SOURCE: "Miyazawa Kenji," in Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1983, pp. 184-231.

[In the following essay, Ueda studies Miyazawa's literary style, creative process, aesthetic theory, and poetic vision.]

Secluded from the mainstream of modern Japanese verse, Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) was almost totally unknown as a poet during his lifetime. He published few poems in magazines of nationwide literary reputation, and for his one published book of poetry and single collection of children's stories he shouldered all publication costs himself. After his death, however, his works soon gained a large following of people from all walks of life. Six different periodicals have been founded by different groups exclusively to study his works. Although literary critics still find it difficult to place him in the history of modern Japanese poetry, his faithful readers could not care less, nor could his posthumous publishers. Five different editions of his complete works have been published, the latest matched in its comprehensiveness only by Sakutaro's among modern poets.

The charms of Kenji's poetry are manifold: his high idealism, his intensely ethical life, his unique cosmic vision, his agrarianism, his religious faith, and his rich and colorful vocabulary. But ultimately they are all based in a dedicated effort to unify the heterogeneous elements of modern life into a single, coherent whole. Kenji stood in solitary opposition to all the other major poets of his time, who as modern intellectuals suffered one or another kind of dichotomy within the self. By training he was an agricultural chemist, and he considered it his heaven-sent work to mingle with farmers in the open fields and to give them expert advice on soil conditioning. He was also a devout Buddhist of the Hokke sect who wanted to propagate the teaching of the Lotus Sutra as widely as possible. He was a man of science, religion, and poetry; yet his mental energy was of such a centripetal nature that he could unify them all. Furthermore, that mental energy was not satisfied until it took a physical form in daily life. Kenji was a whole man, and therein lies the basic charm of his poetry.

IN SEARCH OF THE GALAXY WITHIN

Kenji wrote many works directly or indirectly touching on the nature of literature. A story called "The Dragon and the Poet," for instance, presents his concept of poetry in the form of a Buddhist parable; several fairy tales, such as "Grape Juice" and "A Night in the Oak Grove," reveal what he thought of the origin of poetry, music, and dance; and an aphoristic essay entitled "Agrarian Art: An Outline" sums up the idea of art he came to conceive in his later years. Most significant of all, however, is the prefatory poem to Spring and Asura, the only collection of verse published during his lifetime. Here he directly addressed his prospective readers and explained his concept of poetry, which he knew was radically different from the prevailing ones. He wanted a reader to digest his preface before venturing into the anthology, and we too shall begin our discussion with this poem.

The poem, appropriately called "Proem," consists of five stanzas. The first reads:

The phenomenon called I
is a blue light
coming from the temporary, organic AC lamp
(a synthesis of all transparent spirits).
With the landscape and with everybody
it incessantly blinks
yet never stops glowing:
a light
from the karmic AC lamp
(the light remains, the lamp vanishes

The stanza metaphorically defines a poet: he is a light shining out across, or rather with, the landscape. But that light is from an AC lamp, a lamp whose constant glowing is in fact an incessant blinking, although so little time elapses between each blink that we are not aware of the light's other truth, the darkness.

Despite its imagery from modern technology, the stanza portrays the poet from a Buddhist perspective. Both the significance of the karmic AC lamp and its Buddhist background are made clearer in one of Kenji's fantasies for children, "A Night on the Galactic Railway." In the story, young Giovanni is grieving over the disappearance of his schoolmate Campanella. At that point, a pale-faced man appears, wearing a large black hat and carrying a dictionary. After telling the boy how knowledge of history and geography changes through the ages (an impermanence not unlike what Giovanni has just experienced in the loss of his friend), the scholar raises one finger and then lowers it. In the next instant,

Giovanni saw that he and his thoughts, along with the train, the scholar, the Milky Way, and all else, glowed brightly, faded out, glowed again, faded again, and when one of the lights glowed there spread out the whole wide world with all its history, but when it faded there was nothing but empty darkness. The blinking grew faster and faster, until everything was back as before.

Giovanni's vision seems a comprehensive view of fundamental reality. As he himself, his thoughts, his surroundings, and all of human history in turn glow, then fade to empty darkness, they come to be like the AC lamp. In faster and faster alternation, he sees both the fundamental emptiness underlying all phenomena and the transitory existence of himself and all the world fuse into samsara, the stream of appearances comprising repeated births and deaths that is reality as we ordinarily know it, "everything … back as before." Giovanni's vision reveals the unity of phenomenal world and empty darkness in the ongoing process of constant transformation or change.

To return to the "Proem," the "temporary, organic AC lamp" seems a comparable vision of a reality that is at once plenum and void. It is explicitly linked to the Buddhist concept of karma, the accumulation of deeds, intentions, and events that continually works itself out through the cycles of cosmic history and thus powers the revolutions of samsara. Yet the poet's spiritual essence (at one with all other "transparent spirits" in the absolute mind that contains and creates all beings), although it at present seems determined by the organic lamp of the karmic world, is finally independent of samsara in the absolute mind that forms its ultimate reality, along with that of all other creatures: "the light remains, the lamp vanishes."

In the second stanza and throughout the rest of the poem, Kenji gives his own twist to this Buddhistic image of self and world in the manner in which he conceives of its realization in time and in his poetry. He continues:

These have come from a period of 22 months
that I feel lies in the direction of the past.
By bringing paper and mineral ink together
(it blinks with me
and is felt simultaneously by everybody)
I have preserved until now
each chain of shade and light
in these imagery sketches.

The key phrase here for describing Kenji's poetry is "imagery sketches," a phrase Kenji considered important enough to print as a subtitle on the cover of Spring and Asura. He deliberately avoided using the term "poems," since he felt his sketches were different from ordinary poems. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "What I have published in Spring and Asura, what I have written between then and now, all of those are definitely not poetry. They are no more than rough sketches of images I have drawn on various occasions in preparation for a certain project in psychology, which I would very much like to complete, although I do not have time to undertake a full-scale study." What Kenji called "imagery sketches," then, differ from ordinary poetry in two ways. First, they are not finished products but rough drafts, and since they have not yet received the poet's finishing touches, they are closer to the immediate thoughts and sensations in his mind. Second, Kenji's imagery sketches, besides recording what lies in his mind, also duplicate what lies in the minds of everyone else. His presupposition is that the imagery sketches he draws portray what is common to the human race in general, since like all people he is but a transitory creation out of the pure and absolute mind that is true reality.

This second point is elaborated in the third stanza, since Kenji apparently felt a need for further explanation:

From these, men and the galaxy and asura and sea
   urchins
as they eat cosmic dust or breathe air or seawater
may each think up a fresh cosmology,

but ultimately all is a mental landscape.
These scenes, clearly recorded,
are the records of scenes as they were.
If they show the void, it is the void as it was
and is shared to some degree by all people.
(For everything is within me, within my inner
  everybody
and likewise within everybody else.)

The stanza's first line reminds us that although the Milky Way and sea urchins possess different habits and follow different life cycles, they are one with men in being manifestations of the cosmic mind, the primal reality of the cosmos. Kenji's sketches are not, then, depictions of external objects as observed by the poet but records of internal images and sensations that reflect this greater mind. There is no borderline between the subjective and the objective, nor is there a division between man and inanimate things. Imagery sketches are the records of this nondivisive consciousness.

The fourth stanza, a long one, reintroduces the element of time:

However, it is theoretically conceivable
that these seemingly accurate verbal records
made amid the piles of massive, bright time
in the alluvial epoch of the Cenozoic era
have already changed their structures and qualities
in what to them is a momentary blink
   (or asura's one billion years)
and yet neither my printers nor I
have noticed the change.
For we sense our own emotion
and see a landscape or a person
only through the faculties common to us all.
Likewise, what we know as records or history or
   geology
probably is, with all its numerous data,
nothing more than what we feel
  (within the karmic limits of time and space).
Perhaps in two thousand years
a new geology proper to that age
will unearth plenty of proper evidence for the
   past.
Everyone may think two thousand years ago
a transparent peacock filled the blue sky.
New bachelors of science may excavate splendid
   fossils
from the ice nitrogen zone
glittering at the top layer of the atmosphere
or discover gigantic footprints
of an invisible man
in the Cretaceous sandstone.

The time referred to is cosmic time, hence the use of many geological terms. Human life, which is part of the life of the universe, must be measured against cosmic time, as both geologists imply and Buddhists say it should be. Seen in this perspective, imagery sketches are extremely fleeting things, as evanescent as a blink of light. Nevertheless, they are made by a man who has transcended human time, who is well aware of the limits of human faculties. They are significant, and insignificant, for those reasons.

The fifth and final stanza consists of just three lines, which cryptically bring the poem to its conclusion:

All these problems
inherent in the nature of imagery and time
will be pursued within the fourth dimension.

