[In the following excerpt, Keene provides an overview of Nishiwaki's poetic career in terms of the European poetic tradition.]

Nishiwaki has been acclaimed as the founder and teacher of a modern Japanese poetry that is part of the modern poetry of the world. A typical evaluation by an admirer states: "Nishiwaki Junzaburō played a decisive role in the fate of the Japanese modern poem. Together with Rilke, Valéry, and Eliot, he is one of four great poets who represent the twentieth century." He has probably exercised the greatest influence of any Japanese poet on the post-1945 generation. Some critics have claimed that Japanese poetry died at the end of the Taishō era in 1926, but many more believe that a great resurgence in Japanese poetry occurred at precisely that time, and that the central figure in the new poetry was Nishiwaki.

Nishiwaki was born in the town of Ojiya in Niigata Prefecture, where his father was a bank president. He displayed a precocious interest in English language and literature while still a middle-school student, even composing some poems in English at the time. He was also talented at drawing, and at one stage in his career went to Tokyo intending to become a professional artist; however, the decadent style of life expected of young artists in those day repelled him, and he gave up his plan. In 1912 he entered Keiō University in the Department of Economics, but spent most of his time reading literature and philology. He presented his graduation thesis in 1917; it was on economics considered as a form of sociology, and was written in Latin.

In 1922 Keiō University sent him as a research student to Oxford University, where he studied Old and Middle English. He associated with various young novelists and poets, and published his first poems in English periodicals. In 1925 a volume of his poetry in English, called Spectrum, appeared. It was well received, but it is an undistinguished collection of Georgian verse. He also wrote some poetry in French at this time. The chief significance of his stay in Europe was that his association on terms of equality with European literary figures of his own age made him "the only poet in Japan without a colonial complex toward European literature and artists."

Nishiwaki returned to Japan late in 1925. The next year he was appointed to a professorship at Keiō University, and soon afterward began contributing poetry and criticism to Mita Bungaku, the literary periodical of that university. He formed a literary salon where he exercised a strong influence as the most authoritative commentator on European Modernism. In particular, he used the journal Shi to Shiron as a platform for his views, especially his advocacy of Surrealism, the movement with which his name is associated.

Nishiwaki had written his early poetry in English or French because he felt it was impossible to express himself adequately in the Japanese language. In later years he recalled an experience of 1920:

In that year I read Howling at the Moon, the collection of poetry by Hagiwara Sakutarō, and I felt for the first time an impulse to compose poetry in Japanese. Until then my resistance to Japanese style—to the elegant classical style—had kept me from composing poetry in Japanese. I had written poems almost exclusively in English or French, but as the result of the complete sympathy I felt with the colloquial, free verse in Howling at the Moon, I resolved henceforth to write in Japanese.

Nishiwaki's first collection of poems in Japanese (1933) appeared under the unfamiliar Latin name Ambarvalia, the designation of the pagan crop processions held in the spring. Classical European influences are certainly present, but they are less prominent than that of Hagiwara, with respect to Nishiwaki's poetic language, or of Keats in the imagery. Nishiwaki also acknowledged the influence of Nietzsche. "Tenki" (Fine Weather), the first poem in the section of Ambarvalia entitled "Greek Lyric Poems," suggests both his indebtedness and his personal vision:

(Kutsugaesareta hōseki) no yō na asa
Nampito ka toguchi ni te dare ka to sasayaku
Sore wa kami no seitan no hi

The translation poses various problems, but this is a possible version:

A morning like "an upturn'd gem"
People are whispering with someone by a door
It is the day of the god's nativity.

The quoted phrase in the first line is from Endymion; stained glass windows in a Gothic cathedral apparently called to the poet's mind the colors refracted in Keats's "upturn'd gem." The inclusion of this poem among the "Greek Lyrics" suggests that the word kami in the third line refers to one or more Greek gods, but Nishiwaki, in response to an interviewer's question, stated that the scene was observed through a church window; in that case, the occasion would be Christmas. Nishiwaki's own note indicates that the second line refers not to people talking by the church door, but to a scene in front of an ordinary house on the street outside as observed through the stainedglass window. Nishiwaki remembered having seen such an illustration to a medieval story. But here, as in many poems, Nishiwaki was not trying to make up a puzzle that had to be solved by the ingenious reader; the images he presented were intended to stir the reader into creating a new and individual interpretation of the materials.

