boards at a deserted tennis court. If I consciously kept my eyes on the ball right up to the moment of contact, it seemed naturally to line up square in the center of my racket. I had only realized an obvious thing, of course, but I came home feeling as though I'd made a great discovery.

Once I remembered this principle, my control improved. The shuttlecock flew straight and true every time I hit it. But then I would lose my concentration for a moment and forget. My eyes would stray from the shuttlecock just before it reached my battledore.

"Oops," I'd say, and remind myself what I had to concentrate on doing. It was hard remembering to do it everytime.

Since then I've been thinking about all this with respect to literature. Not in terms of a general view of literature, but in terms of what I do in my own writing--I have no desire to apply it to anyone else.

I want to write only what I have experienced myself, and I wish to do this absolutely. But by that I don't mean I want to restrict myself only to what I have done personally. Rather, when I hear or read about a thing that someone else has done, if it touches me where I live, if it moves me with its poignance, then that thing, too, becomes part of my own experience.

I don't wish my writing to be of anything else but this. In effect, I'm saying I will reach only for those shuttlecocks that have been hit my way. If they weren't intended for me, I'll let them fall. Things that don't affect me, however important they may be to others, however weighty they may be considered by the world at large, are no concern of mine. Others are others, and I am me--and I intend always to remember the difference.

Those shuttlecocks that do come flying my way, I will strive to hit squarely in the middle of my battledore. With rackets and bats, too, it is when the ball meets the very center that we get the most satisfying sound. Keeping this in mind, I must always ask myself: "Here's what I wrote, but is it what I really believe is true?" If I feel myself wavering when I ask this question, I must remove that sentence, letting stand only those that absolutely cannot be removed.

I must engrave firmly in my heart, too, that I am not likely to see or feel anything particularly noteworthy in my life. Still, there are times when I think, "This may be utterly ordinary and not the least bit remarkable, but it's something I want to say. I'm not sure why, but it seems to me it's worth saying, even if it turns out that no one else cares enough to listen." Those are the things I want to write about as clearly and precisely as possible, for they are without doubt the shuttlecocks intended for my battledore.

Such are my literary reflections prompted by playing shuttlecock with my daughter.

Original work copyright, Shono Junzo
English-language copyright, Wayne Lammers

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