On reaching Tokyo, Takuboku first stopped at Tekkan's poetry association, the Shinshi-sha, and through the famous tankaist's influence was promised an appointment to the staff of a newspaper. However, the possibility did not materialize, and Takuboku was given the job of correcting poems sent to the Shinshi-sha by amateurs. With no definite prospect for a sufficient income, Takuboku decided to live by writing stories, and he worked at them strenuously. But his optimistic expectations were shattered when, in spite of the efforts of Kindaichi and the recommendation of the famous novelist Ōgai Mori (1862-1922), the manuscripts were continually rejected.
On May 4, 1908, Takuboku moved into the Sekishinkan, the boardinghouse where Kindaichi was living. The poet shared his friend's lodging for the night, and the next day Takuboku rented an upstairs room. Both his desk and chair were given him by Kindaichi. Takuboku had thought it would not be too difficult to pay the expenses at the end of each month by selling his stories. Actually, he had not even accumulated enough money for the first month's rent on June 11. As Kindaichi was talking to him that day, a servant came to ask for the payment. Kindaichi pawned some of his own clothing for twelve yen and lent Takuboku the required sum.
The poet continued to devote himself solely to writing, composing five stories in one month, a total output of more than three hundred manuscript pages, but with none of the stories accepted, Takuboku despaired of ever becoming a writer. His days were spent in further agony when he learned of the suicide of Bizan Kawakami (1869-1908), the philosopher and critic, and the death of the famous short-story writer Doppo Kunikida (1871-1908).
But the night of June 23, 1908, was the beginning of one of those unique creative interludes found only in the talented few. Inspired, Takuboku had composed at least 246 tanka in fifty hours from the early morning of June 24 to 2 a. m. on June 26. Written at this time were such famous tanka as
On the white sand of a small isle in the eastern sea,
I play with crabs,
Tears on my face
__
Carrying my mother playfully on my back,
I take one step, two, no more—
How her lightness dims these eyes....
__
Calling my own name softly, I shed tears:
It was spring, and I was fourteen,
And never again would this day come back to me.
One hundred of these tanka written in three glorious days were published in the July 1908 issue of Myōjō.7
Takuboku's well-known association with the Tokyo Asahi newspaper began in March 1909 when he acquired the job as proofreader at a salary of twenty-five yen per month with an extra yen for each night of duty for the early morning edition.
In April, his mother, whom he had left just about a year ago at Hakodate with his wife and child, pleaded in a letter to bring them all to Tokyo. But he could not comply because he was in arrears with his rent for the boardinghouse he had moved into the previous September. His life of self-torture intensified over his guilt in being unable to meet his parent's request. He did not want his family in Tokyo: he was of course irresponsible, yet at the same time he could not be certain he would be able to provide the necessities. Furthermore, if his family came, he would not have, he realized, the freedom required for writing. This disgust with himself manifested itself in dissipation in low-class brothels in Tokyo's Asakusa district. It was during this period that Takuboku kept his Romaji Diary. Various entries vividly express his feelings toward his family (see, for example, those of April 7, p. 62, and April 15, p. 84), his desire to escape (April 10, p. 70, and May 16, p. 119), and the occasional threat of suicide (April 16, p. 87).
Takuboku's friend Miyazaki had taken care of the family in Hakodate, and in June 1909 Miyazaki brought Takuboku's mother, wife, and child to Tokyo. Takuboku rented two rooms above a barbershop. During the Hakodate days, the antagonism between the daughter-in-law and the husband's mother, a traditional conflict in hierarchic and feudalistic Japan, had intensified, and the conflict did not end with the reunion in Tokyo.
The relationship between Takuboku and his wife, Setsuko, provides another of those strands of complexity in the poet's life. They became acquainted when he was in middle school in Morioka, and at nineteen they had married. The new bride regularly attended the tanka meetings held at their home, and she even wrote some poems in the Myōjō style of the day:
Awake at dawn
After a night of sleep
On the grass in my beautiful robe—
The cricket's chirp
And my lover in dreams
This sunflower,
Flower of gold,
Suddenly in full bloom,
Enticed
By my songs of flame!
