Romaji Diary and Sad Toys

by Takuboku Ishikawa

  Sleet comes in comparatively warm weather. Pleurisy patients are apt to have chest pains during a sudden change in weather. Perhaps the poet's fear caused by pains in his chest made him choke on the medicine.

  Diary entry March 17, 1911: "Sleet. Fever in the afternoon. Unwell."

  126. Sarado in those days was potato salad with carrots, green peas, and mayonnaise. It was a new and somewhat exotic dish, and it was found at restaurants and some hospitals. Today sarada (not sarado as in this tanka) is sold at butcher shops in two varieties—potato and macaroni. In Takuboku's day, the Shirakaba School of poets (White Birch School) had great enthusiasm for the exotic and new and liked to use foreign words in its poems. Many Japanese at that time would not have known what sarado was.

  Anyone who has been confined in a hospital recognizes the truth of this tanka moment. The eyes see and the nose smells, but the appetite cannot rise to the occasion. The dash lets the reader fill in the rest of the poem.

  This tanka has a peculiar effect brought about by the combination of a very new and exotic subject (sarado) and the formal traditional diction in the last line. Mi wa mitsuredomo (though I did so and so) is a hackneyed phrase used in tanka. The mi in the expression, even though written in the Chinese character for "to see" does not mean "to see." It is the same mi (to try) commented on in note 87.

  127. The language in this tanka is formal, as is that in tanka 128 through 134.

  Aware, which may mean "pity" or "sorrow" or "compassion," is used here as a literary expression equivalent to "Ah!"

  The poet has scolded his child, and his wife, true to her subordinate role in the Japanese family system, remains silent, but her gaze reveals her annoyance. In his mind the poet offers his own justification as he maintains his role of ruler of the family without the necessity of explaining his conduct. Of course, illness makes one irritable, but that is not the real reason behind the poet's rebuke to his child. He has transferred to the innocent child his anger against the world, his immediate surroundings, and his physical condition. Yet he feels guilty about his injustice to a child when he is basically raging against the injustice of the world.

  The poet is not in the hospital but at home. With other patients around, no father would have reprimanded his own child.

  128. Unmei (fate) was a word new to tanka. The poet here personifies fate, a Western conception, the Japanese thinking of fate not as a god or as a person but merely as "luck" or "chance." It was the vogue of the Myōjō School of poets to use this kind of personification, as Akiko Yosano did at times. Tanka 118 of her Tangled Hair personifies death: "My friend found poetry/ At the end of her ordeal,/ But for me/ Only black death/ Ahead. "The Japanese do have names for the personification of poverty and death, for example, Binbōgami (god of poverty), pictured as shabby looking and rather comical, and Shinigami (god of death), a slightly comical figure.

  The key point of this tanka is in the word futon, which means the entire Japanese-style bed on the mats including the quilts. In this tanka only the quilt is referred to. A Japanese futon in Takuboku's time was very heavy (some still are today, though there are much lighter ones). The futon is padded with cotton and covered with cotton cloth or silk. Takuboku's futon would have been made of coarse cotton. The older the futon is, the heavier it gets, for the cotton becomes compressed and contains less air. To a weakened invalid, the futon seems especially heavy. Japanese hospitals have a special device for easing the heaviness of the futon, especially for those patients who have undergone surgery. The device looks like an iron hoop cut in two; when it is placed on the bed, the patient is relieved of the pain which comes from the weight of the quilt. In this tanka we find the weight of the futon, the weight of the poet's illness, and the weight of his unknown destiny.

  129. Thirsty people want water, but perhaps Takuboku felt that to reach for a cup or for a drink was too prosaic or flat for tanka. True, Takuboku did like fruit—tanka 4 notes his night walk to find a fruit store. We must remember that the thirst of a sick person is a different kind of thirst. The poet feels dull, languid, weary. The fresh taste of an apple might alleviate that languor. By some means or other he wants to get rid of this condition, but he cannot.

