The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)
Page 46
“Oh, he’s here. Master Takeru is here.” The people from the village who had gathered in the darkness around the edge of the fire opened the way for him.
“What are you staring at? Why don’t you put it out? Hurry up! Hurry up!” Through clenched teeth he yelled at them from his horse, waving his arms, and in the intense conflagration his face became as red as an ogre as he glared at his house ablaze.
Various voices yelled, “Sir, with this wind, we could not even get close to it.”
“The fire has amazing force. The buildings are already too far gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘too far gone’? Insolent bastards. Go put it out! Go put it out! Don’t just stand there gawking. Where is the pumper?”
“It’s too late, sir. No matter how many pumpers there were, we couldn’t do anything.” “Whether you put it out or not, anyone who gets close to the fire will get scorched.” “Sir, try to put it out yourself!”
“What? Idiots!”
“Oh, Takeru, Takeru, Takeru. It’s burned. It’s burned.” A big man came running toward him in panic, calling his name.
“Stupid Satoru!” Why did you let this happen?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know? Did you get the things out?”
“Mother is safe—I carried her out myself and left her with some people over there.”
“What about the things? Did the valuable pieces make it out?”
“There was no way.”
“What? They burned up?”
“Everyone ran for their lives.”
“Stupid idiot!”
He leaped from the saddle, brandishing his whip, and walked twelve or thirteen steps in the direction of the raging fire. Just then there was a blast of wind from one side, and the remaining frame of the house wavered and fell in a heap of gold and crimson. A pillar of sparks rose in the air, mixed with smoke and ashes, and came back down as a shower of fire. Takeru frowned as he was forced to retreat.
“The main house has fallen.”
“The storehouses are about to go, too.”
“It’s over.”
“Looks like the Ueda mansion will end in ashes.”
And one voice was heard to say, “It’s their punishment.”
Takeru clenched his teeth and straightened his back. The first storehouse collapsed, then the second, and finally the third. Now only the three-hundred-year-old camphor tree continued to burn briskly like a giant torch in the strong wind, illuminating the road to doomsday.
A voice came pushing through the crowd. “Master, master.”
“Who’s that? Oh, Jinbei. It’s over.”
“Yes, it’s over. And Sonobe’s . . .”
“What.”
“Sonobe’s Okiku—”
“What.”
“She hanged herself at Shigeru’s grave.”
“Okiku?”
Just then the crowd began to clamor, “It’s going to fall! It’s going to fall! Look out!”
The great camphor tree had continued to burn and, unable to withstand the relentless wind, finally broke. It hung briefly in midair and then, with an impact that shook the ground, came crashing down. Sparks and ashes flew up into the sky and fell back like rain.
“Ashes. Ashes. The whole place has turned to ashes.”
XI
Thus the mighty Ueda homestead was reduced to ashes in one night, and all the treasures—from gold, silver, scrolls, and antiques to books, deeds, and other valuable documents—were lost. When the father heard about the fire, that same day he suffered a stroke and died.
With the series of tragedies and unable to ignore the reproach of the local people, Takeru found it impossible to stay in the village, so he went to Nakatsu. However, before long he quietly sold off the remaining land and one night ran off to Tokyo alone. Since then no one has heard anything from him. Satoru was left alone with his deranged mother, and some relatives took them in and took care of them.
At the Sonobe house they buried Okiku together with Shigeru, but the villagers named it the “Lovers’ Suicide Grave,” and it is never without offerings of seasonal flowers from young women in memory of the couple.
For some reason, the site of the old Ueda property is shunned by people, and no one has ever tried to build a house there, so the weeds grow wild, and even in midday the sounds of insects are everywhere. Only the burned stump of the camphor tree still remains.
POETRY IN THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE
All the influences and enthusiasms from abroad that colored and shaped Japanese literature during the Meiji period are reflected in its contemporary-style poetry. The so-called free verse (shintaishi) of this period had no basis in the Japanese tradition of waka (thirty-one-syllable poem) and haiku (seventeen-syllable poem), nor did poets feel any need to pay their respects to the themes and concerns of the past. Foreign, particularly French, forms now took pride of place as younger poets searched for more authentic ways in which to express themselves. As the following selections suggest, the verse composed in this period ranged from socially conscious poems to exotic renderings of subtle interior feelings. The following introductions and translations are by Leith Morton.
