As if to heighten the contradiction, Takuboku once more expresses his desire not to compose tanka:
A. Honestly speaking, I don't want to let myself make such a thing as tanka.
B. What do you mean? You are a tanka poet after all. Why not? Do your best.
A. I love myself far deeper than to let myself compose tanka.
B. I don't understand you.
A. Don't you? (Pause) But it becomes rather foolish when expressed in words.
B. Do you mean that you cannot devote yourself to such a trifling thing as tanka?
A. I have never intended to devote my whole life to tanka. (Pause) What can I devote my life to? (Pause) I love myself, but I don't trust myself very much.
These attitudes toward tanka may best be summarized in a letter Takuboku wrote to Fukashi Segawa, a medical student at the time and a former schoolmate at Morioka Middle School (letter dated January 9, 1911):
First of all, I want to write about the fact that we have both changed in the same way. You said you had drifted farther and farther from poetry, and the same is true with me. The tanka I am now writing are different from those I wrote in the old days. You have ceased to write poetry, and I have become unable to—I have become unable to write such poems as I did in the old days and as the young still do today, just as I can no longer repeat the love affairs I had in the old days. Not that I don't feel any nostalgia for those bygone days when I was happy dallying with my own sentiments.... But I cannot repeat such foolish efforts again.
The tanka I am writing nowadays have hardly any raison d'etre—I know that quite well. It makes little difference, so to speak, whether I make them or not. I don't know whether you keep a diary or not, but now I am writing tanka as if I were writing a diary. Perhaps there are well-written diaries and badly written ones, but the value of a diary does not vary according to the writer's skill. A diary is of value only to the writer, and the value is quite irrelevant to the outsider. "I felt so and so" or "I thought so and so"—this is all that my tanka purport now. They have no other meaning, none above that.
Therefore, it makes no difference whether I compose them or not. When I say this, I am not just theorizing. In fact, I don't mind at all if I don't feel like making any tanka for days or even months. I remain quite indifferent. But because I am obliged to lead a dissatisfied daily life, it often becomes imperative to seek the proof of my existence by becoming conscious of my self at each moment. At such times I make tanka; I console myself a little by turning the self at each moment into words and reading them. Accordingly, the day in which I make tanka is an unhappy day for me. It is a day I spent purposelessly, a day in which I could not obtain any satisfaction except by finding my real "self" at each moment. You see, even though I write tanka now, I want to become a man who has no need to write any.
You wrote you understood me. And I believe it. From what I have written above, I believe you must have grasped my attitude toward tanka. But there is one circumstance which causes me sorrow. My tanka have a meaning quite different from the tanka of other people. Nevertheless, because I write tanka people regard me as a tanka-poet, and I myself sometimes feel like one. Whenever others treat me as a tanka-poet, a certain rebellious spirit is engendered in me. I cry inwardly, "I'm not such a special curiosity, but a man, an independent man worthy of the name." And yet, a moment later, I sometimes feel proud by comparing my tanka with those of others. I have hardly any respect or sympathy for the life of a man who lives to make tanka. I regard it as crippled and hollow. So I am well aware that it is meaningless to compare my tanka with his. I also think that it is to debase myself to make such comparisons. Yet I often do; sometimes I am impressed by his work, and sometimes I feel proud of mine. This is what makes me sad, and it reveals my weakness at the same time. This weakness induces me to promise I will write a given number of tanka by a fixed date.
In Takuboku's first collection of tanka, A Handful of Sand, 551 poems had been included; yet in Sad Toys, posthumously published from the notebook in which the poet kept his tanka (the first two in the volume added by his friend Toki from a slip of paper found there later), there were only 194. (We ought to keep in mind the fact that Takuboku did not give his second and last tanka collection the title Sad Toys. Toki had wanted to call the posthumous volume After "A Handful of Sand": From the End of November 1910, but the publisher wisely refused because readers might have easily confused it with the earlier collection. Toki finally selected the title from the memorable last line in the Asahi article.)
Illness, poverty, the demands of his job as a proofreader, his attempt at writing stories, and the pursuit of socialism provide some explanation for the smaller number of tanka; yet these very conditions, painful as they were, lent themselves to the creation of "sad toys." Is it not possible to speculate that Takuboku made greater demands than ever on tanka, demands that pared life down to the essentials of a "self" he was perpetually trying to find? We have seen how Takuboku spent a triumphant three days in his earlier career in which he had set down at least 246 tanka. In the slightly less than seventeen months remaining in his life after the publication of Handful, he probably demanded more from each tanka so that he was much more critical of the effort. He saw the moments slipping by, each one in itself containing infinite possibilities for the creation of tanka:
a family at a time of discontent:
Husband's mind on travel!
The wife scolding, the child in tears!
O this table in the morning!
__
an appreciation of the most trivial:
How precious the winter morning!
Soft against my face,
Steam from the hot water in this bowl...
__
a moment of emptiness bordering on nihilism:
As if these hands, these feet, were scattered—
O this sluggish waking!
This sad waking!