Nishiwaki's first important publication after his return to Japan was the article "Profanus" in the April 1926 issue of Mita Bungaku. In it he declared that Surrealist poetry, far from being a recent novelty, was typical of the great poets of the past. He cited especially Francis Bacon as a notable predecessor, and claimed that the views on poetry presented in The Advancement of Learning were completely realized only by the Surrealist and Dada poets. Although he insisted that the views set forth in his essay were not merely a restatement of the theories of Surrealism of Yvon Goll or André Breton, Nishiwaki followed quite closely Breton's famous manifestos; at one point he even stated as his own opinion Breton's "C'est du rapprochement en quelque sorte fortuit des deux termes qu'a jailli une lumière particulière, lumière de l'image…." Nishiwaki went on:

The Surrealism of Breton destroyed the cause and effect relationship between image and association. It did not merely evoke an obscure awareness, but attempted to raise the electric potential between the images included in the world of awareness and to produce a beautiful radiation of sparks. In short, the point of Surrealist poetry is to create a vast awareness of everything in our minds that cannot be reduced to definite cognition. Surrealist poetry constructs a world of chaotic consciousness, which consciousness itself could never construct. This last statement is not borrowed from the French Surrealists. It is entirely my own opinion.

Nishiwaki's poetry is often puzzling on first reading, and sometimes its meaning eludes to the end even the most determined annotators. This is not surprising in a poet who professed allegiance to such Surrealist principles as "automatic writing"; indeed, it is more surprising that so much of his poetry is not only easily intelligible but sensually pleasing. It is quite possible to read his poems, especially those of the later collections, without reference to any body of poetic doctrines. The surface beauty is so appealing that at times the reader may not trouble to unravel any ambiguities in the text. This is true of the early poem "Ame" (Rain):

The south wind has brought soft goddesses.
They have wet the bronze, wet the fountain,
Wet the swallows' wings, wet the golden feathers,
Wet the tidewater, wet the sand, wet the fishes,
Gently wet the temples, baths and theaters;

This procession of gentle, soft goddesses
Has wet my tongue.

Obviously there is humor in the statements that rain has wet tide water, fishes, and other objects that are wet from the start, and the poetic conceit of imagining the raindrops are "goddesses" brought by the wind is also faintly comic. The scene of the poem is Mediterranean, possibly Rome, as suggested by the mention of bronze statues, fountains, temples, baths, and theaters. Perhaps there is an oblique reference to the Ambarvalia processions in honor of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, in the words "this procession of gentle, soft goddesses." But even without such elucidations the poem is immediately attractive.

Another early poem, also from Ambarvalia, composed of seemingly disconnected fragments, evokes the emotions of a traveler, probably the poet himself. It is called "Tabibito" (Traveler):

You, irascible traveler!
Your excrement has flowed into the Hibernian sea,
You have defiled the North Sea Atlantis the Mediterranean.
May you return to your village
And bless the cliffs of your old home!
That naked soil is your daybreak.
Akebia fruits, like your soul,
Have been dangling all summer.

Instead of explaining or describing the traveler's longing for home, Nishiwaki names the foreign seas he has defiled and suggests the restoration of his senses that his native soil will bring. The akebia fruits growing along the cliffs at home have dangled in the wind like his soul, all but forgotten and waiting for someone to discover them. In later years Nishiwaki wrote about this poem:

The world of poetry is a world of faint awareness, I believe. If this were not the case, awareness would transcend the world of poetry. The world of poetry is a harmony of reality and dream. Humor and pathos must be faintly admixed to create a single, rare entity…. I should like to seek in poetry a faint humor and a faint pathos. That is the kind of poetry I like. Last November, in the mountains by the coast I tried sucking dockmackie (gamazumi) fruits with my children. They tasted like pomegranates, and stirred in me a faint pathos. I felt a faint pathos also in the red earth and the mossy boulders, the voice of a song thrush, the crooked saké bottle. Such things become poems for me in the same manner as poems made of words.

Nishiwaki continued his researches in English literature through the 1930s, publishing a study of Langland in 1935 and a massive volume on modern English literature in the following year. The next entry in the chronology of his work is for 1947. This long gap has not been satisfactorily explained; no doubt to many readers it must have seemed that Nishiwaki, like other Japanese poets of the twentieth century, had exhausted himself creatively while still in his thirties.