__
This evening
Of pale light
When the cricket sings:
Autumn has come,
Embracing these breasts.
__
This me, a black lily,
A cursed flower
That blooms in the shade
Of old mountains,
My hair long in summer.
Apparently Setsuko believed a curse was hanging over her lovely head. She had lived with her husband from June 1905 to May 1907, a period of almost two years before Takuboku left for Hakodate on May 4. After this interlude of their first two years of marriage came a series of separations—some brief, some lengthy —which destroyed their intimacy and added to their marital difficulties.
The Romaji Diary reveals that Takuboku was not happy to have his family members rejoin him in Tokyo. They did indeed arrive on June 16, 1909, the last line of this remarkable document noting that "we arrived at our new home by jinrikisha." That key moment in Takuboku's life was to prove a kind of breaking point. Several tanka in Sad Toys (Kanashiki Gangu, 1912), the collection of poems written in the last year and a half of his life, record the conflict between Setsuko and Takuboku's mother:
Placed in the midst
Of a discord impossible to dispel—
Sadly I spent another day in anger
__
If I keep a cat,
That too will sow some seed of strife—
O my miserable home!
The tension between a new bride and her mother-in-law is proverbial in Japanese life, where filial piety demands the husband support, at least openly, his mother in any situation. The wife is expected to remain silent, obedient to all demands made on her. Setsuko undoubtedly bore up like a first-rate Japanese wife, but her own declining health must have proved too exacting, for irritability accompanies illness and restraint has its limitations on a sickbed.
Though Setsuko had arrived in Tokyo in June 1909, she left at the beginning of October, but left by running away with her daughter, Kyōko. Only a note was offered in explanation. She was of course fleeing from the tension of living with her irreconcilable mother-in-law. In addition, since September Setsuko had been ill with pleurisy, and she wanted to have it treated and to get some needed rest. She also wished to help her sister in preparing for her marriage to Miyazaki, who had been so kind to the family during its Hokkaido days. Due to the efforts of Kindaichi and others, however, Setsuko was persuaded to return at the end of the month, but Takuboku had been dealt another severe blow. He had learned that the fragile moments of life can only be grasped by firmly encasing them in tanka—human beings were another matter.
The son born to Setsuko in October the following year died on the twenty-seventh of the same month. It was on the day of his son's birth that the Tōundō Publishing Company had paid Takuboku twenty yen for his second volume of poems, Ichiaku no Suna (A Handful of Sand), published on December 1, 1910. (Each of the 551 tanka was written in three lines, a departure from the traditional form of printing them in one or two lines). Takuboku had to spend for his son's burial the only sum the publishers were to give him for this volume.
The year 1910 can be considered an important year in tanka history due to the publication of A Handful of San
d, but it also marks the beginning of the development of Takuboku's interest in socialism.
We have seen from Takuboku's schooldays the rebel in him, protesting, going on strike, maneuvering for power, sympathizing with the exploited. But it was the report of the Kōtoku Incident on June 5, 1910, that profoundly catapulted Takuboku's thought toward social movements. All his earlier activity had been more like some adolescent testing ground. Now the injustice of the world—social, political, economic—struck home forcibly during the so-called treason trial of Shūsui Kōtoku, a journalist and anarchist. Several members of his group had formed plans to assassinate Emperor Meiji. Though Kōtoku was opposed to the scheme, he was somehow involved in it. The Meiji government had of course been suppressing radicals with its own system of censorship and incarceration. Before any of the assassination bombs had been transported to the scene of the crime, the conspirators were arrested. The arrests began toward the end of May 1910, Kōtoku himself taken on June 1. Reports of the sensational event appeared in the newspapers on June 5. The trial, held in December of that year, was secret; not a witness was summoned. The court also took the precaution of seeing that the records did not remain in the hands of counsel. Only five of the defendants were involved in the bomb-making, and it is believed today that Kōtoku had no part in the assassination plot. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death at the closed trial, mainly because the government had been suppressing what it saw as "dangerous thought." The incident remains the most revealing example of despotism during the Meiji period.