__
the sudden isolation of midnight:
Awakened at midnight
And wondering if Fate rode me—
O the heaviness of this quilt!
the image of one's hands:
These poor thin hands
Without power
To grasp and grasp hard!
__
a crisis of intense concentration to keep oneself from raging:
On this day in which my wife behaves
Like a woman unleashed,
I gaze at these dahlias...
Takuboku felt the necessity of preserving the most ephemeral element in man's life, the individual moment, whether that moment was high or low, bright or dark, inspiring or frustrating, and he set for himself a task no other tanka poet before him had undertaken—that of extending tanka's range, of revising its form and content, of blending the unique mixture of colloquial and formal which adds so much to the complexity of the Japanese language. He carried his tanka to a point where the poem was almost destroyed because it came so close to breaking down into prose. At times he wished tanka might collapse, and he felt that it would at some future day, but he refused to allow himself to be the one to make that disastrous move. He called his tanka "sad toys," but even toys so easily broken can become precious and indispensable, for his tanka were also "poems to eat." Takuboku gave to the Everyman in each of us moments we can immediately recognize and value as commonplace, real, honest, compassionate, unflinching, and human.
Sanford Goldstein
Seishi Shinoda
Notes
1. All translated passages in the Introduction and its Notes are by the translators.
2. The father of Takuboku's mother was born into a family of lower-class samurai called Kumagai, but he was adopted by the Kudo family. He had four sons and three daughters, of whom Katsu was the youngest daughter. Naosue, the second son, did not like serving his feudal lord. When Naosue's mother died, he entered a Buddhist temple to become the disciple of a priest. Later he returned to Iwate to be the incumbent of a temple. In 1872, the M
eiji government ordered all priests to adopt family names. At that time Naosue adopted the name Katsurahara. He should have adopted his father's earlier name Kumagai, but he preferred Katsurahara, the name of a distant family ancestor who was a prince.
3. Takuboku wrote on the flyleaf of one of the notebooks in which he kept his poems, "Born February 20, Meiji 19 (September 20 in the old calendar, Meiji 18)." This entry shows that Takuboku believed that for some reason, in spite of the official register, he was actually born on September 20, in the old calendar, in the eighteenth year of Meiji. The date is October 27 in the new calendar. Such discrepancies between the actual date and the registered date of birth were not at all rare in those days. Some parents neglected to register the birth of a child for a time, but when they did, they entered a fictitious date which fell within the prescribed period. Accordingly, some scholars believe that Takuboku was born on October 27, Meiji 18, i.e., 1885. But Takuboku's biographer Yukinori Iwaki denies this date. According to him, it is established beyond doubt that the family moved to Shibutami village in the spring of the year following Takuboku's birth, and the chronicle preserved in Ittei's second temple, Hōtokuji in Shibutami, and the village register as well, record that the movement took place in the spring of Meiji 20 (1887). Hence it must be considered conclusive that Takuboku was born in 1886. Aika Toki in the postscript listed Takuboku as twenty-eight. He believed Takuboku's year of birth was 1885. By using the old Japanese way of counting that every Japanese becomes a year older each January 1, Toki arrived at the figure twenty-eight.
4. During the Meiji period, upper primary school had courses of study that were two, three, or four years long, but after finishing the second year, students were qualified to take entrance examinations to the five-year course of middle school. However, students who graduated from schools in the rural areas and who wished to further their education found the limited training they had received insufficient to really compete in these examinations. In Japan's first school system in 1872, lower primary school was four years and upper primary school was the same; but the program was not this systematic in actual practice, and a three-year "simplified" course was permitted in upper primary school. In 1890, a new primary school act was enforced in which the lower course was three to four years, the higher two, three, or four. This latitude was due to the fact that there were not enough school buildings and teachers.
5. In large cities, ryōriya (restaurants) and machiai (where a patron could pass the night with a geisha) were kept distinct. Before World War II, Japan's licensed prostitutes were called shōgi but were more commonly referred to as jorō. They lived in special districts (yūkaku) where licensed brothels were located. These prostitutes were not allowed to go outside the yūkaku, so they were sometimes called "caged birds." The women Takuboku was to buy in the Asakusa red-light district in Tokyo were cheaper, unlicensed prostitutes who were ostensibly waitresses at bars. The authorities knew what these women were but did not interfere with their trade unless it became conspicuous. Near the famous pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara, which was next to Asakusa in Tokyo, was a district of cheap brothels. Geisha, on the other hand, were not prostitutes but entertainers at parties. They were paid for their skill in dance, music, and conversation. Sometimes, though, they slept with their guests for love or for money. Restaurants could not be used on such occasions, so the guest and geisha went from these establishments to the machiai. In rural Japan, however, regulations were not so strictly adhered to.
6. Usually a few (sometimes several) geisha lived in a geisha-ya (geisha house) owned by the okami (mistress or proprietress). These geisha were given board and clothing by the okami, but she was reimbursed from geisha fees paid by customers. Because a geisha's clothing was costly and because a good many outfits for frequent change of costume were needed, many geisha found themselves in debt to the proprietress and were obliged to find a "patron," usually a special customer. But some geisha who were very popular could follow their profession on their own by having their own house. Koyakko seems to have earned a good deal of money because she was able to be independent.