Anyone who had prophesied that Nishiwaki's career as a poet had ended would, however, have been gravely mistaken. Full recognition came only after the end of the war when he suddenly produced a rapid succession of collections of poetry, and when a new generation of poets discovered in his works the inspiration they needed as specifically modern poets. This was especially true of the Arechi (Wasteland) group of poets, who derived their name both from Eliot's poem and from the bleak postwar surroundings. The impressive revival of modern poetry after the war was linked by critics directly to the republication of Ambarvalia in 1947. This collection, which had seemed quite dead, proved to be a phoenix that guided the new men, a triumphant proof of the capability of modern Japanese to serve as a poetic language.

Nishiwaki's first new collection was Tabibito Kaerazu (The Traveler Does Not Return, 1947). He first began planning this collection toward the end of 1944, while evacuated to his native town in Niigata Prefecture. At this time, cut off from other poets, he read extensively in classical Japanese literature and resumed his old interest in ink drawings. Numerous commentators have noted the "oriental" cast of countenance to these poems, and some have deplored the "retrogression." However, Shinoda Hajime questioned the "Japaneseness" of Nishiwaki's later poetry; he believed that it was more accurate to say that this poetry was "a stage in the quest of the 'sensory thought' he had pursued ever since his debut as a poet." It is almost too easy when writing of a Japanese poet to note with satisfaction that, after his rebellious youth and infatuation with the West, he rediscovered in middle age the values of traditional Japan that he had hitherto overlooked. Undoubtedly Nishiwaki's long, unbroken residence in Japan after his return from Europe in 1925 made his choice of scenes for his poems more Japanese than they were in Ambarvalia, which consisted of poems written shortly after leaving Europe. But there is little to suggest the tanka or haiku in these poems; the "oriental" philosophical values noted by some commentators are personal, rather than traditional.

Miyoshi Tatsuji said of the collection, "In The Traveler Does Not Return the inscrutability of the poetic language, which had marked his previous poems, has all but disappeared, and the Surrealistic conceptions survive only vestigially." Certainly there is less need for exegesis, and some of the poems are transparently clear:

The rains of an autumn night
Collect in the mortars of stepping stones;
They smell of chrysanthemums,
A far-off smell of long ago.

Or, on a more complicated level of expression:

From travel to return to travel,
From earth to return to earth.
If I break this jar It turns to eternal shards.
Travel flows away:
If I put out my hand and try to scoop it up,

It turns to foam and dreams.
Into this bamboo hat moistened by dreams
The autumn day leaks.

The prevalent themes in the collection deal with travel and eternity, as the opening poem announces:

Wait, traveler!
Before you moisten your tongue
In this insignificant stream,
Consider! traveler of life,
You too are only a water-spirit
Oozed from the rocks.
Even this thinking water will not flow forever;
At some moment in eternity it will dry up.
What a racket the jays make with their singing!
Sometimes from this water
A phantom man emerges, flowers held over his head.
"To seek eternal life is a dream.
To discard your thoughts in the murmuring brook
Of life flowing away, and finally to seek
To fall from the precipice of immutability
And vanish—that is reality."
So says the phantom water-sprite
Who comes to village and town from the water to play
When waterweeds are growing in the reflected clouds.

The meaning of this poem is unclear, but not because seemingly unrelated images have been brought together in Surrealist fashion; the ambiguity stems from Nishiwaki's use of a private image, the "phantom man." In the preface to the collection he explained, after describing the "modern man" and "primitive man" coexisting within him:

But there is yet another man lurking in me. Does he belong to the mystery of life or to the mystery of cosmic eternity? He is inexplicable, not to be resolved through normal intelligence or emotions.

I call him my "phantom man," and I think of him as the eternal traveler.

This "phantom man" comes to me at certain moments only to disappear. He is probably a recollection, miraculously preserved, of mankind before primitive man, a memory of human beings closer than ourselves to the world of eternity….

I imagine this "phantom man" lurking in me is what makes me experience something like infinite recollections when I see fruit growing on a bush by the side of the road.

Even with this explanation the meaning of "phantom man" is not obvious. Murano Shirō explained the term as corresponding to the "gods of the road" that stir Bashō to leave on his Narrow Road of Oku journey. He added, "Nishiwaki in his poetry is constantly restless, moving from one place to another, from one time to another." Murano said about another poem in The Traveler Does Not Return, which also mentions "eternity" (eigō) and the "phantom man" (gen'ei no hito):

For Nishiwaki God is the conception of eternity, but the existence of God is first revealed in the desolate world of cognition stirred by the pursuit of a "phantom man" through a forest of bushes drooping with fruit; to meditate on this phenomenon is to touch the secret of human existence, and is the sole way of approaching God. Nishiwaki's God, it goes without saying, is not the God of religion, but an ontological concept.