  130. The cold icebag soothes one's fever, but once the poet drops off to sleep, he cannot help but wake suddenly after the ice melts and no relief is forthcoming. The high fever melts the ice, the fever causing pain throughout the body.

  The poet was either at the hospital or at home. Ice was purchased in blocks for home use and was kept in a wooden tub. The ice was chipped with an auger or nail. Ice was not cheap, ten to fifteen sen per kan (four kilograms).

  Me ga same kitari is slightly colloquial. To be perfectly formal, it would have to be written me same kitari, but then there would be only six syllables instead of the required seven. It can also be written formally as me no same kitari, seven syllables exactly.

  131. The lack of indentation in the first line stresses it against the other two lines of the Japanese. In the Tōhoku district, the song of the cuckoo begins in mid-May and lasts through July. Perhaps the poet's fever made him feel summer was about to begin.

  Generally the cuckoo would not be heard in Tokyo, so Takuboku dreamed of the beloved village of his youth. Beloved yes, for its quiet and for the beauty of its surroundings. Yet Takuboku disliked the people of Shibutami village, especially for their treatment of his father. Living in Tokyo and having become more cosmopolitan, Takuboku thought he had outgrown that earlier sentimentality related to home ties. But he has not been able to, and he feels sad that he cannot forget his early native place. Thus the kanashiku of the poet is complicated. He cannot break away, rebel, cast off the past, however much he desires to. That is sad, and so is his nostalgia for the old places.

  The cuckoo here is a synecdoche for "home." Takuboku uses the indirect method rather than coming out so sentimentally with the word home. Akiko Yosano illustrates this kind of Japanese psychology in a tanka in which her heroine realizes she cannot directly ask about her "lover" but only about the "white wisteria" next door: "To the man come from my village/ I could only ask/ About white wisteria/ On the estate/ Next to my house" (see tanka 28, Tangled Hair).

  132. Takuboku left Shibutami village in 1901, but he returned because of illness in 1903. The following year he again went to Tokyo; however, after his father's loss of his temple job, the poet went back home to get married in 1905. For a while he was a substitute teacher there as he was trying to help his father regain the position. Takuboku left Shibutami for Hokkaido in 1907.

  In tanka 131 through 134, Takuboku reveals his nostalgia for Shibutami. This tanka is more simple and direct than 131, for Takuboku mentions furusato (native town). When the poet was strong and healthy, he did not think of his home, but now that he is ill, he does. This kind of nostalgia is a commonplace occurrence to those who are ill.

  Takuboku often spoke as if he were an old man. He probably thought five years a vast time, but he is only twenty-five at the present moment. People in the Meiji period seem to have matured at a rapid rate.

  133. Sansō is an elegant mountain villa. Takuboku's home, located at the foot of a hill, was about two hundred meters from the village highway, but he poeticizes his residence into sansō. The Japanese tend to beautify the plebian. Sansō also has the four syllables necessary for the five-syllable division of sansō o. The temple Takuboku's family lived in was surrounded by mountains and would thus have some of the characteristics of a sansō!

  The cuckoo sings during the day. In these four tanka on the cuckoo (131 through 134), Takuboku is trying a variety of ways to make the same point about his nostalgia for Shibutami. But each poem in a tanka sequence, while connected to other poems, is to be considered an independent, autonomous poem.

  134. The hiba is a strong tree, but it is not as elegant as the hinoki (Japanese cypress). Unfortunately hiba (the hiba arborvitae) does not translate as poetically as hinoki. The latter, which has the best and costliest timber, is produced
mostly in the middle part of Japan; the hiba, which is as strong but less elegant, is produced in the Tōhoku district.

  This kind of tanka is rare. The noun cuckoo is preceded by an adjective clause. The number of syllables makes this effort a tanka, but it is very close to being a haiku, which often uses this grammatical structure of noun preceded by its modifying clause.

  A rare quiet mood of nostalgia for the usually troubled Takuboku. The reference to temple adds to the quiet of the cuckoo's song in the early summer morning.

