Morioka: A city in Iwate Prefecture. Takuboku went to middle school and fell in love with Setsuko there.
Nakajima, Kotō: Penname of Moichi Nakajima (1878-1946). Novelist, critic, and translator. Nakajima was in charge of a column in Shinshōsetsu introducing movements in Western literature to Japanese readers. His translations of juvenile literature are still read.
Nakamura: Ō (penname Kokyō) Nakamura (1881-1952). A graduate of the English Department of Tokyo Imperial University and member of the foreign news section of the Asahi newspaper. He later went to a private medical college and became a practicing physician.
Namiki: Takeo (penname Hisui) Namiki. A shipping company employee whom Takuboku first met in Hakodate, in the Bokushuku-sha, a literary circle.
Nanase: Nanase Yosano. One of the twin daughters of Akiko and Tekkan Yosano.
naniwabushi: A kind of ballad recited to a particular tonal rhythm. Naniwa is an old name for Osaka; bushi (from fushi) means "tune."
Nohechi: A town in the eastern part of Aomori Prefecture. Takuboku's mother's elder brother was the incumbent of a temple there.
Numada, Seimin: One of the villagers who tried to help reinstate Takuboku's father after he lost his position as head of the temple in Shibutami.
Oideno: A field in Shibutami, Iwate Prefecture.
Orochi: A small Tungus tribe living near the mouth of the Amur River, Mongolia, and in eastern Sakhalin.
Ōta: Masao Ōta (1885-1945). A doctor who wrote poems, plays, stories, and critical pieces under the penname Mokutarō Kinoshita. His contributions to symbolic and impressionistic poetry in Japan are considerable.
Otaru: A port city on the west coast of Hokkaido, near Sapporo.
Ozaki: Yukio Ozaki (1858-1954). Orator and politician. Takuboku visited Ozaki in 1904 when the latter was mayor of Tokyo. He showed Ozaki the manuscript of Akogare and asked the mayor to introduce him to a publisher. Ozaki refused. Takuboku dedicated the book to Ozaki when it was published in 1905.
Reisō-sha: Possibly the name of some poetry association that published a small literary magazine.
Sakhalin: A large island north of Hokkaido. The portion south of the 50th parallel became Japanese government territory after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). The Japanese government made various investigations in order to develop the area.
Sanshōdō: Takuboku's name for the publisher Sanseidō.
Satō, Isen: A reporter who worked on the staff of the Kushiro Shinbun, the newspaper that Takuboku edited for a time in Kushiro, Hokkaido.
Satō, Mr.: Shin'ichi Satō (1868-1914). Chief editor of the Tokyo Asahi newspaper, Satō was born in the same prefecture as Takuboku. Takuboku visited Satō and asked him to find him a job. Sato employed him. He did not fire the poet, even though the latter frequently neglected his duties. Sato was kind to Takuboku for the rest of the poet's life.
Sekishinkan: A boardinghouse near Tokyo Imperial University. Takuboku lived there before settling into the Gaiheikan.
Senzokumachi: The correct pronunciation is Senzokuchō. An area behind Asakusa Park in which were located many unlicensed brothels. The complicated procedure of finding a room described in the May 1 entry was typical.
Setsuko: Setsuko Ishikawa, née Horiai (1886-1913). Takuboku's wife.
shimada: A style of hairdo worn by unmarried women during the Tokugawa and Meiji eras. There are several varieties of which the tall style is worn today (in wig form) by brides. Geisha, too, wear a variation of this hairdo when in full dress.
shinnai: One of the many schools of jōruri, the music of the Bunraku puppet play. Its chief characteristic is pathos, its content mostly about double love-suicides. In red-light districts, itinerant shinnai singers used to perform to the accompaniment of their own samisen playing, waiting for restaurant customers to summon them inside to continue their presentation.
Shinshi-sha: A group of poets formed by Tekkan Yosano in November 1899.
Shinshōsetsu: A literary magazine published by Shun'yōdō. It featured short stories, novels, and criticism. It was established in 1889, folded a year later, but was revived from 1896 to 1926.
Subaru: A literary magazine established in 1909, lasting until 1913. Strongly influenced by Ōgai Mori, it was colored by anti-naturalism and aestheticism. Among the popular contributors were Hakushū Kitahara, Masao Ōta, and Isamu Yoshii. Takuboku contributed a short story entitled "Dysentery" to its first issue (January 1909). He was also the nominal publisher of that number.
Tabata: The fourth station to the north of Ueno on the National Railway line.
Tachibana, Chieko: (1889-1922). A teacher at a Hakodate primary school, where Takuboku met her in 1907.
