Romaji Diary and Sad Toys

by Takuboku Ishikawa

  In 1871 what later became the Imperial Poetry Bureau was established under the Ministry of the Imperial Household, the commissioners of the bureau descendants of these very court poets and their disciples. The commissioners were rigid formalists absorbed in preserving tradition yet quite deficient in creative energy. Until the end of the second decade of the Meiji era..., poets were completely dominated by the Poetry Bureau School, or, as it was later called, the Old School. The poets of the Old School were removed from the dynamic life of Meiji as it experienced the impact of Westernization. Their poems, deficient in real feeling, were concerned only with the beauty of nature. Suddenly aware of the rapidly progressing materialism of the new age, the Old School poets began to feel something of its impact and tried to adapt their art to the new era. But inadequate in talent and sensibility, they were unable to keep pace with the times, even though they introduced into tanka the telegraph and the railroad. Their newness never went beyond mere subject matter.17

  Early in his career Takuboku met Akiko Yosano and her husband, Tekkan. The young Takuboku soon saw the limitations in Tekkan's work; he liked Akiko's much more and admired her talent. But he felt he was going beyond their direction as he continued to create tanka as diary, the record of a man's life, a tanka without restriction of subject, its form open to certain kinds of change. That is to say, we feel Takuboku was carrying tanka to its very outermost limit before it broke down into prose. Takuboku's tanka still remain poetic, obviously, but it is a poetry almost lapsing into prose, into the commonplace; and perhaps the more prosaic and commonplace the subject, the more Takuboku would have called it "his" kind of tanka.

  In letters, diary entries, and articles, Takuboku probed his attitude toward tanka. What was this poetic form and who were the people who composed it? In his early days he had difficulty in deciding what the content and the mood of the poem ought to be. "Once," he tells us in his article "Poems to Eat" as he continues along this line,

  I used to write "poems." It was for a few years from the age of seventeen or eighteen. At that time there was nothing for me but poetry. My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems. And I had absolutely nothing except that mind. —As everyone knows, poetry in those days contained only conventional feelings besides fantasy, crude music, and a feeble religious element or something equivalent to it. Reflecting on my attitude toward poetry at that time, I want to say this: a very complicated process was needed to turn actual feelings into poetry. Suppose, for instance, one derived a certain sentiment from looking at a sapling about three meters tall growing on a small plot lit up by the sun: he had to make the vacant plot a wilderness, the sapling a towering tree, the sun the rising or setting sun, and he had to make himself a poet, a traveler, or a young man in sorrow. Otherwise, the sentiment was not suited to the poetry of those days, and he himself was not satisfied.

  With this early attitude that poems ought to emerge from the "inspiration" of the "poet," Takuboku discovered he could not write poems when he felt "inspired," but only "when I was in a mood in which I despised myself or when I was driven by some practical circumstance, such as nearing a deadline. I wrote many poems at the end of every month, for then I found myself in circumstances which made me despise myself." He came, he continues in "Poems to Eat," to reject such words as poet and genius, and when he recalled those youthful days in which he had written "poems," the regret at no longer being able to turned to sorrow and then to self-scorn. Forced to make a living, Takuboku became a stranger to poetry:

  From my home to Hakodate, from there to Sapporo, then farther on to Kushiro—in that way I wandered from place to place in search of a livelihood. Before I knew it, I had become a stranger to poetry. When I met someone who said he had read my old poems and who talked about the bygone days, I had the same kind of unpleasant feeling one has when a friend who had once indulged in dissipation with him talks about an old flame. The actual experience of life caused a change in me. When a kind old politician who took me to the office of a newspaper in Kushiro introduced me to someone by saying, "He is a poet of the new school," I felt in his goodwill the greatest contempt I had experienced till then.

  What revived Takuboku's interest in poetry and other forms of literature was the naturalist movement in addition to his own boredom in thinking of literature as fantasy (that is, removed from reality). His own tormented grasp of the reality of his own life caused him to further accept the spirit of the new naturalism at work in Meiji Japan. He did not object to the attempt to bring into poetry words from everyday life, yet he drew a line—and this is extremely important in the evolution of his own tanka: "Naturally poetry is subject to a certain formal restriction. When poetry is completely liberated, it must become prose."

  For this reason Takuboku's later tanka, especially those in Sad Toys, are more often than not a mixture of colloquial and formal diction, though even in this last volume many are formal in tone. When he came to Tokyo after living in Hakodate, "that colonial town in the north, where the crude realities of life were left unveiled," he often said he too would write colloquial poems in the new style, but his words were simply for those hard-liners who regarded the form of tanka as fixed, cemented in the techniques of history and tradition. In Tokyo, where the difficult life he lived is so movingly described in his Romaji Diary, he apparently wrote four or five hundred tanka during that year, the pleasure from them "somewhat like that which a husband beaten in a marital quarrel derives from scolding or teasing his child without reason." His boardinghouse life, which sometimes hurled him toward the pit of suicide, made him appreciate more fully the spirit behind the new naturalism and the new poetry, the name he gave to the latter being "poems to eat": "The name means poems made with both feet upon the ground. It means poems written without putting any distance from actual life. They are not delicacies or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal. To define poetry in this way may be to pull it down from its established position, but to me it means to make poetry, which has added nothing to or detracted nothing from actual life, into something that cannot be dispensed with."