7. According to biographer Iwaki, Takuboku composed 55 tanka from the night of June 23 to dawn of June 24 (1908), 50 in the forenoon of June 24, and 141 on June 25. Thus the total number of tanka composed would be 246. This figure is based on what Takuboku wrote in a notebook in which he set down his tanka. But in a diary entry for June 24, Takuboku wrote: "Last night I began writing tanka after going to bed. My enthusiasm increased hour by hour, and I wrote all night through. At dawn I took a walk in the graveyard of Honmyōji Temple. I felt incomparably refreshed. My enthusiasm continued, and I composed more than 120 tanka from last night to 11 o'clock. I sent about 100 of them to Mr. Yosano...." On June 25, Takuboku wrote in his diary:
"Inside my head all is tanka. Everything I see and everything I hear turn into tanka. Today I composed 141 tanka by 2 a. m. Forty of them are about my parents. I composed them in tears." Thus Takuboku's figure of the number of tanka written in this three-day period is more than Iwaki's figure of 246. In spite of Iwaki's assertion that 114 of these tanka appeared in Myōjō, only 100 of the 116 poems in Myōjō were composed during this unusual three-day period.
8. The Heimin Shinbun was published by the Heimin-sha, headed by Kōtoku and Sakai. At first it was a weekly paper of eight pages (from November 15, 1903, to January 29, 1905, its last issue no. 64). On January 15, 1907, it was revived as a daily, but because of some internal strife between two factions, the reissue was short-lived. The last issue, April 14, 1907, was no. 75. Heimin means "common people" as opposed to the privileged. No longer used, the word has been replaced by jimmin or minshū.
9. The postscript to Sad Toys is dated June 9, 1912; Sad Toys was published June 20, 1912
10. We offer the following passages from Shiki's diaries:
Besides pain in a certain part of my body, which has plagued me for some years, I have come to suffer a fresh pain in the side. The pain has increased so much since last year that it has been impossible to continue writing. The frustration of being unable to give vent to my thoughts has tormented me. "What's the use of living on like this? Isn't there some way to relieve my boredom in sickbed?" Wondering thus, I happened on an idea. What if I jotted down whatever came into my mind during an interval between fits of pain? The entries would be twenty lines at most, and short ones would be ten, five, or sometimes only one or two lines. It would be better to write even such things than not write at all. I decided to give it the title A Drop of Ink. I am not, however, presumptuous enough to think I will be able to meet the reader's expectations with such childish writings. But it will give me a slight comfort to find my writings in the newspaper when I open it in my sickbed every morning.
my old brushes too
worn out
to paint the second bloom
[from A Drop of Ink, January 24, 1901]
__
While I could not move about, I didn't mind lying in sickbed, nor did I think my illness was very hard to bear. But since I have recently become unable to move an inch, mental agony has been added to physical pain. Almost every day I suffer so much that I become frenzied. In order to avoid the torment, I use every device, but in vain. And the frustration adds to my agony. My head becomes muddled. My endurance, reaching its limits, explodes. Then nothing can be done about it. I scream, I cry. That makes me scream and cry the louder. The torment is beyond description. I think the agony would go if I went mad, but that doesn't happen. What I desire most is to die. But I don't die, and there is no one who will put me to death. My pain decreases slightly at night, but as soon as it abates and I get drowsy, I think of the pain I'll have on awakening the following morning, for it reaches the extreme when I awake. Isn't there anyone who will relieve me of my agony? Isn't there anyone who will relieve me of my agony? [from My Six-Foot Sickbed, June 20, 1902]
11. Armando Martins Janeira, Japanese and Western Literature (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1970), p. 75.
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br /> 12. Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 4-5.
13. Takeo Kuwabara, Works of Takuboku (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1968), pp. 192-207 (original ed.: Collected Works of Takuboku, extra volume; Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1954).
14. Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 211.
15. Ōshima, a member of Tekkan's Shinshi-sha, was also a member of the Bokushuku-sha (Clover Club) in Hakodate. He eventually became the leader of the group; he also gave the club's journal its title, Beni Magoyashi (Red Clover). With the breakup of his marriage, he returned to his home in the country, leaving the work of editing the journal to Takuboku, who had by then arrived in Hakodate. Ōshima was well educated, and Takuboku's letters to him are written in a respectful style.
16. Kuwabara, pp. 206-7.
17. Akiko Yosano, Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from "Midaregami" (Lafayette: Purdue University Studies, 1971), pp. 1-2.
18. The article was first published in the November 1910 issue of Sōsaku magazine.
Romaji Diary
Tokyo
Branch House, Gaiheikan
359 Shinsaka
1 Morikawachō, Hongō
Wednesday, April 7
From out of the west came a savage wind in a clear sky. All the windows on the third floor rattled incessantly, and through the crevices particles of sand from the ground far below swept into my room with a rustling sound. And still the scattered white clouds in that sky didn't move. In the afternoon the wind finally subsided.
Romaji Diary and Sad Toys Page 6