Such philosophical reasoning would certainly have been out of place in the discussion of earlier modern Japanese poets, but Nishiwaki is a scholar-poet whose critical writings are complex and sometimes obscure especially if the reader is not familiar with his vocabulary. His poetry is erudite, full of references that the average reader could not be expected to understand. His admiration for T. S. Eliot may have inspired some of this richness of allusion, but this is a characteristic not only of Eliot but of much poetry of a specifically modern nature. Unless readers are familiar with all of Nishiwaki's references they cannot be said to understand a poem fully, but most readers as might also be said of Eliot's readers are satisfied with less than complete comprehension. Perhaps even Nishiwaki himself could not define everything that is conveyed by a poem like the following one from The Traveler Does Not Return:

Akanomamma no saite iru
Doro michi ni fumimayou
Atarashii shinkyoku no hajime

I lost my way on a muddy road
Where red knotweed was blooming:
The start of a new Divine Comedy.

The brevity of the poem and the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated statements suggest a haiku, but the third line is an intellectual concept foreign to the world of haiku. The speaker, like Dante, is lost nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. He wanders onto a road, real or imagined, where he feels a helpless frustration at being bogged down in mud, even as weeds bloom insolently around him. At that moment perhaps he envisages a descent into the inferno, a private inferno with its particular torments; or it may be that he sees beyond the inferno immediately before his eyes to the creation of the poem that was the fruit of Dante's journey. No single meaning is intended. It is enough if the reader senses the anguish in the poet's heart.

Nishiwaki's mention of the red flowers may suggest the sensitivity of the Japanese poet to nature, despite the intellectual character of his thought, but his attitude toward nature was quite unlike that of the Shiki poets, whose sensitivity toward the traditionally admired flowers, birds, and the like fell into familiar patterns. The poet Ayukawa Nobuo stated: "Nishiwaki's nature is a nature discovered by destroying the order of the traditional sensitivity. He may be said in this respect to have discovered a new nature for modern poets. We find in Nishiwaki's world an instant of joy at the discovery of something fresh and quite different, even in the same sights of nature, because it has been freed from the spell of the old sensitivity."

In Nishiwaki's poetry the familiar elements of traditional Japanese poetry—not only the sights of nature but the awareness of the transience of the world and similar Buddhist concepts—acquired new meaning because of his fundamentally un-Japanese approach to the Japanese language itself. One critic put it: "Nishiwaki looked at the faculties of the Japanese language from the viewpoint of the European languages, rather than from within the tradition of the Japanese language itself; this enabled him to discover and open up an entirely new dimension in Japanese."

Nishiwaki has sometimes been called the "Eliot of Japan." Certainly there are elements in common between the two poets, such as the use of allusion and parody; but their differences are apparent from their attitudes toward tradition. Eliot stood on a foundation of Western European culture, and drew his references from what he considered to be the body of culture common to cultivated men in a half-dozen countries; but Nishiwaki's references are mainly to sources outside his own tradition. The distant past to which he refers is not that of his ancestors, the dancers gone under the hill of Eliot's poem, but "phantom men" of no country and no ascertainable time. He refers on occasion to Japanese poets and poetry, not to establish his spiritual descent so much as to demonstrate that Japanese poets, as sensitive human beings, shared certain basic, underlying beliefs with the great poets of other countries. In an article written in 1961 called "Surrealism and Myself," he described his early readings in Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, and Eliot. He wrote:

I came ultimately to the conviction that the lifeblood of poetry was what from long ago has been called "unanticipated juxtaposition," or what Baudelaire referred to as surnaturalisme or ironie. In short, the important elements in a poem are supernatural and surrealistic; the Surrealism of Goll and Breton was only one manifestation of this spirit. My views of Surrealism were not specifically derived from either Goll or Breton. I merely attempted to explain the general principles of modern poetry. The great Japanese poet Bashō was also a pioneer of Surrealism.

Nishiwaki describes Bashō as a pioneer, and no doubt he knew Bashō's works well, but he does not suggest any particular connection between himself and Bashō that is more intimate than his relationship with Baudelaire. He sees the same "phantom man" operating within Bashō, Baudelaire, and himself.