  Poetry had become for Takuboku as indispensable as food. In this context, of course, his tanka had to be much more than mere toys. He hacked off the outer protective shell that had made the genre into something curious and rare for the elite few, and he turned it into something to be seized by the very teeth, all moments of life available to it. And this meant that the rarefied name "poet" had to be eliminated: "...I deny the existence of a special kind of man called poet. It is quite right that others should call a man who writes poems a poet, but the man should not think himself a poet. My way of putting this may be improper, but if he thinks himself a poet, his poems will degenerate; that is, they will become something needless to us. First of all, a poet must be a man. Second, he must be a man. Third, he must be a man. Moreover, he must possess all that the common man possesses." Nor must the content of poetry be "poetic" in the refined connotation of its earlier meanings:

  ... to say that poetry is the purest of arts is tantamount to saying that distilled water is the purest water. It may serve as an explanation of quality, but it cannot be a criterion in deciding its value or necessity. Future poets should not say such a thing. At the same time they should firmly decline preferential treatment given to poetry and the poet. Like everything else, all literature is in a sense a means or a method to us and to our life. To regard poetry as something high and noble is a kind of idolatry.

  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. Accordingly, it must be fragmentary; it must not have organization. (Poetry with organization, i.e., philosophy in literature, is the novel deductively and the drama inductively. The relationship between them and poetry is what exists between a daily balance of accounts and a monthly or yearly settlement.) The poet must never have preoccupation like t
he priest looking for material for a sermon or a whore looking for a certain kind of man.

  In "Various Kinds of Tanka," Takuboku introduces a letter written by an unhappy schoolteacher living in some out-of-the-way village in which the writer describes his boring life in a community he feels is without taste, declaring he will do his utmost in studying tanka and will contribute at least one tanka a day to the Asahi. Takuboku considers his correspondent a fool "to think writing tanka is something great." At the same time, however, Takuboku feels a kind of envy toward this man who is free from the pain of self-scrutiny. Takuboku continues: "From the fact that he said he would do his utmost in the study of tanka in spite of his unsatisfactory circumstances... I found that he was a man who had never seriously thought how pitiable he was or why, though he called himself 'pitiable'...."

  The schoolmaster, Takuboku discovered, continued to send daily contributions to the tanka column Takuboku was in charge of. The poet found himself perversely waiting for the mail to see how long the man would "be able to continue his meaningless effort." The writer did continue to send an "enormous" number of tanka which Takuboku judged as "no more than mere representations in thirty-one syllables of natural features suited to poetry. There was hardly one good enough to print." What Takuboku concluded was that the man's poems might truly become poems by a living person if the writer squarely faced the fact of his own "pitiable" quality and "unflinchingly thought through how pitiable he was and why."

  At the end of the article Takuboku reflects on the "reality" of tanka:

  Smoking a cigarette and resting one elbow on my desk, I was idly looking at the hands of the clock, my eyes tired from writing. And I thought the following: When anything begins to inconvenience us, we had better attempt to boldly reconstruct it so as to remove the inconvenience. It is only right that we should do this. We do not live for others but for ourselves. Take, for instance, the tanka. We have already been feeling it is somewhat inconvenient to write a tanka in a single line. So we should write it in two lines or three according to its rhythm. Some may criticize us by saying this will destroy the rhythm of tanka itself. No matter. If the conventional rhythm has ceased to suit our mood, why hesitate to change it? If the limitation of thirty-one syllables is felt inconvenient, we should freely use lines with extra syllables. As for the content, we should sing about anything, disregarding the arbitrary restrictions which dictate that some subjects are not fit for tanka and will not make one. If only we do these things, tanka will not die as long as man holds dear the momentary impressions which flash across his mind, disappearing a moment later during his busy life. The thirty-one syllables may become forty-one or even fifty-one, yet tanka will live and we will be able to satisfy our love for the fleeting moments of life.

  Thinking thus, I remained motionless while the secondhand of the clock completed a circuit. Then I felt my mind getting more and more somber. What I now feel inconvenient is not merely writing tanka in a single line. Nevertheless, what I can freely change now or will be able to change in the future are only the positions of the clock, the inkstone case, and the ink-pot on my desk, and, besides these, tanka. They are all matters of little importance. 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.

  From the clock I turned my gaze to a doll thrown down like a corpse on the tatami mats. Tanka are my sad toys.