Tengai: Tengai Kosugi (1865-1952). A writer of realistic novels before the days of naturalism, but later a writer of popular novels. In his Star of a Millionaire, a novel of the realistic genre, he informed his readers that he hoped to create a work which could not have been written by naturalists with their very narrow viewpoint, the naturalists writing only, he felt, their personal lives.
Tsubo, Jinko: See Koyakko.
Tsugaru, Sea of: More properly known as the Tsugaru Strait. The body of water between Hokkaido and Honshu.
Ueda, Bin: (1874-1916). Poet and translator, professor at Kyoto University. He was an anti-naturalist.
Ueno: An area of Tokyo, comprising Kurumazaka, Ikenohata ("pond's edge"), and Hirokōji. There were, and still are, a zoo, museums, temples, and a park there.
Yachigashira: A part of Hakodate, Hokkaido.
Yamakawa, Tomiko: (1878-1909). Poet and friend of Akiko Yosano's. An ardent follower of the Shinshi-sha, she, like Akiko, loved Tekkan, the group's founder. The following tanka by Yamakawa gives her blessing to Tekkan and Akiko's future: "Leaving all the red flowers/ For my friend/And crying without her knowledge, /I gather/Flowers of forgetfulness." She died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine, at which time Tekkan composed twelve poems of tribute to her. Akiko did not immediately write anything, but later the following tanka by her appeared: "That secret/We sealed in a jar,/The three of us,/My husband, myself,/And the dead one." (See the Introduction to our Tangled Hair, Purdue University Press, 1971.)
Yamamoto, Kanae: (1882-1946). Painter, woodblock artist, and a contributor to art education in school curricula. As an advocate of free drawing in primary school, he liberated schoolchildren from the copying of model drawings and paintings.
Yano, Ryūkei: (1850-1931). Penname of Fumio Yano. A famous journalist who, because of his intense interest in politics, wrote novels about Greek politicians.
Yasukuni Shrine: A shrine situated in Kudan in Tokyo, founded in the Meiji era as a place sacred to the spirits of the war dead. In the precincts many open-air stalls and show tents were set up.
Yatsuo: Yatsuo Yosano. One of the twin daughters of Akiko and Tekkan Yosano.
Yoichi: A city near Otaru, Hokkaido.
Yosano, Akiko: (1878-1942). One of the most famous tankaists of the Meiji and Taishō eras. Wife of Tekkan Yosano. She is most well known for her tanka cycle Midaregami (1901), a collection of bold poems asserting female individuality: "Softly I pushed open/That door/We call a mystery/These full breasts/Held in both my hands." "After my bath/At the hot spring,/These clothes/As rough to my skin/As the world!" (See our Tangled Hair, Purdue University Press, 1971).
Yosano, Tekkan (Mr. Yosano): (1873-1935). With his wife, Akiko, one of the most famous tankaists of his day. He founded the Shinshi-sha in 1899 and the literary magazine Myōjō. He was known as "Tekkan the Tiger" and was the founder of the "tiger-and-sword" style, so named because his poems were so masculine: "Rubbing my sword/In the autumn wind/Over these Korean/Hills—/Oh this thrill in my heart!" "They say tigers roar/In these Korean hills,/Yet I hear/Only the desolate wind/Of autumn..."
Yoshii: Isamu Yoshii (1886-1960). A tanka poet, well known for his fondness for saké as well as for his poems.
Yoshiwara: The licensed quarter in Takuboku's time, a red-light district of the highest class
, situated to the north of Asakusa. Poorer men could not afford to visit the elegant restaurants, etc., in the area, but were content to lounge about the quarter and stare at the beautiful women.
Sad Toys
Our attempt in Sad Toys has been to translate these poems in the spirit of Takuboku, preserving wherever possible his mixture of the formal and colloquial. Sometimes we omit the names of places or plants or other terminology too weighty for poetry. We have avoided syllabic count and rhyme in order to preserve the spontaneity, naturalness, and simplicity of tanka, and as Takuboku himself wrote these poems in three lines, we have created three-line tanka but without following Takuboku's experiment on indentation. He also experimented with punctuation, and at times we follow his, but the tone and nuance of English have dictated our own use of punctuation.
1
When I breathe,
This sound in my chest
Lonelier than the winter wind
2
Though I closed my eyes,
Nothing crossed my mind...
Only this emptiness on opening them again
3
That whim on the way
And again I took the day off
To roam the river's edge
4
Throat parched
I went hunting for fruit stalls
Late this autumn night
5
My child not yet returned from playing somewhere
I take out the toy train
And run it myself
6
"I want to buy books! I want to buy books!"
These words to my wife
But not to rebuke, not to wound!