"The fourth dimension" is one of Kenji's favorite phrases; in "Agrarian Art" and elsewhere he repeatedly used it to describe his artistic ideal. In art, the "fourth dimension," which Kenji roughly associated with time, is the source of fluidity, an ability to change through time as reality does. As he said in "Agrarian Art": "The four-dimensional sense adds fluidity to a static art." Kenji must have considered an awareness of time and temporal change to be the basis of that fluidity, for he also said, "The huge drama of human life moves along the axis of time and creates an everlasting, four-dimensional art." Thus, in being imagery sketches the 73 verses in Spring and Asura are the tentative records of a man who was clearly aware of the fleeting nature of his vision. Ordinary poems are three-dimensional: they are snapshots of nature, portraits of people, depictions of sentiments, and the like. On the other hand, Kenji's verbal sketches are four-dimensional, since they are aware of their own change through time.

To summarize, Kenji's concept of poetic mimesis as expressed in the "Proem" is characterized by two features. First, the reality represented in poetry is conceived neither as external reality mirrored in the poet's mind nor as internal reality expressed through metaphors, but as cosmic reality rooted in a Buddhist vision of the ultimate unity of all creatures in being manifestations of an absolute and all-pervading consciousness. Second, the reality thus represented is four-dimensional in the sense that it is not a framed picture or a piece of finished sculpture but a slice of infinite space and time.

Kenji reiterated his idea of cosmic reality in other writings. It appears, for instance, in a letter to his brother, in which he wrote, "When I forget my existence in the wind and the light, when I feel the world has turned into my garden, or when I am entranced to think that the entire galaxy is myself, how happy I feel!" Once he expressed such happiness in a short lyric called "A Grove and Thoughts":

Look! You see?
Over there, drenched in the fog,
there is a small mushroom-shaped grove.
That is the place where
my thoughts
swiftly drift
and one by one
dissolve.
   Butterburs are flowering everywhere.

The communion between man and his surroundings is not a one-way street. The grove, and all other beings on earth, respond to the poet in turn. So Kenji implied when he said in a note, "I am interested in the clouds and the wind not only for their scenic beauty, but because they provide a source of new strength for man, an endless source of strength." In the preface to his collection of children's stories, The Restaurant of Many Orders, Kenji recalled, "I received all these stories of mine from the rainbow and the moonlight as I was in the woods, on the fields, or alongside the railway. Honestly, I could not help feeling these things when I passed near the green oak forest in the evening all by myself, or when I stood shivering in the mountain wind of November." In some of his stories he cited examples of a poem's emerging from a cosmic awareness shared by all things. In "Grape Juice," for instance, a youngster named Seisaku hears a song coming from afar, but he cannot tell whether the singer is the sky, the wind, or a little child standing in the field; apparently it is something within all three. In "A Night in the Oak Grove," Seisaku ventures into the woods, from which a song is coming, and he finds that oak trees, owls, and a human painter all sing similar songs. In "A Spring Day at Ihatove School of Agriculture," a song is sung by the sun in the sky, and the author has even provided its melody in musical notation. To a person who can hear, poetry comes from all things in the universe, as they all share in the cosmic mind.

The relationship of poetry and this cosmic awareness is reiterated in the story "The Dragon and the Poet," where it is connected with the idea that there is a progressive trend in cosmic history. The story outlines how a budding poet named Surdatta wins a decisive victory over a poet of great reputation, Alta, at a song contest. Surdatta himself does not know how he composed his winning song; all he remembers is that he seems to have heard it in his sleep one windy day when he dozed off on a headland. But the older Alta knows the creative process better and explains it to the younger poet in a song of his own:

No sooner have the wind sung and the clouds
  echoed and
 the waves resounded
than you sing their song, Surdatta.
You are a prophet who envisions
a model of truth and beauty for tomorrow's world
after which the stars yearn and the land shapes
  itself
and who eventually makes the world become so.
You are an architect, Surdatta.

Here again is the idea that a song—or a poem—expresses an impulse or an awareness shared by the wind and the clouds as well as the poet, and here too is the idea that the world and all it contains are constantly changing through time. But Kenji also suggests that the changing cosmos has a direction and purpose, and that the change is for the better. The poet, in singing out the cosmic mind, conveys a sense of progress.

In Kenji's view the purpose thus expressed is that of universal reality, not the individual poet. In an advertisement he wrote for The Restaurant of Many Orders he said, "These stories are designed to provide materials for building a new, better world. But that world is entirely a development of this world, a ceaseless, wondrous development unknown to me. Definitely it is not a sooty, misshapen utopia." In his opinion, most utopian stories are products of authors' individual imaginings, reflecting their personal idiosyncrasies. But the stories collected in The Restaurant of Many Orders are based on the cosmic mind, and hence on the cosmic will at work to perfect the world.

The clearest expression of Kenji's idea of cosmic will appears in what seems to be a draft of a letter to an unidentified acquaintance:

There is one problem I can never pass over. Is there such a thing as cosmic will deigning to lead all living things to true happiness? Or is the world something incidental and sightless? If confronted by this choice between what is known as religious faith and what is known as science, I would by all means select the former. The universe has a great many stages of consciousness, and the final one is endeavoring to lead all living things away from all delusions and toward ultimate happiness.

Kenji, an avid reader of the Lotus Sutra, may have associated the highest stage of universal consciousness with the compassionate bodhisattva, who strives to lead all beings to the pure bliss of the Buddha's Paradise, "away from all delusions and toward ultimate happiness." Here he sees a similar ideal embodied, not in a specific religious figure, but in the movement of cosmic history as a whole.

Kenji does not seem to have believed that poetry always reflects universal consciousness in its last stage of supreme happiness. By and large, his own poetry reflects various prior stages. The title of his anthology, Spring and Asura, is symbolic; "spring," denoting the most beautiful time of the year, alludes to the last and highest stage, whereas "asura" refers to one of the lower phases. (In Mahayana Buddhism, an asura is a demonlike creature suffering from such delusive passions as arrogance, suspicion, and jealousy in one of the four spheres occupying the space between heaven and hell.) In "Spring and Asura," the title poem of the collection, Kenji described himself as such a creature, tears streaming from his eyes, who restlessly roams the idyllic countryside on a radiant April day. The poem's speaker is aware of universal consciousness, but he has not yet reached its final stage.

Three representative poems pin down more exactly Kenji's idea of mimesis. I will start with a simple one:

"Politicians (Opus 1053)"

Over there, and here too
everybody wants to make a fuss
and get treated to a drink.
  Fern leaves and the clouds.
   The world is so cold and dark.

But before long
those fellows will
rot
and flow away in the rain,
leaving only the silent green ferns behind.
"That happened in the coal age of man,"
Some transparent geologist will record.

This is not among the best of Kenji's poems. The satire is too simple, and a facile, escapist attitude is implied. Nonetheless, the poem clearly shows the nature of his cosmic awareness, since it regards reality from a stand-point that transcends human time and recognizes a slow progress on the universal scale. The human perspective and resulting anger presented in the first three lines are replaced by a cosmic perspective as the poem progresses, and the anger is thereby sublimated.

The next poem is more famous and more complex. I shall quote its longer version:

"Flower of Karma"

Over the moisture of night forlornly blending with
    the wind
and above a black grove of pines and willows
the sky is filled with dark petals of karma.
Having recorded the names of gods
I shiver violently with cold.
Oh someone, come and assure me
that there will arrive a radiant world
where millions of great men are born
and live together without defiling one another!
   A heron is crying in the distance.
   Will it stand on the cold marshland
   throughout the night, its red eyes burning?
As dewdrops fall from pine trees
a few lonely clusters of stars
emerge afresh from the western clouds.
By coincidence a pair
join their rays to form a yellow plume,
while the rest, a large bushy shadow,
show an obscure white shape.

Here again the imperfections of human reality are implied, and they are viewed from the standpoint of a poet who can identify the gods. Transcending the limits of human time, he envisions the great accumulated mass of actions past, present, and future spread out like petals across the night sky, and in it he recognizes the force determining the course of people's lives. But, in contrast to "Politicians," in this poem the poet is not sure whether time will eventually bring forth a radiant world. By chance a person may attain luminous harmony with others, as a few of the stars do, after coming out of the clouds of suspicion. Yet most of mankind may be like the heron that keeps crying throughout the night. A sense of a higher level of consciousness is still present in the poem, but there is no longer certainty of cosmic progress.

Kenji must have wondered about the ways of overcoming such doubts. His answer is implied in some of his later poems, such as this one:

"Opus 1063"

These are modest fences like the Ainu's.
Yes,
the mulberry tree by their house
was stripped down to the letter Y
and yet they could not make a living.
Last April
the water was black in the rice paddies
as eddies of dark air
incessantly fell from the sky
and crows
noisily flew by.
It makes me wonder.
Though the field is full of sharp-edged gravel
and overgrown with horsetails and mugworts
they till it, those women clothed in black,
while rearing their babies,
patching together the rags from older children,
cooking, doing duties for the village,
shouldering the whole family's discontents and
    desires,
with no more than a handful of coarse food
and six hours' sleep nightly all the year round.
They also clear a bamboo grove
and make an acre of farmland
in exchange for eight yen's worth of fertilizer.
In this area
if they sow two bushels of buckwheat they harvest
    four.
It makes me wonder:
Aren't these people
comparable to those modern heroes—
the many revolutionaries chained in prisons
or the many artists starved by their luck?