This approach to the past resulted in a different poetic stance from Eliot's. Eliot is intellectual, responding to and continuing tradition; but Nishiwaki is prevailingly lyrical, responding to the subconscious memory of "phantom men" close to the world of eternity.

Nishiwaki's poetry has sometimes been attacked for its aloofness from the problems afflicting the world. His tacit refusal to write poetry during the period of Japanese militarism of the 1930s and 1940s is grudgingly admired by his critics, but they find his withdrawal into silence no substitute for genuine resistance:

The hellish advance of nationalism did not in the least intrude into the kingdom of uncertain nationality that was Nishiwaki's world of poetry. When the insane reality had mounted to such a degree that he could no longer protect his kingdom, he gave up overt acts in the form of poetry, and chose instead the blank of silence. But we cannot call this "poetic resistance." It was no more than an expression of the concentrated crisis in Japanese poetry, as symbolized in Nishiwaki's poems.

Nishiwaki's insistence on the "purity" of poetry, on the undesirability of making poetry serve any purpose other than its own, drew the fire of committed critics as early as 1930. He was denounced for harboring the escapist feelings of a man who has lost the courage to face reality, feelings he masked by his assertion that the poet must destroy humdrum reality before he can create new and fresh poetic insights. But Nishiwaki's long silence, broken only after the war ended, was more than escapism, and his decision to write poetry again involved more than a mere profiting by the favorable atmosphere for new poetry. The activities of the militarists dismayed him, but he was also dismayed when, in the bleak days after the end of the war, the Japanese attempted to forget Japan. Nishiwaki is said to have described his efforts in The Traveler Does Not Return as "gathering the fallen ears" left after the holocaust, and as "writing with a brush on the sooty shade of a lantern in a country inn" poems suited to a typically Japanese atmosphere. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko said these poems were the product of "the mental state of Nishiwaki Junzaburō, a Japanese who, as the result of defeat in the war, no longer was in a mood (and no longer had the leeway) to be an avant-garde artist."

The best of Nishiwaki's postwar collections is probably Kindai no Gūwa (1953), to which he himself gave the English title Modern Fable Poems. The title poem was originally called "April Fables," and the first line was "April fables are truly sad," an obvious reference to the opening line of The Waste Land. The collection as a whole, as Nishiwaki's preface stated, consisted of poems "written from time to time, from a single poetic viewpoint, with the object of comforting people."

The poems in the collection are marked by a stronger note of loneliness than before, but also by an irony and even a humor that gives them a uniquely bittersweet atmosphere. "Ichigatsu" ("January") is especially moving:

The season of priests is upon us.
Who was that priest
Who first discovered the scent of the narcissus?
When it comes to beauty, a naked tree
Has it over a naked goddess.
This is the season of crystals forming in the black earth, of roots.
A man sticks out his hand from a yellow clump of bamboos

And snaps the jewels of fruit from the vines.
An oak, like a broken harp,
Lets droop a single strand of green hair.
No bees or women to sing the tune of lonely spring.
That man is still among the thorn bushes,
Squatting and thinking.

Murano Shirō gave this interpretation of the poem: the mention of Buddhist priests (bōzu) in the first line can be taken as a symbol of dignity and control of the passions, but probably it is an abstract and somewhat comic way of expressing the "nothingness" of midwinter. The priest in the second line, on the other hand, is a member of humanity, rather than an abstraction; he has sniffed out the first faint fragrance of the narcissus to comfort himself in the bleakness of winter. The winter is depicted in terms of bare branches, of frost and ice, of roots in the earth. It is not the season of woman, preserver of the seed; and even the man stretching out his hand to pick a last fruit is a lonely, small figure.

"January" shows the traditional Japanese sensitivity to the seasons, but it is expressed in language that owes little to Japanese tradition, and the whole scene has been filtered through a Western sensibility. Other poems in the collection, though varied in subject and mood, confirm the general impression given by "January." The expression is indirect and sometimes even obscure, but the beauty of the imagery can be intuitively felt, and the mood of each poem is securely established. The effects achieved may suggest those of traditional Japanese poetry in the economy of means and the skillful juxtaposition of imagery, but Nishiwaki's poetic past is European rather than Japanese. Nevertheless, the language he uses is Japanese, the landscapes before his eyes or in his mind are Japanese, and he has found in such poetic features as an intense feeling for the seasons a congruence between his European tastes and Japanese tradition. He is an international poet who has exercised a profound influence on the poetry of one nation.