Romaji Diary and Sad Toys Read online

  Romaji Diary

  AND

  Sad Toys

  Romaji Diary

  AND

  Sad Toys

  by

  Takuboku Ishikawa

  Translated by

  Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda

  TUTTLE PUBLISHING

  Boston • Rutland, Vermont • Tokyo

  This edition published in 2000 by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A.

  Copyright ©1985 by Tuttle Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from Tuttle Publishing.

  Cover photograph © Michael Maslan Historic Photographs/Corbis; artist unknown, "Cherry Blossoms (Spring)," ca. 1890; albumen hand-colored photographic print

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data in Process

  ISBN: 978-1-4629-0078-7

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  Contents

  Publisher's Note 7

  Acknowledgments 9

  Introduction 11

  Notes 54

  Romaji Diary 59

  Notes 123

  Selected Allusions 127

  Sad Toys 133

  Romaji Renderings 200

  Notes 210

  Publisher's Note

  The publication of this edition of two of Takuboku Ishikawa's finest and most popular works together in translation has proven to be interesting from various standpoints.

  Romaji Diary and the collection of tanka, Sad Toys, while different forms of literature, are not as dissimilar as they appear on the surface. Takuboku himself wrote that poetry "must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a man's emotional life,' and these tanka are indeed as much a diary as a standard prose one. Both works reflect clearly, honestly, and poignantly the emotions and philosophy of a complex individual living in a time of profound change in japan.

  The tanka in this volume were first published in a book entitled Sad Toys (Purdue University Press, 1977). Romaji Diary is here presented in full in English for the first time, to the translators' and Publisher's knowledge. The Introduction and the various sets of notes are in large part from the Purdue book, but have been revised and added to where appropriate to fit this new edition.

  Acknowledgments

  With gratitude to...

  Professor Akira Ikari, scholar of Japanese literature at Niigata University, Niigata, Japan, for his numerous helpful suggestions on our manuscript;

  Saburō Saitō, for his excellent editing of the Iwanami Bunko edition of A Collection of Takuboku's Tanka, first published in 1946 by Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo;

  Yukinori Iwaki, scholar-biographer, for his informative studies, The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku, published by Tōhō Shobō, Tokyo, 1955, and Ishikawa Takuboku, published by Yoshikawa-Kobunkan, Tokyo, 1965;

  Dr. Takeo Kuwabara, for permission to quote from his excellent essay "The Diaries of Takuboku," found in Works of Takuboku, Chikuma Shobō, Tokyo, 1968 (originally published in the extra volume of Collected Works of Takuboku, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1954);

  Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, for permission to photograph the Japanese text of Sad Toys found in Takuboku Kashū, 1975, and for the use of the original text in our translation of Romaji Diary, found in volume 16 of Collected Works of Takuboku, 1961 (the suppressed words in this edition were filled in from the Iwanami Bunko edition of 1977); special thanks also to Ryōsuke Yasue, Chief Editor of Iwanami Shoten.

  Introduction

  BIOGRAPHY

  Poverty, illness, and tanka—the traditional thirty-one-syllable Japanese poem—permeate many of the twenty-six years of Takuboku Ishikawa's life, and like the contradictory manifestations that moderns are bombarded with, such an unusual triumvirate represents Takuboku's fall and greatness.

  Takuboku's father, Ittei Ishikawa, was the fifth son of a peasant in Iwate Prefecture. In mid-nineteenth-century Japan a needy family living in a poor rural community hoped one of its sons would become a priest, the position being a kind of religious protection against the bleak aftermath of life, to say nothing of the immediate security and status such a career offered. Ittei was taught by Taigetsu Katsurahara, who was versed in Chinese classics and skilled in the tea ceremony and who was himself a poet whose tanka, while conventional, were nevertheless well formed. Even Ittei wrote tanka, typical and unoriginal to be sure, but like his teacher's, excellent in structure:

  I have given up this world

  As full of taint, yet there is nowhere to move.

  __

  What shall I do with this aging me? Neither floating nor sinking,

  I drift, tossed by the waves of years.

  __

  How peaceful the village of Tamayama!

  The sunshine so soft, Mt. Kohime in haze.1

  Takuboku's mother, Katsu Kudō, was Katsurahara's younger sister,2 and she herself had been a very bright youngster. The private school she attended had trained her in calligraphy, reading, and some arithmetic.

  In 1874, Ittei was appointed temple priest in a village next to Shibutami in Iwate Prefecture. Only twenty-five at the time, he was exceptionally young for the position. Certainly Katsurahara's influence was a major factor in earning Ittei the appointment. It was in this Zen temple that Takuboku was born on February 20, 1886,3 the third child in a family with two daughters, Sada (ten) and Tora (eight). As Takuboku's parents had separate family registers because Zen priests in those days were not supposed to marry, the child Hajime (Takuboku is a penname) was listed in his mother's family register as a son born out of wedlock to Katsu Kudō. It must have been quite surprising to Takuboku's classmates in his second year at lower primary school to find Hajime Kudo had suddenly become Hajime Ishikawa. His father and mother had probably decided it was inconvenient and painful for a schoolboy to have parents with different family names. Bastard children were subject to ridicule and hate.