Again, in the final lines a broad perspective of time and history forms the background for the comparison of peasant women to reformers and artists from a standpoint that transcends current, imperfect human reality. Yet the dominant emotion is admiration for those women courageously battling against adverse natural and human circumstances. They are farming in northeastern Japan, where neither the climate nor the soil is favorable, and their attempts to raise silkworms on mulberry leaves, or to cultivate rice in the paddies, all too often end in disaster because of circumstances beyond their control. Their fields have such poor soil that only the sturdiest of weeds, horsetail and mugwort, can grow, yet they are too poor to afford much fertilizer. Still they keep working hard to improve their farms and to change their lives by even a tiny bit. For them, it does not matter whether the world is changing for the better or for the worse; they try to make a positive contribution in a small way. In that sense they can be compared to revolutionaries who endeavor to reform society and to artists who envision a model of truth and beauty for a future world.

Here Kenji's concept of poetry merges with agrarianism. For him, ideal poetry unifies theory and practice, dream and reality, the imaginative capacity to conceive an ideal and the physical energy to work toward it: a farmer is an artist, and an artist should be a farmer. His "Agrarian Art" begins:

We are all farmers, with a rigorous schedule and
   exhausting work.
We seek the way to a more radiant, vital life.
Among our forefathers there were some who did
   so.
Scientists' proofs, mendicants' tests, and our
   intuitions all form a common base for our
   discussion.
No one person can attain happiness until the entire
   world does.
Self-awareness evolves in stages: first the
   individual, then the community, and then the
   society and the universe.
Isn't this the way the ancient sages trod and
   preached
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.

Here is Kenji's ultimate poetic, which has been absorbed into something larger than poetics. Natural science, which provides objective proof, religion, which provides human test cases, and poetry, which provides intuitive insight, are brought together to contribute to progress at personal, global, and cosmic levels. Kenji's poetic gains its identity by losing it.

ALL POEMS ARE TENTATIVE

To the north of the city of Morioka in northeastern Japan is a plain known as Ippongi. One fine day Kenji walked across it, and the experience resulted in this poem:

"Ippongi Plain"

Suddenly the pine grove brightens
and opens a field before me, showing
an endless expanse of dead grass aflame in the sun
and a row of hydro poles, with white insulators,
   gently
extending almost as far as the city of Bering.
The sky of clear ocean blue
and cleansed human wishes—
Larches regain their youth
and I hallucinate the call of a transparent lark.
Green Nanashigure Hills
rise and fall in my mental landscape too.
A cluster of willow trees
are the willows along the Volga.
Hiding in the heavenly malachite bowl,
clay-colored Yakushi Peak points harsh and sharp.
Snow in the crater contours its wrinkles
and Kurakake's sensitive ridges
let nebulae rise toward the blue sky.
 (Say, Oak,
 is your nickname really
 Mountain Tobacco Tree?)
What a blessing
to stroll for half a day
on the grass, under such a bright canopy!
To obtain it, I would be willing to be crucified.
Isn't it like a rendezvous?
 (Say, Mountain Tobacco Tree,
 if you keep doing that awkward dance
 you may be mistaken for a futurist.)
I am the beloved of the woods and fields.
When I make my way through the reeds
green messages, coyly folded,
slip into my pockets.
When I walk in a shady forest
crescent-shaped lipmarks
cover my elbows and trousers.

The poem reveals an early stage of the verse-writing process as conceived by Kenji, even though its persona cannot, of course, be considered identical with Kenji himself. It begins in a sudden brightening, as a landscape unexpectedly appears beyond the dark woods. The poet emerges and surveys the scene, and as he does so ordinary external reality, such as the line of hydro poles, begins to be transformed in his act of perceiving it. This transformation becomes in effect hallucination, visual and aural, for the city of Bering is imaginary and not even the lark's invisible call, let alone its body, is actually transparent. As his physical eyes sight the Nanashigure Hills in the north of Ippongi Plain, the eyes of his imagination glimpse Siberian hills that he has never seen.

In the second half of the poem, he communicates with trees and plants. Using human language, he addresses an oak tree, which happens to be shaped like an object in a futurist painting. Nature seems to respond to him, too: reeds slip their messages into his pockets as he passes, and trees, helped by the sun, print their kisses on his clothes. As he perceives the things around him, he at once transforms and communes with them: in the act of seeing the shadows of pine needles as the marks of lips or the blades of reeds as messages, he shares with these fellow beings, both in their eternal flux and in a cosmic awareness, the ecstasy of a fine day.

For Kenji, then, the first step in verse writing is to submerge oneself in one's surroundings, particularly natural surroundings. "Communicate with the wind, and obtain energy from the clouds" was his advice to would-be agrarian poets. He seems to have thought that such oneness must be attained on a preconscious level, presumably because the conscious mind makes distinctions between different objects. "Unless it flows out of the subconscious," he said, "what you have is frequently powerless or false." The young poet Surdatta in "The Dragon and the Poet," who sings out the song of the wind, the clouds, and the waves, conceives the song in his sleep and does not himself know how he arrived at it; he has communed with all things while unconscious. A similar experience is told by the narrator of "The First Deer Dance":

Then, from between the bright, frizzled clouds in the western sky, the evening sun shed its crimson rays aslant on the moss-covered plain, making plumes of pampas grass waver like white flames. Exhausted, I fell asleep there. Then the rustling wind gradually began to sound like human words, eventually telling me about the true spirit of the deer dance, which is still performed in the Kitakami mountains and plains.

In Kenji's view, a storyteller, like a poet, is a medium: he does not speak his own thoughts, but allows the cosmic mind to speak through him.

However, the poet must immediately record his visions in words; otherwise his memory of the experience will fade away. Kenji habitually kept a notebook with him, whether at home or outdoors, in which he jotted down whatever came to mind. Some of his notebooks have been preserved, and they give clues to the second stage in his creative process.

We have, for instance, a notebook with a black leather cover that Kenji used around 1928. He wrote down all kinds of things in it: names, dates, a study schedule, mathematical formulas, and letters of the English alphabet. On two of its pages he scrawled in a hurried hand:

already
I am a feverish
  forlorn salt lake
along the shore
 many miles of
  jet-black
lepidodendron
  groves extend
must I
  until the reptiles
change into birds
 keep
   oozing up?

Without other evidence, there is no way of knowing the exact circumstances that prompted Kenji to scribble these words. The contents of the note suggest that while lying sick with fever he had a dream or vision in which he became a salt lake in prehistoric times. Immediately afterwards, he jotted down these fragmentary words.

Kenji seems to have wanted to polish his wording almost as soon as he had finished initially setting it down. Using the same pencil, he erased the word "already" and changed "I am" to "I have turned into." Then, some time later, he copied the jotting in another notebook, making revisions as he did so. There it reads:

Now my chest
has turned into a feverish, forlorn salt lake.
Along the shore, miles and miles of
jet-black lepidodendron groves extend.
And I wonder: Must I
until the reptiles change into birds
keep lying like this?

After copying this version, Kenji inserted the word "still" between "lying" and "like this" in the last line.

The third draft is written on a sheet of manuscript paper, and the handwriting is much neater, although the poem still shows the traces of revision:

Now my chest
is a feverish, forlorn salt lake
on whose shore, for full five hundred miles,
a jet-black lepidodendron grove extends
and I wonder—must I
until the reptiles change into some birdlike form
keep lying
still?

Kenji apparently intended to publish this version. He placed the manuscript among other poems he wrote around this time, inserted them all into a binder, and put on the cover a label reading "During an Illness," a collective title for all the poems.

The first of these three drafts is like a personal note, syntactically looser and semantically more vague than the other two. The second version tries to focus the images more sharply. Thus "already I am" is revised to "my chest has turned," and "oozing up" is changed to "lying like this" and then to "lying still like this." The third draft continues the process. The vague "miles and miles" turns into a more precise phrase, "five hundred miles"; the personal "lying like this" is transformed into "lying still," explaining to the reader what "like this" means. The changes of "has turned" to "is" and of "birds" to "some birdlike form" are probably intended to emphasize the slowness of evolutionary time. "Is" expresses the length of time the poet experiences that state, for the change is so slow he does not experience it as change; "some birdlike form" emphasizes me many stages of evolutionary development—the reptiles turn, not to birds, but to some lower form gradually developing toward a bird. The third version expresses the poet's original experience in a way that is easier for the reader to understand.

In another example of Kenji's verse-writing process, the initial note is even more fragmentary:

child eating a melon while walking
                 sun resides on the castle field
                                      bird
mother gathers plumes of pampas grass
   pine grove

The note, scrawled in light pencil on a page of a note-book, gives the date as August 1918. Other evidence shows mat at this time Kenji was working as an assistant to a professor at a local agricultural school who had been commissioned by the county government to do soil research on farms in the area. When he made the note, Kenji was probably on a field trip to a farm. Having poetic inspiration but no time to compose a poem, he jotted down the essence of his impressions in his notebook.