Takuboku's friend Shū Hiraide was a counsel for the defense of these twenty-six socialists headed by Kōtoku. The defense Kōtoku himself wrote while in prison, Takuboku recopied. The task required two days to complete. He began reading socialist literature, including Kropotkin's A Plea to Youth. On January 18, 1911, the decision in the case of high treason was unprecedentedly severe: twenty-four of the twenty-six were sentenced to death. But on the following day, due to the "benign order of the Emperor," twelve of the twenty-four had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment. The shock to Takuboku was, nevertheless, great. On January 23, he reviewed the case trial records, and the next day he wrote "The Plot by Japanese Anarchists: The Course of Events and Attendant Phenomena." Eleven of the condemned, including Kōtoku, were executed on January 24; the only female, Kōtoku's mistress, was executed a day later. At Hiraide's house on January 26, Takuboku read through the seven thousand pages of trial record.
During Takuboku's hospitalization from February 4 to March 15, he read Kropotkin's autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. At home the poet perused the back numbers of the Heimin Shinbun, which had been put out by the social anarchists Kōtoku and Toshihiko Sakai,8 and he also spent time going through other socialist journals and literature. Even as his health declined, he wrote about the Kōtoku Incident, and on November 17, 1911, he finished copying Kropotkin's Terror in Russia. Earlier in the year Takuboku had written a series of poems revealing his socialist leanings. He called these poems Yobuko to Kuchibue (The Whistle and Whistling). According to Katsuichiro Kamei in his postscript to The Works of Takuboku (in Works of Modern Japanese Literature, vol. 39, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1964, p. 421), these seven poems created under conditions of illness reveal "not a trace of morbidity... and little sentimentality or romanticism." Kamei sees in Whistle the perfection of Takuboku's art, poems "tense like a testament, there being hardly any waste of emotion." This praise seems extreme when one considers the high quality of Takuboku's tanka, but in Whistle perhaps the best is "A Spoonful of Cocoa," written on June 15:
I know
The sad heart of the terrorist—
A single-minded heart
Which finds it impossible to cut asunder speech and act,
A heart that wants to speak with deeds
Instead of words, which one has been deprived of,
A heart that hurls at the foe the body encasing it—
This is the sorrow serious and fervent men forever have.
Sipping cold cocoa from a spoon
After some eternal endless debate,
I know from this slightly bitter taste
The sad sad heart
Of the terrorist.
Takuboku could intuit "the sad heart of the terrorist," though he was outside any real kind of political activity. It was the insight of a poet of acute sensitivity who could see into the fractured structure of a world filled with unrealized moments. In the first poem in Whistle, "After Endless Debate," he compares Japanese youth to their Russian counterparts fifty years ago, the eyes of his companions bright in hope arguing about the methods of revolt, yet Takuboku writes—
... no one strikes the table with his clenched fist
And cries, "V Narod!"
V Narod! (Into the midst of the people) may have been true of men not so lost in endless debate on the theory of property and the state or on the exploited and miserable, but for Takuboku at least, the energy needed by the active revolutionary was a quality he lacked. In "A Heated Argument," the third poem in the series, Takuboku notes how he himself debated for over five hours with N, a young economist and comrade, about the new society's disposal of power. N finally called his opponent a demagogue:
But for the table between us
His hand might have dealt this head a blow
His large swarthy face I saw
Spill over with masculine rage.
Once the argument stopped one hour past that midnight in May, Takuboku felt relieved:
How fresh the hint of rain in the wind of night
On these convalescent yet agreeably heated cheeks of mine.
