[In the following essay, Rimer examines several poems from Spring and Asura that demonstrate Miyazawa's style and personal vision.]

Matsuo Basho made famous the north country of Japan in his haiku journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which he characterized the particular poetry of that area, still remote and mysterious for so many Japanese. Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), one of the greatest of the modern poets, has through his brilliant and idiosyncratic poetry become the modern gatekeeper to the elusive beauty of the north and to the traditions harbored there, which he evoked through the powerful expressiveness of a self-trained and highly original spirit. Like Basho, Miyazawa seemed throughout his life to be on a quest. A sense of freedom and urgency runs through much of what he wrote. His poetry is at once mystical and earthy.

Miyazawa seemed an unlikely candidate for the literary life. Born in the northern town of Hanamaki in Iwate Prefecture, he studied agriculture with an eye to alleviating the plight of the poor farmers in his area. After a brief stay in Tokyo, where he had gone to further his studies of Nichiren Buddhism, Miyazawa returned to the north country to be present during the final illness of his beloved sister, Toshiko, about whom he wrote some of his most moving poetry. Taking a job at a local agricultural high school, he began to work to improve the lot of the farmers in the region, both in terms of their immediate livelihood and of their broader cultural concerns. Self-denial and overwork, however, led to the poet's early death. Miyazawa was looked on as a kind of saint by the local people, who deeply appreciated what he had done for them during his lifetime. It is doubtful if many would have read or appreciated his poems and touching children's stories, which became widely circulated only after his death.

Spring & Asura (Haru to shura) contains most of Miyazawa's major poems and reveals an astonishing depth of religious conviction, conveyed in an often exhilarating exuberance of language. Miyazawa's commitments to Buddhist belief caused him to place the Lotus Sutra, a central scripture in the Chinese and Japanese tradition, at the center of his meditations. The metaphysical underpinnings provided by this great sacred text run like a thread through his sensibility as expressed in his poetry. Miyazawa's images, however, are altogether his own and lend an invigorating freshness to his verse.

The hard keyura jewels hang straight down.
Twirling, shining, the creatures keep falling.

Truly, they are the angels' cries of grief,
clearer than hydrogen—
haven't you heard them
sometime, somewhere?
You must have heard their cries
stab heaven like icy spears.
—(trans. Hiroaki Sato)

Even when his poetry is simple and deeply personal, it resonates with the forces of nature.

The blizzard drives hard
and this morning, that catastrophic cave-in
   … Why do they keep blowing
   the frozen whistle?
Out of the shadows and the frightening smoke
a deathly pale man appears, staggering—
the horrible shadow of myself
cast from a future of ice.
—(trans. Hiroaki Sato)

For Miyazawa, knowing and doing must be one in order for man to find his place in nature.

The new age points toward a world with a single
   consciousness, a single living thing.
To live a righteous and sturdy life we must
   become aware of, and respond to, the galaxy

  within us.
Let us seek happiness for the world. Such seeking
  is itself the way.
—trans. Makoto Ueda)

Even readers who may be resistant to the metaphysics of Miyazawa's personal vision will be moved by the verse he wrote concerning the death of his sister. The poet's fierce affection, his vulnerability to her death, bring him close to the reader, in a kind of awkward embrace.

Toshiko,
now so close to death
you asked for a bowl of clean snow
to brighten me for the rest of my life.
Thank you, my brave sister,
I too will go by the straight way
   (Get me some snow, Kenji)
In your delirious fever, panting,
you asked me for the last bowl of snow
that fell from the sky,
the galaxy, the sun, the atmospheric strata
   … Between two pieces of granite
sleet makes a solitary puddle.
I stand on them, precariously,
keeping the pure, white two-phased balance of
   snow and water
and get for my gentle sister her last food
from a glowing pine branch
laden with cold transparent drops.
—(trans. Hiroaki Sato)

Despite the intensity of such moments in his poetry, however, Miyazawa on the whole strikes a powerful note of affirmation, not in terms of his individual ego or his accomplishments as a poet, but rather an affirmation of the healing power of the great forces of Nature to which he found access, and in which, he insisted, we are all, perhaps unwittingly, involved. It may be because the poet's writings can provide the reader with a means of entering Miyazawa's own "deep north" that he has become a sort of cultural hero in Japan. While Miyazawa's poetry is often resistant to quick comprehension, and his juxtapositions of images are often easier to feel than to understand, the totality provides a special species of spiritual clarity, one that is virtually unique.