Some time later he drafted a poem from the jotting. The earliest surviving version is written in pencil on a sheet of manuscript paper:

Over a manifold pine grove
a flock of birds swiftly passes,
and off the mountains in the clear wind

white clouds of autumn coil.

The child with a black snow-skirt
eats a melon,
and the mother, gathering red plumes
of pampas grass, walks across the field.

It seems that Kenji, on completing this draft, crossed out the initial note in red ink. He crossed out this first draft, too, when he came up with a new version. The second draft is written on the back of the paper on which the first appears:

A child with a black snow-skirt
eats a melon, walking:
off the mountains in the clear wind
white clouds of autumn coil.

Doesn't she want a melon herself?
The young mother of the child,
absorbed in gathering red plumes
of pampas grass, comes across the field.

Kenji further revised the poem and eventually published it in a local women's magazine on November 15, 1932. The published version was entitled "Mother." It retained the first stanza intact, but changed the second to:

Doesn't she want a melon herself?
The mother, still young in age,
amuses herself by gathering red plumes
of pampas grass as she crosses the field.

Apparently the poem was a favorite of Kenji's, for he placed it at the very beginning of One Hundred Poems in Classical Japanese, a poetry anthology he compiled in August 1933. The version in the anthology is virtually the same as that published in the magazine.

The three drafts of the poem "Mother" reveal something of Kenji's art in polishing a poem. One can gather from the initial note, fragmentary as it is, that the core of the poet's experience was contemplation of a scene: a child eating a melon and a young mother plucking pampas plumes in a wide expanse of landscape that included the sun, a field, birds, and a pine grove. The first draft tries to capture the communion with the scene the poet seems to have felt, but it is not successful because there is too wide a gap between the two stanzas. The first stanza is merely a landscape sketch, with no suggestion of correspondence between man and nature. The second draft corrects the situation by placing a child in the center of the landscape: both the child's snow-skirt and the coiling clouds anticipate the coming winter. The new second stanza is linked more closely with the first through its revised first line, which makes the mother similar to the child by implying that she might want a melon, too. We cannot tell whether she does or not, however, for she is "absorbed," caught up in communion with another aspect of the landscape. In the third draft, Kenji chose to emphasize the new link by making the mother still more childlike. He revised the stanza's second line to place stronger emphasis on her youthfulness and changed "absorbed" to "amuses herself"—her action in picking the plumes becomes like a child's play. This final version presents a happy vision of the two walking across the autumn field, their gaiety and self-absorption dispelling any hint of melancholy in the signs of coming cold.

The second stage in Kenji's creative process, as illustrated in these two examples, may not seem significantly different from what other poets do at a similar stage in their verse writing: he attempted to clarify his initial inspiration and to communicate it more fully. Kenji was different, however, in that for him there was no such thing as a finished poem. His clearest statement of this point appears on the cover of One Hundred Poems in Classical Japanese, where he wrote, "I regard the current revision as the definitive version at that particular time." The statement is dated August 22, 1933, just one month before his death. Kenji undoubtedly knew he was dying, and he did not know how much more time he had to revise the poems intended for the anthology. That did not bother him, however, because he considered each poem's current version to be the final draft at that time, and he wanted to convey this belief to his family and to others who would take care of the manuscripts after his death. Indeed, many of his manuscripts show the marks of continual revision up to his final days.

The belief that no poem is ever final can be seen at work in Spring and Asura, too. Kenji personally oversaw this anthology's publication, occasionally even helping the publisher with details of printing. When the book appeared he was quite pleased with it and gave copies to a number of his friends and acquaintances. Yet he went on revising the poems after publication, just as he had before it. In at least three surviving copies of Spring and Asura, Kenji wrote down post-publication revisions. The first copy includes some three hundred amendments; the second, approximately ninety; and the third, ten. To be sure, many poets want to revise poems after publication, but how many would take the trouble to revise an anthology in four hundred places if they had no plans to publish a second edition? Kenji thought the poems printed in Spring and Asura were merely "the definitive version at that particular time," the time of publication. They continued to metamorphose after publication, just as they had before it.

Kenji's unique conception of the creative process is related to his idea that art is four-dimensional. In his view, art has to be fluid, for human life—and the life of everything else—flows along the axis of time. A poem has to move along that axis, too, even after it is printed, and even after its author is dead. The versewriting process has to be open-ended because the poem itself exists in time and people "rewrite" it whenever they read it. Toward the end of "Agrarian Art" Kenji declared, "An eternal incompletion is itself a completion." That idea applies to the creative process, too.

WE CREATE NEW BEAUTY

In "Agrarian Art," Kenji made some strong statements about aesthetic beauty. Deploring the corruption of art and religion in modern times, he said:

Nowadays, men of religion and art monopolize the
   sale of truth, goodness, and beauty.

We cannot afford these, nor do we need them.

Now we must start along a new, authentic path
   and create beauty of our own.

Of course, agrarian art will have beauty as its
   essence, too.

We create new beauty. Aesthetics keeps moving
   on.

It will expand boundlessly until the very word
     "beauty" perishes.

These statements indicate that Kenji was dissatisfied with the aesthetic effects created by contemporary works of art. No doubt he saw these works as becoming progressively isolated from the lives of ordinary people; yet their creators claimed truth, goodness, and beauty as their own elite and exclusive property. He had no use for such art or for the rarefied productions of a modernist avantgarde. Instead, his goal was to infuse life and art with a single spiritual awareness—a single understanding, acceptance, and grateful fulfillment of man's place in the universe. In life, this would take the form of a simple and selfless dedication to one's work and one's fellow human beings; in art, it would take the form of a new beauty, whose connection with life would grow until finally the two would become indistinguishable, and the very concept of beauty as a separate phenomenon would disappear.

Kenji seems to have had ideas about the new kind of beauty he wanted agrarian art to create, but he had not formulated them well enough to commit them to writing. Apparently he discussed the subject publicly around the time he wrote "Agrarian Art." One of his comments was recorded by a young man who in February 1926 heard Kenji give a lecture entitled "Agrarian Art: An Introduction." According to him, Kenji wrote the main points of the lecture on the blackboard but discouraged the audience from copying them down, saying that his thoughts had not yet been finalized. Of aesthetic effects, he wrote, "Features of poetry in the new age: it must be sound (hope, determination to progress, resistance to corruption, emphasis on being social and productive)." The comment, fragmentary though it is, points toward Kenji's concept of the "new beauty" he urged his fellow agrarians to create in the years to come. In a word, the new beauty yields the impression of being "sound," and its ingredients are aspiration, will to progress, hatred of wrongdoing, and a positive contribution to society. The connotations of these terms become clearer in the context of Kenji's other comments and his poems touching on the subject.

It is easy to see that a poem expressing hope produces a sound, healthy impression. Contemporary Japanese free verse, dominated by a school of which Hagiwara Sakutaro was a leader, must have seemed misguided to Kenji, as it frequently embodied aspects of modern pessimism. Kenji would have no part of this. He chose to believe in a cosmic will that would eventually direct all living things to true happiness, and he felt verse composed by a poet of the new age should reflect that optimism. Indeed, when Kenji was asked where such a poet should start, he answered, "First of all, hold a great hope for the world."

Kenji's poem "Snow on Kurakake" embodies such hope:

All I can depend on
is the snow draping Kurakake.
Since the fields and the woods
are either fuzzy or dusky,
though it is a snowdrift
as blurry as yeast,
I hang my last faint hope
on the snow covering Mount Kurakake.
   (An old-fashioned faith)

Kurakake is a high mountain located near Kenji's home-town, but it was also part of his mental landscape. As Kenji looked around, people looked "fuzzy" or "dusky," with pallid faces and a gloomy appearance. He could see no ideology, religion, or art in contemporary Japan that promised salvation; the only encouraging sight was a mountain towering in the distance, capped with pure, white snow. The mountain was remote, but he could hang his hope on nothing else. Such a state of mind seemed to him to be the kind of faith cherished by people of older times, when religion was a more important part of life. The poem, despite its largely dark imagery, does leave a positive, wholesome impression because of the poet's refusal to lose hope in a hopeless world.

The second ingredient of soundness, "determination to progress," can be considered an extension of hope or a restatement of it in more practical terms. It is not enough to stand by and hope; one must work actively to realize one's aspirations. As we have seen, Kenji urged his readers, "We seek the way to a more radiant, vital life" and "Let us seek happiness for the world." Elsewhere in "Agrarian Art" he called out to his fellow farmers, "Oh, friends, let us join our righteous forces together and transform all our farms and all our lives into a magnificent, four-dimensional art." Of course, in Kenji's view determination to progress should not be an individual assertion but part of the cosmic will. Yet as he realized later in life, one cannot identify oneself with that will without making an effort to do so.

