Takuboku succumbed to tuberculosis on April 13, 1912, one month after his mother died of the same disease. His wife also died of TB, on May 5, 1913.
ROMAJI DIARY
In Japanese literature the last flowering of the tradition of diary-writing, which dates back to the ninth century, fell to Shiki (Tsunenori Masaoka, 1867-1902)10 and Takuboku. It is the latter's Rōmaji Nikki (diary in Roman letters, as opposed to the Japanese writing system of two syllabaries plus Chinese characters), kept from April 7 to June 16, 1909 (first published in 1948-49), which offers the reader a vivid portrait of a disturbed artist as Japan was itself undergoing radical change during the Meiji era.
Armando Martins Janeira in his Japanese and Western Literature says of the Japanese court diaries of the tenth to the fourteenth centuries that their originality is in their subtle and subdued poetic tone as well as their sharp delineation of psychological observations.11 And in Japanese Poetic Diaries Earl Miner makes a distinction between public diaries written as early as the eighth and ninth centuries that recorded events in classical Chinese and those Japanese diaries of a literary sort that were either private or diurnal. He notes that the Japanese diary as literary art most often concerns love instead of marriage, death rather than participation in mortal combat, the family in lieu of public life. Yet Miner believes that even when the literary Japanese diary is private, its content must be broader, in fact universal, if it is to be read with interest. These human concerns of nature, time, death, love, and family, he feels, must provide some thematic order of universal significance if they are to succeed as art.12
In Takuboku's Romaji Diary there is observation of certain current social conditions. We learn of Takuboku's interest in the new cinema and the popularity of some cinema commentators. Takuboku gives space to the naturalist movement, which dominated so much of the Japanese literary scene in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He speaks of the passing of major writers either by natural death or suicide, of Akiko and Tekkan Yosano, of Gorki and Turgenev. Family, marriage, home roots, love and death and friendship—all these larger social, moral, and philosophical areas—find their way into the diary as they do in other literary diaries. But with Takuboku the inner voice dominates, the personal element overwhelms, the existential dilemma of choice—the voice of disturbed modernity—commands attention.
Perhaps the best commentary on the Diary is found in an essay by Takeo Kuwabara. One group of writers, says Kuwabara, interests us so much that we are compelled to know about their actual lives, while a second group fails to interest us in this way. Kuwabara places Takuboku in the former group, his reason being that Takuboku was one of those modern Japanese writers whose works, if not the greatest, are the most intense.13
Romaji Diary may actually be considered a kind of novel in diary form; the conception is not too far removed from Takuboku's belief in tanka as a diary of the emotional changes in a poet's life. It is obvious that the Diary has all the elements of tanka moments; however, instead of a dispersal of scattered diurnal moments, which we might find in non-literary diaries, we discover the same unity found in classical diaries, but with something modern and disturbing that goes beyond traditional Bildungsroman, because our youthful hero—if we consider the Diary as a novel—is a kind of anti-hero. After all, Takuboku does not always turn out to be the admirable young man one hopes will overcome his difficulties in his pursuit of the good, the true, and the practical. It would seem as though something perverse in the hero, a Dostoyevskian personality pursuing illogicalities with a vengeance, were fighting against a program that would lift him from his dilemma, almost hurling himself toward even greater difficulties each step of the way.
When we consider the myriad of moments in each day, we are forced to conclude that the same task of selection faces the tankaist, the diarist, the short story writer, and the novelist. Obviously Takuboku could not plan his diary in the same way that James or Flaubert could speculate on a germ or devise a scenario. Yet the elements of the major problem he faced at this time remained constant: the ambivalence of various possibilities, the chemistry of fatal ambiguities, the eruption of moments and their fatal fallout—all these remain in the diary from its first pages to its last.
The Diary is not, of course, a literary work in the usual sense of that term. The author does not pay attention to form, and except for the unity given by the pervasiveness of his troubled mind, episodes are deficient in organic integration. Nevertheless, its great literary value and success lie in the fact that Takuboku wrote it entirely for himself without any expectation or fear that it would ultimately be read by others.
As a short story writer, Takuboku was a failure. One of the reasons was that his characters were not sufficiently alive. He observed them as if he were a superior existence rather than a fellow human sharing their weaknesses. Furthermore, his earlier diaries (written in the usual Japanese script) read like studies in short story writing. (In one story at least, we find a reproduction of a scene in his diary. ) He always attempted to justify himself in his diaries, and the reader is sometimes led to wonder what the opposing party would say. In Romaji Diary, however, Takuboku was completely honest. He did not need to "judge" others; he concentrated on chronicling his mind and its reactions to people and events. And in this attempt his training as a short story writer aided him. He could accurately describe his own experience; without affectation he could see himself truthfully. Divested of encumbrances, his genius was fully displayed in bringing this unique document to life.
Why was the Diary written in rōmaji? Donald Keene has commented that such an unusual method of transcription would be comparable to someone's composing a diary in Esperanto today.14 Takuboku himself provides a partial answer in his entry of April 7:
Why then have I decided to write this diary in Roman letters? What's the reason? I love my wife, and for the very reason I love her, I don't want her to read it. But I don't really mean that! That I love her is the truth, and that I don't want her to read it is equally true, but these two statements aren't necessarily connected.