  In 1887, Ittei was transferred to the temple in Shibutami, a village which is on the old highway to Aomori, the northernmost city in Honshu. The former priest had died, but the son who would usually be next in line for the post was too young, so Ittei had been selected. Katsurahara had influenced the incumbent of the head temple to appoint Ittei, while Ittei was himself persuading a group of influential parishioners. The parties concerned disregarded the plight of the bereaved family members, who had to leave the temple without any means of livelihood. Usually members of a village have an interim-incumbent until the temple son is old enough to succeed his dead father, but in this instance no such guarantee was provided. Ittei's hard bargaining caused some villagers to dislike him and to have misgivings about him, so the prize carried with it a residu
e of antagonism.

  After moving to Shibutami, Ittei discovered his chief goal was the reconstruction of the temple, which had been destroyed by fire a decade earlier. By the time he was forty, the task was accomplished, an impressive three-year achievement, but one Ittei was never to equal during the remainder of his own sad life.

  Takuboku was a small delicate child, but he was quite happy during these early years, doted on as he was by his parents. His sister Tora said that after the boy's birth their mother disregarded her daughters. Another child, Mitsuko, was born December 12, 1888, and she too remarked that her parents were overly partial to Takuboku, who became increasingly wilful.

  As a primary school student in Shibutami in 1891, Takuboku established the best record in his class. In those days the lower primary school course lasted four years, so in 1895 Takuboku entered an upper primary school in Morioka,4 which is about ten kilometers south of Shibutami. Takuboku's uncle oh his mother's side boarded him in Morioka for two years during these upper primary school days, and later, in 1899, Takuboku lived with his married sister in the same city.

  After finishing his third year of upper primary school, Takuboku successfully entered Morioka Middle School, the five-year course roughly equivalent to Japan's present secondary school system. Takuboku had ranked tenth out of 128 when he entered, but his record steadily declined. In spite of this performance, Takuboku remained a precocious student. One of his achievements was a literary manuscript handwritten in ink and circulated. With a school friend (Koshirō Oikawa, later a famous admiral), Takuboku visited Kyōsuke Kindaichi (1882-1971) and formed what was to be a lifelong friendship with him. Kindaichi, who as a professor at Tokyo University became a well-known expert on the Ainu language, was not only Takuboku's first teacher of tanka but continually helped Takuboku during his miserable years of poverty. Kindaichi had contributed poems to tanka magazines, and he lent Takuboku all the issues of the famous literary magazine Myōjō, which Tekkan Yosano (1873-1935) had established in November 1899 and which published many of the memorable tanka written by his wife, Akiko Yosano (1878-1942). Myōjō's October 1902 number carried one tanka by Hakuhin Ishikawa. Hakuhin, translated as "white flowers of the water weed," was Takuboku's penname at the time. The November 1902 issue contained two of his tanka; and that of December 1902, three:

  With these poems written in blood as proof of my life,

  I wander in tears through the fields of autumn.

  __

  As a dream vanishes soon, so love dies in a moment:

  Let those who will say so—I do not mind.

  __

  Suddenly awake, I closed my eyes, relieved,

  Thinking of the darkness at the end of my dream.

  In 1901, a student strike erupted at Takuboku's middle school in Morioka. It was Takuboku's third-year class which first protested, demanding reform, and the fourth-year students soon followed. The action, begun at the end of February, lasted about a week. The startling decline in Takuboku's class standing at the end of his third year was probably due to this event and to his literary pursuits.

  In that year he had organized a student literary association and had begun circulating a school magazine he called Mikazuki (Crescent). In the autumn of this same year, Takuboku and some of his friends began distributing a new magazine, Nigitama (Soft Soul), the word associated with the ancient Shinto belief that two souls exist in each person, one (nigitama) representing the sensitive aspects of mind, the other (aramitama) symbolizing the warlike. Added to the young student's romantic tendencies was his interest in Setsuko Horiai, with whom he had become acquainted in his sister's neighborhood in 1899. That interest soon flowered into love.

  The first issue of Nigitama included Takuboku's essay "Aki no Urei" ("The Sorrows of Autumn") and a series of thirty tanka he called "Akikusa" ("Autumn Flowers"), a few of which follow:

  Do not tell others, little pillow, of my dreams tonight.

  Sometimes I resented, sometimes sorrowed, and sometimes I was happy too.

  __

  Softly opening the door to the brightly lit palace room,

  I peeped in, drawn by the koto she played.

  __

  I will not curse the world of men, nor will I even regret.

  No longer. The cloud of ideals in tatters now.