Many of Kenji's literary works embody such a determination. One of his finest stories for children, "A Biography of Guskobudori," is a good example, as it traces the life of a man who devoted his life to helping others. Also belonging to this category are some of the finest poems of his later period, such as "Rice-Farming Episode" and "The Gentle Breeze Fills the Valley." Here I will cite "To My Students," a poem drafted in 1926 or 1927, when Kenji had just resigned from a teaching position at Hanamaki School of Agriculture.

Dear students:
When the dark blue horizon swells upward
do you feel like submerging yourselves in it?
You must become the many-shaped
mountains on the horizon.

Don't you feel this
transparent clean wind
coming from your wondrous new world?

With a black flower called sakinohaka
a revolution will soon be here.
It is a ray of light sent to us,
a southerly wind already decided on.

Do you want to endure a slave's life
and keep serving an age that leads you by force?
No, you must create a new, stalwart age.
The universe is ceaselessly changed by us.
You must go a step further
than using up all the energies of nature
like the tide and the wind;
you must try to form a new nature.

Copernicus of the new age:
set this galaxy free
from the oppressive law of gravity.

Marx of the new age:
reform this world that moves on blind impulse
and give it a splendid, beautiful system.

Darwin of the new age:
board the Challenger of Oriental meditation
and reach the space beyond the galaxy.
From there, send us a purer, deeper, more accurate
geology and a revised biology.

All that labor on the farm
performed as if driven by an impulse:
through a cool and transparent analysis
elevate it, together with
its dark blue shadow,
to the level of dance.

New poets:
obtain new, transparent energy
from the clouds, from the light, from the storms
and suggest to man and the universe the shapes
    they are to take.

In bidding farewell to his students, Kenji described in lucid terms what he wanted them to do in the coming years. Underlying the poem is his optimistic view of cosmic progress, but he also urged his students to work actively to create a better age. "The universe," he declared, "is ceaselessly changed by us." The piece is filled with his confidence in human capabilities, and as a result it produces the kind of positive, vigorous impression he wanted from a poem.

Now it is easy to understand why "resistance to corruption" was the third ingredient of poetic beauty as conceived by Kenji. "Corruption" probably included all the political, social, and moral evils that seemed to him to obstruct the progress of mankind. He wanted poetry to criticize those evils. "Religion, after tiring itself out, has been replaced by modern science, but science is cold and dark," he said. "Art, having gone away from us, has degraded itself." In his view, contemporary religion and art had lost the critical spirit they should have. He wanted poetry, his type of poetry, never to follow suit.

Resistance to corruption is more directly manifest in Kenji's stories for children than in his poetry. For example, "Oppel and the Elephant," describing how an agricultural entrepreneur takes advantage of a gentle elephant, attacks the capitalist exploitation of labor; "The Spider, the Slug, and the Raccoon," which recounts the destinies of three graduates from a school in the woods, criticizes modern laissez-faire society and its educational philosophy; and "The Restaurant of Many Orders," in which two game hunters from the city narrowly escape being served up at a dinner table in a wildcat's restaurant, satirizes the aggressive, warlike civilization of modern industrialized countries. Kenji did not write such overtly satirical works in verse; yet, as we have seen, such poems as "Politicians" do contain elements of social satire.

Another example embodying social criticism is the following untitled poem, of which I will cite only the opening section:

Two or three more times
I must glare at Kosuke.
In the shrill wind blowing off the mountain snow
he ordered all the villagers to come out
and had them cut cedars, chestnut trees, and
    whatnot
to erect two poles amid the willows on the canal's
    edge
and three more along a cliff shaded by the
    grove—
those unneeded hydro poles
for unneeded electric light.
Now, to thank the electricians
he says we'll have a celebration.
He says we'll drink in the grove;
he says all the dignitaries are invited;
he says I'm one of them too.
What! I'm not like you.
Rambling about in a group all day,
you say this hole isn't deep enough or that pole
  looks slanted
as if you were performing an important service
when in fact you are just loafing.
I'm not one of you.

The poem so far is a fierce invective against Kosuke, a representative of an electric company, and against the kind of civilization he stands for. In the rest of the poem, however, the attack is blunted as the poet becomes more reflective and thinks of his own imperfections. In general, Kenji seems to have been too self-conscious and too gentle-natured to write bitingly satirical poems. His spirit of criticism was more constructive than destructive.

Indeed, being constructive was the fourth element of sound, wholesome poetry as envisioned by Kenji. His term for it was "emphasis on being social and productive." In the same lecture he referred to "true poetry," saying, "It must be the prime energy for production, capable of helping one to recover one's strength and complete one's labor." "Agrarian Art" contains such statements as "Set your gray labor aflame by means of art" and "It [agrarian art] always affirms actual life and tries to heighten or deepen it." There he also said, "No one person can attain happiness until the entire world does." Evidently Kenji believed that all people, including poets, should be directly concerned with the welfare of society and should work constructively to improve it. In his view, therefore, poetry should inspire all workers toward the aim of ultimately bringing about an ideal society. In other words, sound poetry should concern itself with social issues and should incite its readers to productive action.

At this point Kenji's poetic seems to approach that of socialism. Indeed, "To My Students" includes lines suggesting his belief in a coming revolution. "Oppel and the Elephant" also appears to support a proletarian revolution, and in another of his stories, "The Polano Plaza," some laborers who have been exploited by a shrewd capitalist finally succeed in setting up a cooperative factory of their own. However, in the context of all his writings such works are in the minority. As Kenji himself wrote in a letter, "Our age must as a matter of course move toward proletarian literature, but my writings somehow do not clearly follow that course." His idea of revolution and social reform was too idealistic and dreamy to motivate the kind of social criticism socialist critics would want. On the other hand, that dreamy idealism helped keep his poetry from becoming propaganda.

Examples of poems that try to be social and productive are more abundant in Kenji's later poetry. "Opus 1063," in praise of peasant women, is a good example; another shows Kenji himself as a farmer:

"Clearing the Wild Land (Opus 1017)"

When we at last finished clearing
all the thorn bushes
the sun was shining brightly
and the sky was hollow and dark.
Taichi, Chusaku, and I
felt like dropping on the bamboo grass
and sleeping like logs.
The stream carried nine tons of needles a second;
a large flock of herons flew toward the east.

Taichi and Chusaku are typical names of farmers, and the poem portrays Kenji toiling side by side with them and sharing their hard work and fatigue. The sturdy thorns indicate the poor quality of the soil, as well as the difficulty of clearing it. Yet the three are not discouraged, and by sheer hard work they complete the project. The poem calls to mind one of Kenji's remarks in "Agrarian Art": "We are all farmers," he said, "with a rigorous schedule and exhausting work."

One of the most famous poems in modern Japan, written by Kenji, falls into the same category. It is untitled and was written only 22 months before his death:

Neither rain
nor wind
nor snow nor summer's heat
will affect his robust body.
Free of anger
and desire
he will always keep a calm smile.
A quart of brown rice, miso
and some vegetables will be his daily food.
In all things
he will not think of himself
but will observe, hear, and understand well
and will not forget.
Living in a small, reed-thatched hut
under pine trees in the field,
he will go to tend
a sick child in the east
or carry a bundle of rice plants
for a tired mother in the west
or try to dispel the fear
of a dying man in the south
or stop a trivial quarrel or lawsuit
of people in the north.
He will shed tears if a drought comes
and trudge disconsolately if the summer is cold.
Called a bum by all
he will be praised by no one
and will bother no one.
I should like to become
such a man.

The poem has attracted a great deal of attention because it is believed to represent the image of an ideal man Kenji held in his last years. Because of its intense idealism and lucid diction, it has been a staple of Japanese textbooks for many years, but of late it has become an object of controversy. The militarist government advocated a similar self-abnegating spirituality in its propaganda during the war years, and this has been the basis for some critics' disparaging remarks. Kenji's ideal man takes too passive an attitude, others say, when he does nothing more than shed tears in a time of drought and trudge disconsolately in a cold summer. Those critics, however, overlook Kenji's basic stand as a man of morality and religion. The reform he had in mind was more religious and moral than political and social, and the social reform he talked of was of a nonviolent nature. He would rather be a bum who was praised by no one than a revolutionary hero who hurt others in the course of attaining a worthy aim. He would do everything within his power to help others, but he knew some things were beyond his control, and when they happened he would grieve with other victims. Whether or not such an attitude is too passive is a matter of opinion; from Kenji's own point of view, the poem's implications are sufficiently "social" and "productive."

The foregoing examples show how various ingredients in Kenji's poetry contribute to a "sound" emotional effect. It must be conceded, however, that many of his poems do not produce such an effect. "Spring and Asura" and many of his elegies for his sister, for example, although they are not morbid like many of Hagiwara Sakutaro's poems, show anxiety, irritation, or grief. "Flower of Karma" and the untitled poem beginning "Now my chest," both already cited, are cases in point. To quote another example:

"Opus 1087"

What a coward I am!
Because those rice plants were beaten down by the
   rain at dawn
I have been working with abandon
to help drown my woe.
Yet again
the black death
floats up in the west.
Last spring,
wasn't that radiant love itself?