Am I a weakling then? Not by any means. That is to say, this contradiction arises from the existence of that erroneous institution called Conjugal Relations. Matrimony! What a ridiculous institution! So what am I to do?
The obvious desire for secrecy on Takuboku's part even this early in the Diary may seem strange, for Takuboku could not know that the entries would proceed with passages that depict so frankly—incredibly so for 1909—his visits to red-light districts and activities therein, and that offer such highly critical comments on many of his contemporaries. Yet he must have known that because of his own personal honesty he would tell all and that he would be able to if he so wished because of the new method of transcription. Furthermore, in no other diary does Takuboku go into such minute detail on his sexual pursuits. The use of Roman letters permitted him a wide range of freedom.
But to treat the matter of secrecy in terms of his wife alone or his sexual tastes is to limit the Diary's range and intention. Because rōmaji itself had not yet been popularized, it was not Setsuko alone who would be unable to read it. Takuboku may not have wanted his "friends" to read it either. The following portions (from April 12) on friendship would undoubtedly have disturbed many of Takuboku's close associates:
I think it's already time to separate from my old friends—yes! from my old pals—and to build a house of my own....
So don't be loved by others. Don't receive favors from others. Don't make promises to others. Never do anything that requires begging another's permission. Never tell others about yourself. Always wear a mask. Be ready at all times to fight, ready to land a blow to the head. Never forget that when you become friends with another person, a day will inevitably dawn when you must break with him.
While it is true that Takuboku felt the need for secrecy in keeping his diary from his wife and probably from friends as well, Kuwabara believes that there was a further reason for this choice of t
ranscription. Takuboku had tried the same approach in his short story "Mr. Sakaushi's Letter" (see entry of April 19, p. 94); and in a letter dated February 6, 1911, to Tsuneo Ōshima in which Takuboku refers to the necessity of social revolution,15 Takuboku informs his friend that he intends to begin popularizing rōmaji. Takuboku was one of the far-sighted Japanese of his era who seriously considered reformation of the Japanese language. Kuwabara notes that unless we take this fact into account, it is difficult to understand Takuboku's conduct on the day that he had his first hemorrhage: on that day he copied out A Compendium on the Right Use of Kana for Representing Kanji Sounds.
Kuwabara believes that Takuboku, by adopting rōmaji, could be liberated from three categories of repression: (1) mental and ethical repression, for the diary would not be read by his family; (2) the repression of traditional Japanese literature; and (3) social repression in general, which would also include the first two categories. Takuboku could create a world whose activities would be surprisingly free. The adoption of Roman letters not only enabled him to write boldly; it made inevitable the removal of archaic words of Japanese origin and unfamiliar words derived from classical Chinese, and it led to the creation of a new, freer style of written Japanese. In fact, his style did become freer, and he was able to adopt fresh and popular expressions even when he wrote in the traditional manner. The use of rōmaji enabled Takuboku to produce a more natural flow of language.
After presenting this strongly persuasive hypothesis, Kuwabara goes on to consider the major theme of the diary as the classic struggle between "freedom" and "self-consciousness." While it was true that Takuboku wandered alone to Kushiro in Hokkaido and then to Tokyo to find the means by which to establish his family in decent surroundings, a Takuboku letter of July 7, 1908, notes his desire for freedom and his inclination to desert his family and become a hero who "fully tastes all the sorrows and joys, all the pleasures and pains in life most boldly, most straightforwardly, most deeply, and most widely." That he wrote only twice to his family since the beginning of 1909, that he sent his wife and mother almost no money, that he spent desperately needed funds on prostitutes—funds that ought to have been directed to his family struggling in Hokkaido—all are part of the poet's personal warfare, yet these very conditions underscore the complexity of his crisis and strengthen for us the other end of this dual chemistry, namely, the artist's recognition of the necessity of providing for his family.
Kuwabara finds more to sympathize with in Takuboku's dilemma than he does to complain about. He feels that Romaji Diary not only describes the poet's experiment in living, but also his experiment in literature. Takuboku, as a man of letters, attempted to analyze himself by means of writing, but found that he needed a new style, both truthful and tense. It was by writing in rōmaji that he succeeded in creating a style which fulfilled his purpose. Kuwabara also points out that although Takuboku's frank description of his life was impossible without the existence of naturalist literature, it is only Takuboku who, with his sharply innate self-consciousness, tested naturalism to the utmost and surpassed it by negating that medium.16
What Kuwabara means by this last statement is that Takuboku's naturalism always "contained a gleam of neo-idealistic romanticism," an illustration of which is his brief interlude of happiness won by sleeping with a prostitute. We can add a number of details to support this "neo-idealistic" tendency, especially in the last quarter of the diary (see the entry of May 2, p. 112) when Takuboku befriends two young men and attempts to keep them from the Tokyo pit of despond. Penniless even with a job, he paid for part of their boardinghouse fees, helped them move, tried to devise plans for their survival, and even thought of spending time in their room writing stories he hoped to sell in order to maintain them and himself.
