[In the following essay, which is a revised version of an introduction originally published in 1989, Sato provides an overview of Miyazawa's life and work.]

Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)—here his and other Japanese names are given the Japanese way, family name first—is probably the only modern Japanese poet who is deified. A good part of the deification may come from a piece called "November 3rd." Opening with the phrases

neither yielding to rain
nor yielding to wind
yielding neither to
snow nor to summer heat

and ending with

called
       a good-for-nothing
             by everyone
neither praised
nor thought a pain
      someone
             like that
is what I want
             to be

it describes in simple, moving words the poet's wishes to do good for others while remaining humble and obscure himself.

"November 3rd" was found posthumously, written in a pocket notebook Miyazawa is thought to have used beginning in late 1931, two years before his death. Though the text is broken up into lines, considering his approach to versification at the time, it is likely to have been meant more as a prayer than a poem. Yet as early as 1942, the Japanese government, then in the early stage of the Pacific War, used it as a propaganda piece, apparently deciding that it would help inculcate the sacrificial spirit in the general populace. A few years later Tanikawa Tetsuzō, a well-known philosopher and the father of the poet Tanikawa Shuntarō (b. 1931), called it the "noblest" Japanese poem of modern times, while describing the poet as the only man of letters before whose grave he would want to genuflect. Since then, "November 3rd" has not only been used in school textbooks, but printed on an assortment of souvenir products.

The deification of Miyazawa may also derive from the way he lived. The aggressive promotion of the man as a saint by his surviving family members and others confounds much of his belief and action. But there seems little doubt that Miyazawa was profoundly concerned about the plight of the peasants of his region, Iwate, which was then known as the "Tibet of Japan" for its unaccommodating climate, topography, and soil, and for its frequent crop failures. A devout Buddhist of an activist sect founded by Nichiren (1222-1282), a firebrand polemicist who taught in essence that a true believer in the Saddharma-pundarika or The Lotus of the Wonderful Law must work for universal salvation through action and deed, Miyazawa, after studying and teaching at two agricultural schools, put his knowledge to practical use. And for the few years after he began helping the peasants learn modern, scientific farming methods, he forced himself, unscientifically, to subsist on a poorer diet than even the local people were accustomed to, and ruined his health, his body already infested by tuberculosis. One thing that makes this story ennobling, if you will, is the fact that as the first son of a well-to-do businessman, albeit a pawnbroker of used clothes, Miyazawa did not have to do any such thing. Furthermore, for religious reasons he led an ascetic life and remained unmarried.

Should, however, "November 3rd" and a bare biographical sketch, such as I have just given, create an image of Miyazawa as the sort of pious wimp you would want to avoid, that would be most unfortunate. Miyazawa was no weak-kneed murmurer of ineffectual pieties. He compared himself to an asura, in Buddhist belief the contentious, sometimes malevolent giant who ranks between the human and the beast, a sort of perpetually dissatisfied trouble-maker. In Haru to Shura (Spring & Asura), the title poem of his first book of poetry, published in 1924 at his own expense, he put it this way:

how bitter, how blue is the anger!
At the bottom of the light in April's atmospheric
   strata,
spitting, gnashing, pacing back and forth,
I am Asura incarnate.…

Miyazawa thought this image of himself as an asura important enough to use the title Spring & Asura for three unpublished collections of his poems. And the picture of Miyazawa that emerges from his poems is a man who is entranced by the things that happen around him, and eternally restless.

He frequently took long walks, day and night, furiously scribbling in his notebook with a pencil hung from his neck on a string. As a result, a great many lines of his poetry and, indeed, a good many of his poems are detailed descriptions of things observed. So, for example, "Koiwai Farm," a poem of more than 800 lines, is largely a catalogue of what he saw and thought as he walked one day from a railway station to a Western-style farm established by three entrepreneurs in 1891.

His fascination with what happened around him and his delight in describing observed things rarely produced trivial or merely curious pieces. He was, for one thing, blessed with a singular, almost hallucinatory imagination. As the critic Yoshimoto Ryūmei has noted, Miyazawa's writings are so attractive because of "the extraordinarily free placement of the eyes." In one moment, the scope is as sweeping and grand as if seen by "the eyes attached to a body giant enough to reach the top of an exceptionally tall building"; in the next instant, it is as microscopically detailed as if seen by "the eyes attached to the head of a crawling, minute insect." Here, for example, is the opening of "Annelid Dancer," in which Miyazawa is believed to describe a mosquito larva:

              (Yes, it's water sol,
                   it's opaque agar liquid)
Sun's a golden rose.
A red, tiny wormy worm,
draping itself with water and light,
is dancing a solitary dance
                   (Yes, 8γe6α
                   in particular, arabesque ornate letters)
the corpse of a winged insect
a dead yew leaf
pearly bubbles and
a torn rachis of moss.…

Miyazawa also had a highly developed sense of drama and humor, as exemplified by such dramatic monologues as "The Prefectural Engineer's Statement Regarding Clouds," which begins:

Although mythological or personified description
is something I would be ashamed to attempt,
let me for a moment assume the position of the
    ancient poet
and state the following to the black, obscene
    nimbus.…

These qualities, when blended with a Buddhist vision and a belief in science that was tempered by a fine sensibility, created a unique poetic world that is at once intense and light, joyful and moving. It is a world yet to be matched by another Japanese poet, ancient or modern.