This is a poem not of hope but of lost hope. The poet, an expert in soil conditioning, had advised farmers on fertilizing farms in the spring and had been delighted to see the rice plants growing well. Then a rainstorm came one morning in late August, beating down all the plants and ruining any hope for a good harvest. The poem implies no determination to progress, no resistance to corruption, no positive desire to make a contribution to society; its total impact is far from what one might call "sound." Its implications of frustration, worry, and self-doubt reveal the other extreme of Kenji's poetry.

In talking about the nature of poetry, however, Kenji completely ignored this darker side. He preferred to look at what poetry could do, rather than what it was doing for him. Part of the reason for this may be that when he discussed the nature of poetry he was usually addressing someone, whereas when he wrote poetry he wrote it for himself. But his attitude must also be related to his basic mental outlook. He was an idealist, and when he talked about the beauty of poetry he did so in terms of ideals rather than reality.

VARIATIONS ON 7-5

"Poetry is a rhythmical language that spontaneously flows out from the innermost part of the soul.… The sound, the melody, the tone, the wording, all come out automatically." According to a student's note, Kenji said something to this effect in one of his lectures. In keeping with his conception of poems as imagery sketches and his idea that the creative process begins with the submersion of self in natural surroundings on a preconscious level, his idea of poetic form seems to have centered on spontaneity: a poet, in touch with the cosmic mind, instinctively and automatically sketches his inner vision. The touchstone of this half-conscious singing out is the rhythmical language in which it occurs: the course of Kenji's poetic development shows that he came to consider a flow of strongly rhythmical language to be the essence of poetic form. Unlike Hagiwara Sakutaro, he seems to have been less concerned with an individualized rhythm and shape for specific poems than with rhythmical language per se. From his initial involvement with experimental tanka through his move to free verse, his prosody remained quite regular, and it grew more so in the course of his career. Thus the form of his poems comes to echo their content: as imagery sketches they portray slices of the infinite continuum of time and space; as variations on 7-5, they are slices of the rhythm echoing throughout all previous Japanese poetry—above all, through popular marches and songs.

Kenji stated explicitly his emphasis on the basically musical nature of poetic language in an apologetic letter written home to his father in 1926 during a three-week stay in Tokyo, where he was indulging his enthusiasm for classical European music by taking daily organ lessons. "You may wonder," he wrote, "why I have to pain myself unnecessarily to learn music. But I need it badly, as it is a foundation for the language of literature, especially of poetry and children's drama." The link between poetry and children's drama may indicate that he was thinking primarily of rhythm, since in the East as in the West, children's literature tends to be marked by a strongly rhythmical quality.

There was room for individual variation in the poetic rhythm, however, as his story "The Dragon and the Poet" makes clear. The young poet Surdatta, now knowing how he composed his contest-winning song, is tormented by the suspicion that he may have unconsciously stolen it from a wise old dragon. He remembers that when the song came to him in his sleep he was on a headland where the dragon lived. But the dragon, when hearing Surdatta's misgivings, reassures the young poet:

Surdatta, that song is yours as well as mine.… At that time I was the cloud and the wind. And you were the cloud and the wind, too. The poet Alta would probably have sung the same song if he had meditated then. But, Surdatta, Alta's language would have been different from yours, and yours from mine. The same thing can probably be said about rhythm, too. For this reason that song is yours, and it is also ours to the extent that it belongs to our spirit that controls the clouds and the wind.

Here Kenji implies that the spirit moving all poets is the same, but that it takes different forms when different poets verbalize it. Each poet has his own individuality, which colors sound, melody, tone, and wording, resulting in a mode of expression uniquely his own.

Kenji began his career as a poet by writing tanka, and he used that form almost exclusively until he was 24 years old. He was a prolific tanka poet: a collection of tanka he himself compiled contains more than eight hundred poems. In choosing the 31-syllable form, he may have been influenced by the examples of Yosano Akiko and Ishikawa Takuboku. Many middle-school students who aspired to literary fame in those days wrote tanka; even Hagiwara Sakutaro wrote in that form as a secondary school student. For the young Kenji, Takuboku's influence must have been particularly great. Takuboku had been born near Kenji's hometown, had attended the same secondary school, and had published poems and essays in local newspapers. It must be more than coincidence that Kenji began writing tanka seriously in January 1911, several weeks after the publication of A Handful of Sand. "Various Kinds of Poetry," Takuboku's essay eloquently advocating the merits of tanka—his kind of tanka—had been published at about the same time. No explicit proof of Kenji's indebtedness to Takuboku has been preserved, but in theme, imagery, diction, and style his tanka have a good deal in common with those in A Handful of Sand. The most convincing evidence of direct influence is that he consciously manipulated the length of lines and their appearance on the page, as did Takuboku. In practice Takuboku wrote only three-line tanka, but Kenji used two-, three-, four-, and five-line forms, following closer in fact to what the older poet preached in theory.

A couple of Kenji's tanka will illustrate Takuboku's influence. The first was written in 1914, the year Kenji graduated from middle school and began to help in his father's pawnshop on a full-time basis. His nose was operated on for ozena in the spring, and the resulting complications kept him in the hospital for more than a month.

My friends'
matriculation tests must be soon.
Having been ill, I dig up
a small lily.

Compare this with a poem from A Handful of Sand:

The day when all my friends seem superior to me,
I bring home a flower
and cherish my wife.

Both tanka portray a young man comparing himself with his friends and suffering from an inferiority complex; in an effort to overcome his feelings, he pays attention to a flower, something outside of competitive human society. The two poems use similar themes, materials, and images, except that the bachelor Kenji could not refer to a wife. Also, both verses look like fragments of a diary, recording the poet's emotion of the moment. Of course, Kenji also utilized the multi-line form characteristic of Takuboku's tanka.

As another example, here is a tanka Kenji composed in 1915:

Dokugamori Woods,
Mount Nansho, and the rest of the range
suddenly leap up and hang over my forehead.

This can be traced back to another poem in A Handful of Sand:

I think of an October morning
when Mount Iwate's
first snow closed in over my eyebrows.

Although Takuboku's tanka records a recollection rather than an immediate experience, the center of interest in both poems is a colossal mountain towering above the poet, who for an instant feels both awe and a sense of purification. Again, both poems use the multi-line form.

Other tanka by Kenji also suggest his indebtedness to Takuboku. Indeed, many resemble the older poet's not only in form but also in that they record the emotions the poet experienced from day to day, in sharp contrast to most contemporary tanka, which copied nature in the way advocated by Shiki. Kenji even grouped poems by date of composition when he compiled his tanka anthology, so that the collection looks almost like a diary. Thus Takuboku's theory that poetry should be a diary, that it should record the poet's thoughts of the moment in the fragmentary way they come to mind, may have laid the foundation for Kenji's own later theory of imagery sketches.

In 1921, at the age of 24, Kenji almost completely stopped writing tanka and then slowly began to write free verse. The fact that his later tanka include many rensaku, or sequential compositions, may evince an increasingly urgent need for a verse form longer than 31 syllables. A rensaku collectively entitled "Andersen's Swan," for instance, is a sequence of ten tanka, but because each tanka has a varying number of lines—from two to five—it looks more like a free-verse poem consisting of ten stanzas. Its first tanka especially, which contains five lines of three, two, seven, five, and fourteen syllables, does not look like a tanka at all. From this type of tanka to free verse, the distance is very short. In a sense, Kenji's shift from tanka to free verse had already been determined when he began to emulate Takuboku by allowing the needs of each poem to dictate its line divisions.

On the other hand, Kenji seems to have carried the rhythm of traditional poetry into his free verse, and the 7-5 pattern is basic to a considerable number of his "imagery sketches." For instance, the line-by-line syllabic scheme of "Clearing the Wild Land," a nine-line poem cited earlier, is:

7
7-7
7-5
7-5
7-5
7-5
8-7
7-5-9
7-7

The basic rhythm of seven and five syllables is so distinct that one is tempted to view the poem as several tanka glued together or as a variation on rensaku. Likewise, the 52 lines that constitute "Spring and Asura" include sixteen 7-5 lines (and variations), eighteen 5-7 lines (and variations), and seven 7-7 lines. "Green Blades of Spears," another poem in Spring and Asura, presents an extreme case: it is neatly divided into seven parts by a one-line refrain, each part consisting of four lines with the syllabic scheme:

7-7
7-5
7-7
7-5

The rhythmic pattern is so regular that one feels hesitant to call it free verse. Most of Kenji's imagery sketches show the 7-5 scheme less markedly than do these examples, but many of them have one or two 7-5 lines or variations at a crucial spot in the poem, thereby providing a rhythmic undercurrent for the entire piece.