When he began his rōmaji diary, Takuboku must have resolved to write something never written before. In the entry for February 21, 1909, of an earlier diary, he refers to a change which had occurred in his thought toward the end of the previous year. And in the rōmaji entry for April 10, he says that he spent the last one hundred days fully armed even though there was no war. During that period he parted from his friends, one after another. He was at war with the real world around him and with his real self. For that purpose he had first to destroy his own facade, an extremely painful task for him. He performed on himself a kind of vivisection. Whether this pained his wife or friends did not matter as long as he did it in rōmaji. He looked squarely at himself for the first time in his life. He liberated himself from his usual narcissism and sentimentality. He ceased to be a bystander and viewed himself and the world around him through non-tinted glasses. The experience was a trying one, but that experience, that experiment, aided him in taking a step forward as a writer who would later be able to produce Sad Toys.
The poet left his diaries to Kyōsuke Kindaichi. "I will leave them to you," Takuboku informed his friend. "If you think they are no good, burn them. Otherwise, you need not." Kuwabara further informs us that Takuboku's wife, just before her death, gave them to her brother-in-law, saying, "My husband told me to burn them, but my attachment to them has prevented me from doing so after all." Kuwabara speculates that it was not pure accident that the diary in Roman letters and the other diaries have become accessible. Something in Takuboku himself forced her to preserve them despite her husband's instructions, something that forced their publication after they escaped destruction. Kuwabara defines that something as "a power which engenders in the reader's mind a deep affection for the writer."
TAKUBOKU AND TANKA
In "Various Kinds of Tanka," an article which Takuboku had serialized in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper from December 10 to December 20, 1910, he pointed out that tanka poets ought to be free to use more than the traditional thirty-one-syllable rhythm of 5-7-5-7-7. Even the content of tanka need not be limited, Takuboku insisted, and he urged poets to disregard "the arbitrary restrictions which dictate that some subjects are not fit for tanka and will not make one." Modern readers may be surprised when Takuboku, in this context of defining tanka, suddenly lapsed into the nihilistic frame of mind so deeply rooted in him: "What can I do with those many things which really inconvenience me and pain me? Nothing. No, I cannot continue my existence unless I live a miserable double life, submitting with resignation and servility to these inconveniences. Though I try to justify myself, I cannot help but admit I have become a victim of the present family, class, and capitalist systems and the system of trading in knowledge." It was in this mood of pessimism and defeat that Takuboku turned his gaze from the clock at which he had been staring "to a doll thrown down like a corpse on the tatami mats. Tanka are my sad toys," he concluded.
The definition of tanka that Takuboku himself provided in "Poems to Eat," an article serialized in the Tokyo Mainichi newspaper from November 30 to December 7, 1909, was that "Poetry must not be what is usually called poetry. It must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a man's emotional life." Takuboku loaded his poems with events from his own personal history. The detailed biographical aspects of that life, like the l-novel which forms so much a part of Japanese literature, cannot be ignored. In an l-novel, the author-hero exploits with a fair degree of accuracy the details of his own life. Takuboku's life is tanka, his tanka his life.
Were Takuboku's tanka merely "toys" he played with in times of misery and sadness? Or did he feel his tanka were "toys" because they had no social value? An examination of Takuboku's life provides a kind of synecdoche on the eternal struggle of the artist in society, and while Sad Toys contains penetrating moments into that sad life, these poems go beyond it to provide tanka with a much greater range than it had in its twelve-hundred-year history. Along with the famous Akiko Yosano, Takuboku became a supreme tanka-reformer. The words sad and toy, contradictory and clever and yet edged with pathos—that of a child who cries over his toys—contain on closer scrutiny a much deeper significance when viewed in the light of Takuboku's diaries, letters, and articles.
; What is there in Takuboku that breaks the heart yet bears along with this fragile feeling a strength that cannot crumble into sentimentality? The slippery wire Takuboku walked along remained taut. That fragile yet taut line was of course tanka. We must ascertain Takuboku's view of tanka, his sad toys; many of the 194 tanka in this posthumous volume serve as examples of the evolution of an idea of tanka that was to radically modernize it and lift it from the mechanical reliance on technique that had brought tanka to its last dying gasp in the Meiji period.
In our Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from "Midaregami" by Akiko Yosano, we noted how Akiko and her husband, Tekkan, had removed tanka from the stranglehold of history and mere technicality. The earlier court poets had made the Kokinshū, Japan's second oldest anthology (completed 905), their sacred book:
... as time passed, many words and phrases were totally incomprehensible to the mass of readers. Those families versed in the art of tanka capitalized on the inscrutable expressions in these poems and monopolized the field. The prestige of the poetry families was heightened; moreover, the financial rewards were great. For hundreds of years the heirs of these families were initiated into the well-guarded techniques of the art. As a matter of course, poets and their poems were conservative in the extreme.
Romaji Diary and Sad Toys Page 4