  Despite this last tanka, Takuboku maintained his sympathy for the downtrodden, which had been first awakened by the student strike. That sympathy found further expression in the sensational incident of December 10, 1901. Shōzō Tanaka, an ex-member of the Lower House, disturbed the entourage of Emperor Meiji on its way to the opening ceremony of the Diet by attempting to hand the emperor a petition urging him to stop the wastes of the Ashio Copper Mine from entering and polluting the downstream farmlands in Tochigi Prefecture. In February 1902, Takuboku and other members of his literary club sent a donation to the suffering peasants victimized by the most famous pollution incident in Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) Japan. Throughout his life Takuboku questioned injustice in the legal, political, and economic systems. He was especially troubled by various codes in Japanese family relationships.

  Yet it was an incident of cheating on an examination that created the first really crucial event in Takuboku's life. In April 1902, he was reprimanded for "misconduct on the terminal examination." At the end of his fourth year of middle school, he ranked eighty-second in a class of 119. Despite the earlier warning, he cheated again in July. A scholarship student wrote the answers to a mathematics test on two sheets of paper, and as he left the classroom, he handed one to Takuboku. Because this student was deprived of his scholarship, Takuboku undoubtedly felt responsible for the penalty. As for Takuboku himself, he was not merely reprimanded: his examination papers were voided, and his punishment was publicly announced. In October, he suddenly left school "for family reasons" and went up to Tokyo.

  Takuboku's withdrawal from Morioka Middle School prevented him from graduating. Since the graduate of a middle school was equivalent in status to today's college graduate, the middle school diploma was a necessary stepping-stone to a better career. The real elite, of course, were the university graduates, but a middle school diploma was almost a prerequisite for work demanding intellect. Takuboku did try to find a vacancy in the fifth-year classes around Kanda, the student quarter in Tokyo, but he was unable to gain admission. Consequently, his formal education ended with his departure from Morioka. As a Meiji dropout, he had difficulty acquiring a good job.

  On November 9, 1902, the aspiring poet attended a meeting of Tekkan's Shinshi-sha (New Poetry Association), and the following day Takuboku visited the famous tankaists Tekkan and his wife, Akiko. Later Tekkan was to write in a supplement to the Kaizōsha edition of Takuboku's works (published in monthly volumes with accompanying leaflets in 1938-1939) that the lad was frank, bright, noble, and sagacious, "a very spirited young man." From the time of this visit, Takuboku went every day to the public library where he became absorbed in literature, including works in English, even attempting to translate into Japanese an English translation of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman. The end of the year, however, found Takuboku ill and poverty-stricken. Three poems written for his middle school alumni magazine suggest Takuboku's mood in leaving home, feeling disoriented, and confronting an intense and passionate loneliness:

  Fallen leaves of late autumn, destined to decay!

  Following them in sympathy, I hurried to start my journey.

  __

  Not knowing where the wind has gone that blew it from its twig,

  This stray leaf, bewildered and lost, has fallen on my sleeve.

  __

  Is there a friend in these fields who will cry out treading the waste weeds?

  This evening cloud of autumn burning like a flame!

  In February 1903, Takuboku's father had to accompany his son home to Shibutami from Tokyo because of illness. Perhaps this physical setback was the earliest indication of Takuboku's tuberculosis. While recuperating, he read Wag
ner and, under his penname Hakuhin, proceeded to write "On Wagner's Thought," an article in ten installments for the Iwate Nippō. In the July issue of Myōjō, four of Takuboku's tanka were published, one of which suggests the origin for the poet's adoption of the name he was to use later:

  So thin have I grown,

  As ugly as some slim woodpecker scurrying about in the bush.

  Takuboku is the Chinese pronunciation of kitsutsuki (woodpecker). Most Japanese woodpeckers are beautifully colored, but Takuboku probably envisioned a drab bird, which is usually disliked because it slyly eludes human detection.

  Another tanka in the same issue suggests Takuboku's changed condition:

  Will not my parents cry if I tell them my life

  Will perish in the dark with this flame?

  In the November 1903 issue of Myōjō, twelve more of Takuboku's tanka appeared under the name Hakuhin, two of which follow:

  Only a glance! That single sight I had of her

  Started this wild blaze in my heart!

  __

  A phosphorous fire on the altar,

  A witch of the land of the dead combs her sinful hair throughout the night!

  That month Takuboku was nominated for regular membership in the Shinshi-sha, and in December he published five poems, each fourteen lines long. For the first time he signed his name Takuboku, though four tanka in the same issue bore his earlier penname.

  Takuboku published numerous tanka, articles, and critical reviews in 1904. By the end of October, he had returned to Tokyo and remained there with the intention of bringing out his first book of poems. He was regarded as one of the most promising of the younger poets. But a real turning point in his life came on December 26 with his father's dismissal as the incumbent of the temple in Shibutami.