Kenji's predilection for the 7-5 syllabic pattern links his work to the rhythm of the traditional Japanese song, utilized in popular Buddhist hymns as well as in folk songs and songs for children. One of the strongest popular uses of this rhythm is in marching songs. When Kenji himself wrote a marching song in a story called "Hydro Poles on a Moonlit Night," he used the 7-5 pattern for its basic rhythm; he did the same when he wrote a school song for Hanamaki School of Agriculture, clearly keeping in mind that the song would be used to accompany students' marches. Being the basic rhythm of a march, the 7-5 pattern conveys a sense of progress, comradeship, and exaltation; Kenji, who wanted his poetry to produce a "sound" impression, may have exploited this effect in his free-verse poems. Perhaps he hoped that the march rhythm would help a poem move forward in time and space, as it were. The rhythm can be used for laborers' processions, too, and its popular valence can make it seem a "workers' rhythm."

Kenji would have denied consciously using a syllabic scheme, however, for he believed that the language of poetry was spontaneous. He would have insisted that the language of his free verse automatically had the basic 7-5 rhythm. For him, that was probably true: the rhythm sometimes flowed out even when he wrote prose, as in some sections of such stories as "Tales of Zashiki Bokko" and "General Son Ba-yu and Three Physicians."

Kenji was sensitive not only to the rhythm of a poem but also to the aural effect of the individual words used in it, and he made some interesting remarks on the subject. According to a student of his, for instance, he once said in a lecture that a poem loaded with consonants sounds rough. In the same lecture he arranged the five vowels of the Japanese language according to degree of tonal brightness: the order was, from the brightest to the darkest, "a," "i," "o," "e," and "u." On another occasion, when he offered critical comments on a children's story written by a friend, he observed that Rirura, a name given to one of its characters, sounded too smooth to fit the illnatured character of the child. His suggestion was to change one of the three "r"s to either "m," "s," or "h." In his own story "Windflowers," the narrator observes that okinagusa, the usual Japanese word for a windflower, does not have aural qualities that suggest the gentle, youthful beauty of the flower; he prefers its alternate name, uzunoshuge, whose tonal qualities suggest to him the black petals, pale green leaves, and gleaming pappi of a windflower. In yet another revealing example, an idyllic poem called "A Picture of Flowers and Birds: July," Kenji presents a young man and his sister standing on the edge of a river and enjoying the scenery on a summer day. The sister notices a bird that has alighted on a power line and points it out to her brother, who responds:

"Oh, that's a kingfisher.
A kingfisher, you know—the one with crimson
   eyes.
Say, Michia, this is another hot day, isn't it?"
"What is Michia, brother?"
"That's his name.
'Mi' refers to the smoothness of his back;
'chi,' to the way his bill is pointed;
and 'a' makes it a pet name."

Here Kenji has coined a name for the kingfisher purely on the basis of the aural effects produced by three syllables. This example, together with the others cited, shows that Kenji's imagery sketches included not only visual images but auditory ones as well.

Kenji's preference shifted from imagery sketches in the colloquial language to shi in classical Japanese as he grew older. Especially in the last five years of his life, largely a period of illness, he liked writing poems in the classical language. There is no doubt that he thought quite seriously about those verses, for he called them shi, and not the modest-sounding imagery sketches. Even as he lay dying, he continued to revise, copy, and compile them into two anthologies entitled Fifty Poems in Classical Japanese and One Hundred Poems in Classical Japanese. He died before he had time to finish compiling a third. All in all, the poems he wrote in this form total more than three hundred.

Many of those poems are adaptations of imagery sketches or tanka he had written earlier. It appears that the ailing Kenji, lying in bed, took out old manuscripts and reworked them. One example is a free-verse poem he wrote in July 1926:

"Opus 728"

As the rainshower pours down
a smoke of dust rises.
  In the billowing steam
  I, all alone, am angered at my work.
    Dead leaves of fern,
    wild roses' roots,

   and busily scurrying ants
   around their collapsed castle.
The cedar trees hang streams of rain
and send faint, white splashes.

Kenji crossed out this poem, presumably when he made the first draft of a shi some time later on the margin of the manuscript. He then copied the final draft on a new sheet of paper:

"Rainshower"

As the rainshower pours down, the tilled ground
sends up a smoke of dust.

In the lukewarm steam a person stands,
his figure dark with groundless anger.

When wild roses' roots have been washed
and ants scurry around their nest

the cedar trees hang banners of water
and splashes faintly extend.

The most obvious difference between the two poems is in form. "Rainshower" is more deliberate and formal, a quality that is even more evident in the original because it is written in classical Japanese. The sense of immediacy present in the language of the earlier poem is all but gone, for better or for worse. It has been replaced by the strong rhythm of a well-regulated prosody: the second poem consists of four stanzas, each with two lines of an identical 7-5 syllable pattern. No wonder Kenji had to change "I" to "a person" in the latter poem, placing greater distance between the poet and the experience depicted. In it, the poet's anger is neatly framed.

"Rainshower" typifies the prosody of Kenji's poetry in classical Japanese. The form he considered standard had four stanzas, each consisting of a couplet, with each line consisting of seven and five syllables. Many pieces in Fifty Poems in Classical Japanese and One Hundred Poems in Classical Japanese are written in this form, and the others can be seen as variations on it. Kenji's predilection for this form can also be surmised from a note entitled "A Study of Four-Couplet Poetry in Classical Japanese," apparently an outline for a projected essay with that title:

1. Introduction. The Fixed Verse Form in Classical Japanese. A Poem in Four Couplets. Its History. Imayo. Toson, Yau, Hakushu.
2. Beginning, Development, Change, and Conclusion in a Four-Couplet Poem.
3. Prosody. Composition of a Line.
4. Rhyme.

Sketchy though it is, the note suggests Kenji's idea of his favored verse form in classical Japanese. The sequence of four couplets had precedents in the Japanese poetic tradition, its origin going back to the imayo of the late Heian period. Several modern poets before him had experimented with the form, too. He conceived the poem's structure in terms of the time-honored method of development used in classical Chinese verse, the first couplet constituting a "beginning," the second a "development," the third a "change," and the fourth a "conclusion." He gave no further explanation of prosody or rhyme, but he clearly regarded these as important elements of shi. The reference to rhyme is odd, for Japanese poetry had never utilized that device in its long history. No extant shi by him has a distinct rhyme scheme, either.

Kenji's poems in classical Japanese have usually been ranked lower than his free verse. They have been described as less fresh, less vigorous, and less original, and this has been attributed to the fact that the poet, confined to bed, had no new experience to stimulate his mind, no new images to sketch. However, Kenji's poems in classical Japanese sound more melodious than his imagery sketches. The 7-5 rhythm, which was submerged in his free verse, appears openly and resounds throughout his shi. Perhaps Kenji thought of these works more as songs than as poems. He wanted them to be read less by literary critics than by the general public, for whom free verse was still an import, whereas the 7-5 pattern was easy and familiar. In allowing that strong, popular rhythm, anchored by the four-couplet form, to prevail in his last poems, Kenji was true to his desire to be both a Buddhist poet and an agrarian artist—he was attempting to write poems that would sing out of the minds of ordinary people, as well as out of the cosmic mind of wind and clouds and trees.

ART IN A TURNIP FIELD

Roughly speaking, Kenji's view of the use of poetry evolved in three stages. At first he expected a good deal out of literature, linking it with religion and envisioning much usefulness for it at both personal and social levels. Then he came to admire a farmer's life so highly that art began to seem a luxury. In later years he tried hard to resolve the dichotomy between art and manual labor, as is evident in "Agrarian Art." One cannot, however, clearly demarcate the three periods; it is more accurate to say that elements of the three co-existed to varying degrees, on the whole moving in the general direction of a dialectical synthesis of labor and art.

At the personal level, verse writing early functioned as a means of relieving loneliness for Kenji. His early tanka are full of insecurity, uneasiness about the future, self-accusation, unfulfilled desire, causeless anger, gloom, and even despair. Writing poetry seems to have been one of the few, if not the only, means he had to vent those emotions. A tanka he wrote in 1916 is typical:

Steel pen, steel pen,
steel pen: all alone, you
move on the barren moor
of my doubts.

The picture is brighter in "A Biography of Guskobudori," his pseudoautobiography, in which the hero is described as feeling so lonely in childhood that he sings songs and scribbles words on tree trunks in the woods. Yet the idea that poetry relieves loneliness remains. Kenji's most direct statement of it appears in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1932. Referring to his motive for writing poetry, he said, "I have not been writing imagery sketches to please the public. It is all because I could not bear loneliness, because I could not resist my desire to own something beautiful. If a handful of readers were to completely share my feelings and say a few words to me to that effect, that would be about all I hope for."

Although it may sound as though Kenji were writing verse only for himself, significantly he mentions his hope for "a handful of readers" to share his feelings completely. He was not blind to the social functions of poetry, and the preceding quote shows his awareness that poetry can serve as a means of uniting people. In general, he stressed the social functions of poetry more than its personal uses, and we have seen him presenting a particular kind of social function in an early story, "The Dragon and the Poet," in which Surdatta is praised for his ability to envision a model of truth and beauty for tomorrow's world. This story shows the main drift of Kenji's early views on the function of poetry: he saw the poet as a prophet, an architect, a seer—as a moral leader like a man of religion.