KODAMA KAGAI
Kodama Kagai (1874–1943) was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He attended, but did not graduate from, Dōshisha University, Sapporo Agricultural College, and Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō. He published his own collection, A Collection of Socialist Poetry (Shakaishugi shishū), in 1903. But the book was banned by the authorities, and except for two copies, the whole print run was confiscated. Not until 1949, after the Pacific War, was it made available. Consequently, Kagai published a second collection, Kagai’s Collection of Poetry (Kagai shishū), in 1904, which contained fewer than half the poems from his first collection. He also published other collections. The two following poems are from A Collection of Socialist Poetry.
THE SUICIDE OF AN UNEMPLOYED PERSON (SHITSUGYŌ SHA NO JISATSU)
A devil may endure but just being a man
In his labors long and cruel
His body was merely a slender blade of grass
Since the time his lungs had become diseased
He became a wood thrush who coughs blood and dies
Wandering here and there
Now, how sad it is that he has nowhere to live
In a frenzy he spits blood
He was watching the water flow
Under the rails of the Ryōgoku bridge
And was a companion to the night gulls
He sank into the water, how tragic
Near the edge of the reeds at Etchūjima
His corpse floated up the next morning
Ah even to hear it is bitter, this
The end of a working man.
THE SETTING SUN (YŪHI)
Once when I looked up at the sky
Where in my world of dreams the sun set in Osaka,
The fires of the Tempō1 era burned
In indignation, flared up and died
I thought of Ōshio2
Behold the sun shining brightly!
Sinking below the mountain gleaming,
When the flames of ideology3 burn
He will die with ideology.
ISHIKAWA TAKUBOKU
Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912) was born in Hionoto village, Iwate Prefecture, the only son of a Zen priest. Traveling back and forth between his northern home and Tokyo, by 1905 Takuboku had already published his first collection of “new-style” poetry and had established a reputation as a rising star. Later he became a socialist, an ideology that strongly influenced his writing of tanka (short poems, for which he is especially celebrated), fiction, and new-style poetry and free verse. Takuboku also kept a very candid diary, which later became famous for its revelations of the poet’s personal life.
BETTER THAN CRYING (NAKU YORI MO, 1908)
I met her in a dream
I do not know in what year, on what night.
By now
she has probably died.
Drenching her hair in black oil,
Like the fur of a white rabbit that has died of disease
Thick white face-powder,
Smearing her lips with lip-rouge the color of blood,
She sings obscene song after obscene song, in the company of young girls
Gaily plucking at the shamisen,
Gulping down saké burning her tongue strongly like fire
Like water—
Surrounded by men just twenty years of age who do not drink.
“Why do you sing such songs? I asked
In my dream
She replied
Smiling redly in a drunken stupor
Better than crying!
DO NOT GET UP (OKIRU NA, 1909)
Life is more wearisome than
A dust-covered windowpane
Hot from the afternoon sun
Totally exhausted from thought,
Sweating, snoring, napping
Yellow teeth glimpsed inside the mouth of a man still young
Summer sunlight illuminating through the window a pair of hairy legs,
Upon them fleas crawl upward.
Don’t get up, don’t get up, at least until the sun sets.
Until the cool, quiet evening of your life comes
Somewhere a woman’s seductive giggle.
A SPOONFUL OF COCOA (KOKOA NO HITOSAJI, 1911)
I know, the sadness
Of a terrorist’s heart—
A single heart
That finds it difficult to separate words and deeds,
A heart that seeks to speak through deeds
Rather than stolen words,
A heart that hurls its own body at the enemy—
But it’s a sadness always possessed by those who are serious and passionate.
AFTER ENDLESS DISCUSSIONS (HATESHI NAKI GIRON NO ATO, 1911)
We have read and argued fiercely,
But the gleam in our eyes is
Equal to the Russian youth of fifty years ago.
We are arguing about what to do.
But not one person clenches a fist and slams the table,
Shouting “V narod!”1
We know what we want,
And we know what the people want,
And we know what we have to do.
Truly, we know better than the Russian youth of fifty years ago.
But not one person clenches a fist and slams the table,
Shouting “V narod!”
All gathered here are young,
Youth always creates what is new in the world.
We know that soon the old people will die, and we will finally win.
Behold! The gleam is in our eyes! The fierceness of our debates!
But not one person clenches a fist and slams the table,
Shouting “V narod!”