  It seems that Takuboku had to find some means of justifying his life as a writer of tanka, for the words of the novelist Futabatei Shimei (penname of Tatsunosuke Hasegawa, 1864-1909) that a man cannot devote his life to literature had considerable impact on the young poet, though Futabatei himself could not break away from his craft. Takuboku tried stories and socialism, but in neither could he succeed. And yet even as he was successful as a young tanka poet, it almost seems as if he was fighting this talent in himself. "The Glass Window," an article published by Takuboku in June 1910, a year after the cessation of his Romaji Diary, sharply explores this contradictory tendency. Takuboku begins the article by claiming there is nothing interesting left in the world. He has discovered that even the cigarettes he incessantly smokes have become less appealing. His walks outside are directionless, and on his return home he carries only "dissatisfaction in [his] mind.... It was as if [he] didn't know what to do with [his] life." As he reviews the past, he once more notes his contempt for poets or literary men:

  Three years passed. Five years passed. Before I knew it, I had ceased to have sympathy for men younger than I who wanted to become poets or literary men, titles the sound of which had once thrilled me. Before I knew their personalities by seeing them or considered their literary endowments, I found myself feeling pity and contempt and at times distaste for them. As to those people living in the countryside who do nothing but pass their time writing poems and yet have such strong pride as cannot be imagined by outsiders and who write me vague, enigmatic letters—I sometimes felt that the world would become a much cleaner place if I dug a big hole and buried them all.

  He felt the gap between the Philistines and the literati or the gap between the actual world and the life in literature itself. He notes in this article the rise of naturalism as a movement to bring literature closer to actual life, yet Takuboku concludes that naturalism could not fully bridge the gap between the two. Perhaps Takuboku meant that inevitably naturalism could not remain a literary movement, for the gap that must remain between the created form and life as it is actually lived is one "which even an operation by the most ingenious surgeon could not suture." Takuboku claims that it is only by this gap that literature can preserve its territorial integrity forever (should that line be crossed literature could not call itself such). Nevertheless, Takuboku could not help pointing to the deep sorrow men who create literature must feel because of this gap. And still he had to admit he was most content when he was busily at work at his desk completing one piece of work after another:

  When I am too busy, I sometimes feel dizzy. At such moments I scold myself by saying to myself, "How can you lose your head because of this?" and I concentrate my attention, which is apt to be distracted, on my work. Though the work may be uninteresting, I have no other desire and no dissatisfaction. My brain, eyes, and hands work in combination so efficiently I myself am surprised. It is so pleasant. I think to myself, "I want to be busier, much busier."

  After a while the work is completed, and with a sigh of relief I have a smoke. I become aware of a healthy hunger. I feel as if I were still seeing myself working hard. Again I think, "I wish I had been busier!"

  I have various hopes: I want money, want to read books, want to obtain fame, go on a trip, live in a society which suits me. I have many more additional desires, but all of them put together cannot replace the joy of being immersed in work, forgetting all desire, all gain.

  Innumerable times as he returned home by streetcar, he thought: "I wish I could work all my life from morning to night without even time to speak or think, and then die a sudden death." Yet these thoughts, too, like tanka, were only moments of the floating world:

  But sometimes a quite different feeling suddenly occurs to me. I feel as if I have once more begun to experience the throbbing pain of a wound I had forgotten. I cannot control the feeling, nor can I divert my attention from it.

  I feel as if the world which had been bright were growing dark rapidly. Things which gave me pleasure cease to do so; things with which I was contented cause dissatisfaction in me; things I need not be angry with make me angry. There is nothing I see or hear that does not increase unpleasantness. I want to go to the mountains, I want to go to the sea, I want to go to a place where no one knows me, I want to be lost among people who speak a language I don't understand at all. It is
at such moments that I laugh to my heart's content at the unbounded ugliness, at the unbounded pitiableness, of this being called myself.

  Despite these contradictions Takuboku could not after all abandon tanka. His article "A Dialogue between an Egoist and His Friend"18 further explores this ambivalence toward tanka. As the egoist Takuboku had said, tanka would die out, but this event would not occur for many years because the form would continue to exist in the same way a man is said to have lived long when he becomes an octogenarian. Only when the Japanese language was unified would it become possible for tanka to die, and the Japanese language would unify itself only when the confusion existing in its mixture of colloquial and formal in its written forms was eliminated. As for other aspects of tanka structure, Takuboku repeated his belief that tanka itself might contain more than the traditional thirty-one syllables and need not be patterned in the traditional one or two lines. In fact, he claimed that because each tanka is different in tone, each might have different line divisions. In one of the most revealing sections of this dialogue, Takuboku (speaker A) notes the convenience of tanka, its length, its capturing of moments, its preciousness in allowing preservation of the fleeting and momentary and ephemeral:

  A. Yes. Each second is one which never comes back in our life. I hold it dear. I don't want to let it pass without doing anything for it. To express that moment, tanka, which is short and takes not much time to compose, is most convenient. Yes, it is convenient indeed. It is one of the few good fortunes we Japanese enjoy that we have a poetic form called tanka. (Pause) I compose tanka because I love life. I make tanka because I love myself better than anything else. (Pause) Yet tanka will die. I won't theorize, but it will collapse from the inside. Still, it will not die for a long time. I wish it would die as soon as possible, but it will not, not for a long time to come.