From early youth Kenji seems to have seen literature as allied to religion. It is widely assumed that he began writing free verse and juvenile literature seriously in 1921, after a high-ranking Buddhist priest named Takachio Chiyo advised him against entering the priest-hood, explaining that in the Hokke sect a believer was expected to try to reach a higher level of faith while following his line of business. The priest further suggested that if Kenji felt gifted as a poet, he should pursue that art until his faith in Buddhism manifested itself in his poems without conscious effort. Kenji seems to have taken the advice to heart. The words "Through Reverend Takachio's advice, creation of literature for the Flower of the Law" are recorded in one of his notebooks, and a letter from the same year declares: "The religion of the future is art. The art of the future is religion."

In what sense can poetry serve as a religion? Kenji's answer would have stressed poetry's ability to widen our perspective. The kind of poetry collected in Spring and Asura helps a person to transcend the human and merge with the true mind, the single, shared consciousness that is reality. It helps a person know his true self and experience his true place in the scheme of things.

Unfortunately, Kenji could not unwaveringly keep his belief in such a lofty view of poetry. Especially in his later years, he doubted poetry's capabilities more and more. A devaluation of poetry is already evident in a preface he wrote for his unpublished second collection of imagery sketches, entitled Spring and Asura II. Toward its end he entreated magazine editors not to press him for more poetry after they read the collection. Explaining why he disliked such solicitations, he said, "Incompetent man though I am, I have a farm to till, and in winter I have to set up an 'office' with jute sacks at various places and advise rice farmers on fertilizing. My head is filled with thoughts about those works, which are somewhat more humble than such declarations as 'Let us march on full stride' or 'Let us make a pledge,' and so on." Although he did not deny the value of poetry, Kenji implied that he personally attached equal or even higher importance to other things that were generally considered lower than poetry in the hierarchy of human activities. Foremost among those other things were farming and helping people to farm. To Kenji, poetry began to look less meaningful because a poet merely promised without making the physical effort to fulfill his promise.

Kenji's misgivings about the capabilities of poetry came to take more direct expression in later years. An extreme case is his poem "Love and Hate for Poetry," an imagery sketch that he published in a magazine in 1933. The poem is about an electrical engineer on a night shift at a hydroelectric plant. As he sleepily watches over the gauges on the master panel, there appears before him a sweet-voiced woman whose body is made of ice and through whose chest show three radiant hearts. The engineer, who apparently has a complex about art, recognizes her as Poetry and strikes up a conversation:

"Just as I suspected,
you have three hearts, don't you?"
As the engineer sadly mutters,
the beautiful lady, heaving her chest in pride, says "
How could anyone write a play
without three or four hearts?"
That angers the engineer.
"What is a play anyway?" he asks.
"Because of your petty education
and silly vanity
those children in the field out there
cannot buy
little red pants or even a pair of socks.
At the year's end, the heads of their families
must go to the market for fish and medicine
and roam the streets, sighing,
until the night falls.
Who is the master artist
deserving that kind of sacrifice?
Where is the work of art
rivaling that kind of sacrifice?
If what is known as art
remains an imitation, a fake
or a place of refuge for incompetents and cowards
for ever and ever,
we should smash it to pieces!"

When the engineer realizes that his words have been a bit too violent, it is too late. The shocked lady collapses to the floor and disintegrates, whereupon the engineer's vision vanishes, too.

In "Love and Hate for Poetry," Kenji criticized poetry for ignoring current social conditions, and thus helping to create them. Yet Kenji must have felt a certain affection for his Lady Poetry, since the engineer belatedly regrets having blasted her, and the poem's title includes the word "love" as well as "hate." The later Kenji loved poetry so long as it presented a vision of beauty and truth mankind could seek, but he had to reject it when it did little or nothing to actualize that vision.

Kenji tried hard to resolve the dichotomy between art and life, between vision and reality, in his later years. His endeavor was twofold: on the one hand he attempted to transform real life into art, and on the other he tried to bring art close to the life of workers. In other words, he attempted to bring art and life together by reorienting each toward the other. His attempt to see art in a worker's life has already been glimpsed in "Opus 1063" and "To My Students." It took even more direct expression in the following poem:

"Third Art"

As I ploughed the field for turnips,
a stocky, gray-haired man
sneaked up behind me
and asked what I planned to sow.
Red turnip seeds, I answered.
The man, saying a turnip field
should be ploughed like this,
quietly stretched out his hand
for my hoe
and drew a curved furrow with it.
Stillness ringing in my head,
I stood there vacantly
as if entranced by a magic potion.
There were the sunshine, the wind,
our two shadows cast on the sand,
and a stream gleaming in the distance.
Yet I was in a trance, wondering
what brushstroke in black ink
or what fragrance of a sculptor's chisel
could ever surpass that furrow.

Here the old farmer is identified as a master artist who uses a hoe for his paintbrush and the earth for his canvas. His art is that of the Third Estate, or "third art." By extending the meaning of art to include the consummate skill of an experienced laborer, Kenji was attempting to unify life and art.

On the other hand, Kenji tried to bring art into laborers' lives, for he felt that too many workers never knew the enjoyment afforded by beautiful things. That feeling is expressed in such poems as this:

"Opus 739"

In the dense fog the hands are freezing.
 The horse's thighs tremble, too.
Toss me the rope. The rope!
 The plumes of pampas grass are loaded with
  frosty dew.
 Would that sunrise be soon!
A pheasant is crowing. A pheasant
appears to be in your house.
  Striding through the vacant house,
looking for food
and crying. Isn't that a pheasant?

The poem, written in 1926, depicts farmers working in the field on a chilly autumn morning. On the dusky farm before sunrise, their minds are occupied with work and with their wish for the sun to bring some warmth. Kenji, however, wants them to think of a pheasant, a beautiful bird that symbolizes art. He believed the farmers would get a bit of relief from their hard work if they could divert their minds to things of beauty from time to time.

Kenji's twofold approach to a synthesis of art and life found its definitive expression in "Agrarian Art." The title of the essay suggests its purport, a unification of art and farm life; that unification is attained when all artists become farmers who physically till the land and all farmers become artists who are sensitive to the beauty of nature and of their own work. As has been noted, Kenji criticized contemporary artists for monopolizing beauty, an old, unproductive kind of beauty. In the same essay he had this message for artists:

Look at those long-haired ones sipping coffee,
   their faces vainly waiting for something.

Burn up all your worries and merge with the soul
   of all that exists.

Communicate with the wind, obtain energy from
   the clouds.

And he had this message for farmers:

Set your gray labor aflame by means of art.
Here is our ceaseless, pure, and happy creation.

He explained, "Labor is something instinctive. It is not always pain. It is always creation. Creation is always a pleasure. When a person sacrifices his humanity and enslaves himself for productivity, it turns into pain." Ultimately, Kenji was trying to restore humanity to art as well as to workers' lives, making it the basis of both. Of course, in his vocabulary "humanity" had unusually large connotations, including the cosmic mind that man shares with all other beings. Agrarian art as conceived by Kenji was based on this kind of humanity; it should enable all men to join together in a common spirituality and a shared work.

Such a view of the use of art is open to criticism when seen against the backdrop of contemporary society. In the first place, Kenji's identification of a higher type of art with agrarian life is too limited in scope, for labor is not limited to farm labor. Life on a farm provides more opportunities for the artist to merge with nature and to receive creative energy from it than does life in a factory. But Japan had already begun transforming herself from an agrarian into an industrial nation, and Kenji appears to have regarded that fact too lightly. Second, he was too optimistic in his expectations for the role of art in agrarian life. He thought art would relieve the hardships of peasant life, but he seems to have overlooked the fact that the main cause of those hardships was the existing social order, which heavily favored landlords. Poetry might bring emotional relief, but it could not cure social inequities. Takuboku eventually found that out, but to the last Kenji does not seem to have felt it of paramount importance.

Be that as it may, Kenji's vision of the use of art remains an attractive ideal. Long after his death Japan has not yet solved the problems that concerned him. Many artists still suffer from a dichotomy between art and life, as evidenced by the life and death of the novelist Mishima Yukio (1925-70). Like Kenji, Mishima in later life came to recognize that art was powerless to improve existing conditions. Earlier he had tried to create the kind of art that would positively contribute to the spiritual well-being of his countrymen, but in the last phase of his career, he seems to have given up hope that art could make an active contribution to social welfare. Other novelists, like Abe Kobo (b. 1924), have written extensively about alienation, a prevalent problem in contemporary, urbanized Japan, and have tried to find some way to facilitate meaningful communication between individuals. Kenji's poetry, and his idea of poetry, address these and other problems that are still vital today. His solution requires an idealistic and spiritualistic belief beyond the grasp of many, but his proposal of uniting through art with both the world and one's fellow humans is appealing. And the honesty, sincerity, and intensity with which he made that proposal are exceptional, moving all who read his biography and his writings. He not only conceived a unique view of poetry; he lived it.