7
Husband's mind on travel!
The wife scolding, the child in tears!
O this table in the morning!
8
For five blocks after I left home,
I walked like a man
With something to do, someplace to go
9
Hand pressed against my painful tooth,
I notice the sun rising
Blood-red in winter fog...
10
Suddenly felt
As if I had to walk without end
Along these midnight streets
11
How precious the winter morning!
Soft against my face,
Steam from the hot water in this bowl...
12
Somehow, this morning,
Things don't seem so bad—
I trim my nails.
13
Absorbed
By the illustrations in this book—
Smoke from my cigarette blown their way
14
Too late to transfer to another car,
I felt like crying—
And what's more, the rain!
15
Every third night
About one a. m. I climbed this slope
To earn my bread
16
Going home—
And my brain itself so steeped in this smell of wine
And weighted down down
17
Saké again today!
How well I know this nausea
From booze!
18
At least thinking
I mumbled something now,
Close my eyes to taste this drunken state!
19
Midnight awakening!
And so refreshed, so sober!
Begin making ink...
20
Midnight,
And through the bay window in this narrow room
Fingertips cooled against the wooden railing's frost!
21
O this secret desperation nowadays
As if to say
Let Fate do what it will!
22
As if these hands, these feet, were scattered—
O this sluggish waking!
This sad waking!
23
This morning's sorrow:
Spreading out the shabby paper from back home
And scouting for misprints
24
Wish someone
Would rebuke me and rebuke me again!
That's the kind of mind I have!
25
Morning after morning
The sorrow on rubbing
The numbness from this thigh after a night of sleep
26
Like some train across a wild waste
This agony
Now and then through my mind!
27
Somehow
It's like visiting the grave of a first love,
This being in the suburbs...
28
Like returning to one's precious town—
That's how I felt
Riding a train at long last!
29
"I believe a new dawn's coming!"
Say these words in earnest
And still—
30
Thought about the things I really wanted
And yet it all boiled down to none—
I polish my long-stemmed Japanese pipe!
31
I stare at these soiled hands-
Just like
My mind these days!
32
When I washed these dirty hands—
My scant satisfaction
For the day...
33
Yearning suddenly for my hill,
I came out today—
O where's that rock I sat on last year!
34
Overslept
And again unable to scan the news—
How like some monetary debt it feels!
35
So relaxed this New Year's Day,
Mind vacant
As if all my past erased!
36
This alert mind
From morning to night—
Until yesterday I tried to keep it up.
37
Just like last New Year—
Outside the sound of battledore and shuttlecock
And laughter too...
38
Feel somehow
As if this will be my year—
O this clear, windless dawn on the first!
39
From deep in my guts the urge to yawn,
And so it came—a long long roar
This New Year day!
40
Much the same each year
My friend's two or three poems
On his New Year card
41
On the fourth
At last
His once-a-year card
42
My brain
Concocting only the impossible in this world! —
Will the coming year be the same?
43
All these people
Going in the same direction—
And me, watching them from the side
44
Fed up with this framed tablet
Across my wall,
How long will I let it hang!
45
Slowly inch by inch
Like a candle burning down,
This last day of the year has finally passed!
46
Leaning on this blue-glazed brazier
And closing my eyes and opening them again,
I begrudge the passing of time...
47
Scolding myself
For somehow counting on tomorrow's luck,
I went to bed.
48
Is this fatigue the accumulation of a year?
New Year's Day
And yet so sleepy, so drowsy...
49
New Year afternoon
And sad somehow
Knowing the cause of this drowsy mind...
50
Helpless
Motionless
I stare at my nails stained from
an orange
51
This irritation nowadays
Like the irritation of hands that clap
And wait forever until some sleepy voice replies!
52
That single cachou I took on the way—
Came back,
My important errand forgotten
53
Bedding completely over my head,
Legs drawn up—
It's at no one in particular I stick out my tongue!
54
Gone all too soon
The New Year days,
And again the same old rut...
55
In the morning about four days ago—
O that dream
In which I argued with a god and cried!
56
just waiting
For the time to return home—
Today, too, I worked.
57
Unable to guess
The thoughts of these men—
Again, today, I went quietly about my work...
58
O those many things
I once thought I'd do-
Had I been editor of this sheet!
59
This butter
From a farm bride
In the distant north!
60
So similar that voice!
Midnight, and I stop to listen,
Chin buried in the collar of my great coat...
61
Here and there in my old diary
The initial Y—
It stood for him.
62
Hear most of the peasants had to lay off drink—
If more hard up,
What'll they lay off next?
63
O this mind just after waking!
Romaji Diary and Sad Toys Page 15