Takuboku could argue and suffer defeat in debate, but he could not at this late date act. Critic Kamei calls "My Home," the penultimate poem in the series, an excellent socialist statement: "It is a home like this that lies hidden in the depths of a mind suffering from destitution, and it may be said that all revolutionary passions contain such a yearning for home. It is not 'individualism' but a desire common to all poor people...." Today few will agree with Kamei. In fact, those who emphasize Takuboku as a revolutionary would like to disregard this poem, for it seems to reveal the limitation of Takuboku in this area. It is the expression of a secret desire of a frustrated man wearied from the battle with life. Nevertheless, the poem also shows his honesty and guilelessness. "My Home," we feel, rings with that perpetual desire in Takuboku to escape, to live a life of ease as a student or as a comfortable family man with enough books and cigarettes and leisure:
Oh, its garden shall be wide, overspread with weeds,
Oh, the pleasure of the sound of summer rain
Falling on the wild grass covered with leaves.
In one corner I'll plant a huge tree
And at its foot I'll place a bench all painted white,
And on rainless days I'll go out there
And while smoking Egyptian cigarettes rich in fragrance with thick rings of smoke,
I'll cut the pages of new books
Maruzen sends every four or five days
And pass the time dreamily until dinner's announced...
The relationship between Takuboku and his wife continued to decline in June 1911. Once more Setsuko wished to visit her parents, for they were moving to Hakodate where her father had found a new job. After innumerable disputes which lasted from June 3 to June 6, the husband's objections won out. He refused to let Setsuko leave. He remembered his anguish during her flight from home almost two years earlier. Had she gone he had vowed to sever his connections to her family.
While this despotic attitude on the part of the male was commonplace in Meiji Japan, Takuboku's conduct may be cited as equally springing from the irritability of tuberculosis patients, who at any moment are likely to flare up into anger. In July, Takuboku developed a high fever, and his wife was also unwell from an illness diagnosed as a mild case of tuberculosis. In January 1912, his mother's lung hemorrhaged. The three adults in the family were suffering from the same illness. Since Setsuko
's condition was comparatively slight, she had to undertake all the household chores.
Takuboku's history of ill health can be traced to his delicacy as a child. Certainly the continual pressures he had been under since his departure from middle school had not helped his condition. The Romaji Diary contains frequent references to his mental and physical anguish. The long poem entered in the Diary on April 10, 1909, notes Takuboku's desire for some illness to attack him in order to free him from responsibility:
For a year, no, for even a month,
Even for a week, three days even,
O you gods, you gods, if you exist,
Grant only, I beg, this one prayer:
Damage some part of this body,
Ever so slightly, painfully even.
Of that I won't mind.... Oh, to be made ill!
Oh, I beg!
He was to have this perverse wish granted. On February 1, 1911, he underwent a medical examination at the hospital attached to Tokyo University. He had felt unwell for some time, and his case was diagnosed as chronic peritonitis, a condition in which germs from the lungs settle in the abdomen. He had no idea his peritonitis was related to TB, for some types of peritonitis are not of this order. Key moments of his stay in the hospital from February 4 until March 15 are recorded in several of the tanka in Sad Toys. During this period his abdomen swelled, and he had to undergo an operation to drain the excess fluid out of the abdominal cavity. Whatever the illness, Takuboku must have long been conscious of the specter of tuberculosis.
The poet's last days were described in the postscript to Sad Toys, written by Takuboku's friend Aika Toki: "Several days before Takuboku's death," wrote Toki, "he asked me to find a publisher for his book of poems, as he was penniless. Immediately I went to Tōundō's and persuaded them, though with some difficulty." With the twenty-yen payment in his pocket, Toki hurried to Takuboku's home. Despite the emaciation in the poet's face and body due to the final stages of tuberculosis, Takuboku's eyes revealed his excitement on hearing the news. He felt he had to polish some of the poems, and he also wanted to arrange the series, but only after he recovered from his illness. However, Toki informed his friend that the publisher insisted on having the manuscript at once. Surprised, Takuboku waited a moment in silence before asking his wife to fetch what he called his "dismal-looking" notebook. It was medium-sized with gray flock-paper covers. This notebook Takuboku entrusted to his friend with the words, "From now on I must look to you for help."9
Romaji Diary and Sad Toys Page 3