Ah, the candles have been changed for the third time,
The corpses of tiny beetles float in our cups,
The zeal of the young women does not diminish.
Yet in their eyes, the exhaustion after endless discussions.
Still, not one person clenches a fist and slams the table,
Shouting “V narod!”
KAWAI SUIMEI
Kawai Suimei (1874–1965) was born in Osaka and attended, but did not complete, his studies at Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō. He began writing poetry in about 1891. In 1895 Suimei became the editor of the magazine Bunko (Library) and organized the Meiji poetry group Bunko-ha. Besides publishing some collections of “new-style” poetry, in 1907 Suimei started the Shisōha group and began putting out the magazine Poet (Shijin), which attracted many young poets. He was a major figure in the movement for free verse—as opposed to the old-fashioned diction of new-style poetry—and in 1910 published Mist (Kiri), the first volume of free-verse prose poetry published in Japan. The following two poems are from Mist.
SNOWFLAME (SETSUEN)
Under the shade of the riverbank snow lingers on; the moon is shining on the snow.
The moon is colorless, so too is the snow.
Moonlight and snowbreath twist together, a cold wave of heat shimmers.
A flickering, dazzling, white, blue, red slender flame burns.
A slender flame flares, flickering, dazzling, white, blue, red.
I am told in the north country from within a snow flame the white face of a woman
can be seen.
LIVING VOICE (NIKUSEI)
My heart trembles at the raw sound of a woman’s voice as if drawing together tightly thin, colored silk.
What is she saying?
What is she singing?
Lost in meaningless birdsong, my heart opens to the sky.
Echoing in my breast the expression of a living voice, the sweet sound of petals falling on an open piano.
Wilder than a face, a form, a kimono,
The wild heart of a woman’s living voice.
KITAHARA HAKUSHŪ
Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942) was born in Yanagawa in Kyushu into a saké brewer’s family. He studied English at Waseda University in Tokyo but soon dropped out to write full time. His first book of poetry was The Heretics (Jashūmon, 1909), which established his reputation. Other collections followed, including Reminiscences (Omoide, 1911), Scenes of Tokyo and Other Poems (Tōkyō keibutsu shi sono ta, 1913), and Poems in Monochrome (Suibokushū, 1923). Hakushū also was famous as a tanka poet. The following poems are from, respectively, The Heretics and Reminiscences.
ANESTHESIA OF RED FLOWERS (AKAKI HANA NO MASUI, 1909)
The sun at midday, distinctly warm waves
Of ether sweetly, and slowly pour against the door,
In the clouded glass there is no sound,
The scent of chloroform drips . . . poison in delirium . . .
In the distance, I hear the cacophony of trains . . .
. . . A dream of abandoned elixirs . . .
Time has passed painfully in the fine, downy fur of cats and
Their white swelling paws.
Under the window, unable to tremble amid the agony of life, bright red grass flowers
At the end of the damp tube
In the zinc pipe . . . now I anesthesize myself
SPIDER LILIES (HIGANBANA, 1911)
Young maiden, young maiden, where do you go?
Red, the spider lilies on the grave,
Spider lilies
Today too I came to break off a bud.
Young maiden, young maiden, how many are there?
Seven in the earth, like blood,
Like blood
Exactly, the age of that child
Young maiden, young maiden, take care.
If you pluck one, the sun at midday,
The sun at midday
One after another they will bloom.
Young maiden, young maiden, why do you weep?
No matter how many I pluck, spider lilies
Spider lilies
Eerie, red, still seven
KISS (SEPPUN, 1911)
A woman of rich aroma approaches
Her body rubs hotly against me.
At that instant the wheel-lilies beside me
They flushed red, glittering
The dragonflies ceased their movement, the wind stopped.
I recoiled in fear
Her palms, wet with perspiration
Suddenly and with great strength lifted me up and kissed me.
Painful, cruel, longed-for
The grass droops, a grasshopper
Leaps at the hot evening sun.
YAMAMURA BOCHŌ
Yamamura Bochō (1884–1924) was born in Munetaka village in Gunma Prefecture. He studied English at a church in Maebashi and then moved to Tokyo to study theology. While working as a preacher, he published his first volume of poetry, Three Maidens (Sannin no otome, 1913), which was followed by Holy Prism (Seisan ryōhari, 1915) and other collections. Although Bochō’s verse was initially greeted with open derision, he is now seen
as a pioneer of Japanese modernist poetry.