As might be expected, Miyazawa in real life was often frustrated in trying to carry out his good intentions among the peasants. This may be discerned from ruefully comic poems, such as "The Hateful Kuma Eats His Lunch," and other more straightforward pieces. Many peasants no doubt valued his new agricultural knowledge. But many also regarded him as an obnoxious do-gooder who intruded into their centuries-old ways of doing things. Though he himself didn't say so explicitly, it is thought that he was beset with a sense of failure toward the end of his life. Some say that what appears to be, at least on the surface, innocuous pieties in "November 3rd" in fact hid Miyazawa's admission of defeat—although others say that those "pieties" are the ultimate expression of Buddhist sincerity as Miyazawa understood it.

Still, Miyazawa maintained a resilient soul. An outstanding manifestation of this is the poem entitled "Pictures of the Floating World," whose sensuality may seem so uncharacteristic of this determinedly ascetic poet. He wrote it after seeing a wood-block print exhibition in Tokyo in 1928. Indeed, he had a life-long interest in this genre of art, including the pornographic subsection of it called shunga, which actually dominated the genre. Once he wrote an essay on the technical aspects of print-making. Another time, in 1931, he composed advertisement copy for prints to help a friend start a new business.

Miyazawa began writing poems in the traditional 5-7-5-7-7-syllable tanka form at age fifteen, in 1911. He continued to write mainly in this form until 1920, when he put together a "tanka manuscript" of 735 pieces. In preparing it he recast, for some unstated reasons, what were originally poems written in the standard single-line format into poems of one to six lines.

In the autumn wind
deep in my head a tiny bone
must have splintered:
there was that sound.

Such lineation of the tanka, normally regarded as a "one-line poem," began with the publication, in 1910, of Nakiwarai (Crying, Laughing) by Toki Aika (1885-1980), who broke up every piece in the book into three lines. The practice was followed by some notable poets, among them Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912), who would become the best-known writer of three-line tanka. Miyazawa's lineation was much freer and might have influenced the later development of this poetic form had the manuscript been published. However, even though many of the pieces had appeared in school magazines and other places, he strictly proscribed the publication of the manuscript. This he did probably with the thought, at least initially, of revising the pieces, as he evidently continued to do for a few years. Then, perhaps, other things began to preoccupy him. In any event, the two poems he wrote several hours before his death are also in the tanka form:

Within these ten square miles: is this in Hinuki
    alone?
The rice ripe and for three festival days
              the whole sky clear

Because of an illness, crumbling,
                      this life—
if I could give it for ripening rice
               how glad I would be

Not long after putting together the tanka manuscript Miyazawa switched to free verse. In between, he wrote a group of poems called "Winter Sketches," which are regarded as transitional pieces.

Free verse became the accepted standard in Japanese poetry during the 1910's with the appearance of such books as Dōtei (Journey) by Takamura Kōtarō (1883-1956), published in 1914, and Tsuki ni Hoeru (Howling at the Moon) by Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942), published in 1917. Miyazawa continued to write in this format to the end of his life, although in 1928 he also began writing bungo-shi, which employed syllabic patterns and literary rather than colloquial language. The reasons for his reversion, if it was such, are obscure, and of the 262 bungo-shi he composed, only a handful rival his free verse in strength and intensity. Toward the end of his life he also wrote some haiku and even a few sequences of renga, linked verse. But these, too, are not remarkable.

In addition to poetry, Miyazawa wrote a good many short stories, mostly for children. The best of these stories, written from 1918 to the year of his death, are characterized by the same qualities that make his poetry stand out: keen power of observation, imagination, Buddhist vision, and a sense of humor. Many are stark, at times brutal. And even when compassion is the theme, the resolution of the conflict is usually realistic and credible. One of the three stories I have translated …, "The Ground God and the Fox"describes a cthonic deity who kills a foppish fox out of sheer jealousy for the animal's flirtation with a beautiful birch tree whom he loves.

The two other stories, "The Nighthawk" and "The Bears of Nametoko," deal with the Buddhist precept (kai) against killing or taking life and the inevitable sufferings and pain that arise when you try to live up to it. To conclude this introduction to a poet who, during his lifetime, remained a largely obscure local writer but is now recognized as one of the three or four greatest poets—and surely the most imaginative spinner of children's stories—of twentieth-century Japan, it may be worth noting how Miyazawa decided to observe an important precept of his faith and pursue vegetarianism. In a long letter he wrote to a friend, on May 19, 1918, he said:

In spring I stopped eating the bodies of living things. Nevertheless, the other day I ate several slices of tuna sashimi as a form of magic with which to "reestablish" my "relationship" to "society." … If the fish, while being eaten, stood behind me and watched, what would he think? .…

Suppose I were the fish, and suppose that not only I was being eaten but my father was being eaten, my mother was being eaten, and my sister was also being eaten. And suppose I were behind the people eating us, watching. "Oh, look, that man has torn apart my sister with chopsticks. And while talking to the person next to him, swallowed her, thinking nothing of it. Just a few moments ago her body was lying there, cold. Now she must be disintegrating in a pitch-dark place under the influence of mysterious enzymes. We have given ourselves up; our precious lives, which should be treated with reverence, are being sacrificed, but we haven't won a thimbleful of pity."