  135. Takuboku does not have many poems of this kind in Sad Toys. That is, in this instance he is gentle and sympathetic, whereas he often focuses on stronger feelings tinged with irony or cynicism. He had in him feelings of great tenderness, but his struggle with the world and art and illness hardened him.

  In the Taishō period, the position of a nurse, like that of women in general, was quite subordinate to the male's. A nurse was a nurse, not a servant. But in those days, some nurses, especially those employed by general practitioners, were expected when not busy to do chores usually done by servants. She was trained at the hospital, for nursing schools as we know them today were nonexistent. Perhaps this nurse is sixteen or seventeen or slightly older.

  136. The first line in the Japanese is formal, the second and third lines colloquial.

  The Japanese say a cold hand signifies a warm heart, but that is not Takuboku's meaning in this tanka. A patient identifies the various nurses by their hands as the pulse is taken. The "cold hand" may be typical of the distance between nurse and patient, of the impersonality and indifference. Since Takuboku was hospitalized a month, he must have seen many nurses and thought about their attitudes toward the patients. That Takuboku gives the initial F means he definitely remembers the nurse's name but suppresses it. It is of course possible that she may have been anemic—there must have been in her something which attracted his attention.

  137. A typical moment in the hospital world. Japanese hospitals have enormously long corridors. When a man has been in bed keeping absolutely quiet for three days, he is unsteady in walking; if he spends a week without moving, walking is almost impossible. At home Takuboku remembered that long corridor. It was an impressive challenge for a patient determined to get well, but Takuboku had been too weak then to walk it. Now that he is at home, he probably feels he could have made the walk to the very end of the corridor.

  138. In those days the tulip was not as common in Japan as it is today. It was imported into Japan during the Tokugawa period.

  Once more Takuboku uses a noun (tulip) preceded by its adjective clause.

  To touch and smell the tulip would have been pleasant for the poet, but he was too weak, so he could only admire the flower from a distance. Takuboku tried to walk about to hasten his recovery, but he soon tired; probably even the short distance to the tulip was too much for him at this particular moment. Out of the hospital now, the poet remembers that terrible moment of weakness made vivid by the color of the flower.

  139. Once more we find Takuboku in a moment of weakness, yet it is the self-pity of the ill, a common experience. Takuboku uses synecdoche, the hands representing the total decline of the power of his body.

  140. This poem was published in the July 1911 issue of the Shin-Nippon magazine as one of a series of twenty-six poems entitled "After Illness."

  What Takuboku was thinking as the cause of his disease is a matter of conjecture. Of course, he did not know the nature of his mother's illness at the time of writing this tanka, but the following entry in his diary for January 23, 1912, may not be irrelevant. For several days his mother had hemorrhaged:

  A polite "locum tenens" [the doctor's deputy, in this instance, may have been a person studying medicine but without a medical license] about thirty years old came to see her. After examining my mother, he made the following diagnosis: She had had chronic tuberculosis for many years. As she was old, its progress was very slow, but her left lung had almost lost its ability to function.

  I suspected the nature of my mother's illness as she had hemorrhaged, but the doctor's words gave me a shock. Unfortunately I knew many facts which corroborated his statement. I had heard from my mother herself that she had had "emaciation," i.e. consumption, when she was fifteen or sixteen. Moreover, she had been saying for some years that she couldn't sleep on her left side because of coughing. And I was told she had coughed up a small amount of blood while I was in the hospital last year. I also had to consider the cause of my eldest sister's death.

  ... The fact that the nature of my mother's illness has been found means that the cause of the misfortune enveloping my home has become clear. Today I had to admit I was in a desperate situation. Coexisting in my mind with the desire that she live as long as possible is the fear that if she does, I will be in real difficulties.

  When Takuboku wrote this poem, he did not know that his mother had tuberculosis, but he must have suspected the nature of his own disease. On April 25, 1911, he writes: "Why is it that I have not yet been cured forty days after being released from the hospital? And the fear of hunger is drawing near." On May 10, he writes: "In the afternoon I summoned up the courage to go to the hospital. The doctor said the aftereffects of pleurisy still persist, but my lungs are intact...." The fact that Takuboku had to summon up his courage to undergo a medical checkup reveals he had guessed how serious his illness was. It would be natural if he thought about his sister's death in 1906 and his mother's evident weakening since 1910. This kind of speculation is part of the background of tanka 140.

  The critic Katsuichiro Kamei (see Introduction) makes the assertion that Takuboku was not referring to physical ailment when he said the cause of his sickness was deeply complicated but was probably deploring his fate since his birth in having an overabundance of aspirations, which Kamei considers a manifestation of what he calls Takuboku's "general aggressiveness." At the same time, Kamei believes Takuboku was perhaps referring to a loneliness which nothing could alleviate and to a despair which stemmed from that loneliness. On the other hand, Kamei wonders if Takuboku did not have a presentiment of the shortness of his life, a corollary to which might be that extraordinary outburst of creativity which enabled the poet to write more than 240 tanka in three days (see Introduction, footnote 7).

  We might say that the cause of Takuboku's "sickness unto death" is too tangled, too complicated, to unravel.

  Probably "sickness" in this tanka includes the physical as well as this added suggestion by Kamei. Zen Buddhism often notes the impossibility of the rational method in getting back to the source, to the cause, of anything. Analysis and dissection of this kind may well lead to an intense closing of the eyes.

  Takuboku's division of his tanka into three lines is his own invention—probably a division into two lines or even five will give the same effect. But in this tanka the threefold division works quite well. A different arrangement in only a few places provides this poem with the usual tanka characteristics of rhythm and emphasis. But the second line has almost the rhythm of prose. The line is in the kanbunchō style—that is, in the Chinese style with its forceful and manly and cryptic emphasis. Japanese prose is softer, perhaps even feminine, when it is compared with kanbunchō. The latter is the style in which classical Chinese writings were "read" in a special way in Japanese. As the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters, each character had its Japanese way of pronouncing it. So a technique of reading Chinese sentences in Japanese was developed with minimum changes in word order, and these changes were indicated by several signs. This Japanized Chinese style is forceful and manly in its cryptic emphasis. An educated Japanese in the Meiji period or even today would instantly recognize the style in the second line.

  141. Nan no kokoro zo is an exclamatory sentence meaning "What a mind I have!" In colloquial Japanese, the line would be Nan to yu kokoro darō!

  The poet is rebuking himself for his weakness. Sadly aware that the situation surrounding him would be the same even if he were cured and forseeing the
continuation of a life of pain and fatigue, the poet, in this weak moment, desires to die as he is. Of course, he knows that he ought not to be this weak and irresponsible, so he rebukes himself. But the rebuke is a weak one; the general tone of the poem is the poet's despondency over his sad condition.

  The second and third lines in the Japanese are in the weighty, masculine, and cryptic style, the kanbunchō (see note 140).

  142. On February 7, 1911, Takuboku underwent minor surgery for peritonitis. He writes in his diary on that day: "The operation was performed to make a small hole in the lower abdomen in order to drain the fluid accumulated in the belly. When about three liters of that whiskey-colored fluid had come out that rubber tube, I felt as if I had suddenly become hungry, and I fainted while joking about that hungry feeling. The operation was suspended. I was made to lie on my back. Still cracking forced jokes, I sipped the wine I was ordered to drink. After that I felt good, but all my strength was gone."

  Certainly the scar must have been very small. Probably it was not only that Takuboku minded the scar—he wanted a stronger body. In Meiji Japan, the word chūkō (loyalty to the emperor and filial piety) was uppermost in the mind of every schoolboy, each student knowing the Chinese classical statement, "Our body, our hair, our skin, we have been given by our parents. The first of the filial duties is to keep these intact." When Takuboku's body was unharmed, he might not have remembered these words, but as he pats his operation scar at this moment in this tanka, he may have been thinking about them.

  143. The slight humor of this tanka reveals another of the many facets of illness. Those who have been ill a long time recognize the poet's psychology. At the beginning stages of illness, a patient is quite regular in taking his medicine. At this point Takuboku was perhaps still cavalier about his illness.