Let us sing
When, worn-out by incessant battle, joints of our limbs ache,
When a deep woe visits us,
When our child suffers in deathbed,
When we see a beggar who resembles our mother,
When we have exhausted our soul in love-
Let us sing at those moments,
Gazing into a silent sky,
O my starved comrades
This book comprises much of the poetic production of Ishikawa Takuboku [石川 啄木] (1885-1912), a major literary figure of the early XX century. Restless, grieving and inspired by the ordinary, his experimental approach to traditional Japanese styles of poetry went through roughly three stages: from textbook romanticism to a more somber and austere naturalism, and then to his signature, personal style. His meandering and penniless life provided him enough bitter and harsh experiences so as to turning him into a poet of the humble and the voiceless, without ever abandoning his deeply nihilistic and cosmic ennui. In many respects Ishikawa lived as a man of his own age; the early twentieth century and its noisy detritus. Elsewhere he regrets his abandoning his small coutry village for the urban life, where men become a wolf to each other, and nature can't yield anything. Traces of alienation, alcoholism and, of course, his dying of tuberculosis are all familiar signs, which on themselves cannot pierce the individuality of Ishikawa and his moving style. Thus, let us go further.
His true name was 石川 一, Ishikawa Hajime (meaning "the first", since he was the first boy among three sisters); Takuboku means "woodpecker", and it was bestowed as a pen-name by the poet Yosano Tekkan. Mainly known for his fiction works and romantic approach to verse, his style changed shortly after. His father's losing his job and then abandoning them made so Ishikawa had to support both his mother and his sisters; he also had just married a childhood friend, Sachiko, and soon had a daughter. Thus, he had to abandon hopes of a great academic trajectory (also tainted by cheating during an exam) and focus on work, his poetic production staying at the margins -best represented at the time by bohemian circles of wandering poets and their searching for new, deeper winds to nurture Japanese poetry. Among such fantastic poets we have already listed some such as Kōtarō Takamura.
At some point, Ishikawa also would get interested in socialism, which also intermingles with much of his poetic production. This also sparked on him a human interest for those who stood in defiance to the law, many of his short poems offering vivid descriptions of people being arrested, evicted or left without job. In this, Ishikawa is among a very brief selection of Japanese poets, and undoubtely a master at his craft. This tendency to "social themes" as most academics would say also expanded to his own life: he was fired from a teaching position due to his supporting a student strike against the principal. However, openly "socialistic" poems are scarce (within this compilation, "After an Endless Discussion" is an example); usually, they are simply reflections on poverty, and the strive for survival:
No matter how hard I work
My life remains poor-
I stare at my hands in wonder
After his firing he traveled to Hakodate in order to become an editor, until then a literal fire destroyed it. Ishikawa was then forced to move between small cities in order to make a living as proof-reader, reporter and editor. His moments of peace were few and far in between, often living on small loans and quite a help from his friends and acquaintances; he often stayed away from his wife and his family. However, Ishikawa remained remarkably prolific: he wrote nine novels and a thousand poems during one year, and sometimes reached 50-100 poems in a single night. For a brief time he had an affair with a geisha (her working name being Koyakko), which sparked a period of love-related themes; however, and in his very personal fashion, these are not exactly joyful. Ishikawa's style is abrupt, almost violent: things happen as they are, and every word and situation appears as raw truth, as unmasked from the protection of ordinary language. Among these -quite frequent- introspective themes, here are two: I resent flattery The ennui
It is pitiful After pretending to be somebody
To know oneself too well What shall I compare it to?
These take an even darker turn when, at twenty four, his newborn baby Shinichi died. One among his most important works, "A handful of sand", was published right after and he used the money in order to pay for his son's funeral. On it Ishikawa defined his modern contribution to tanka by removing the syllabic limitations of the genre and allowing three lines of variable lenght (as you can see in these brief examples). Disgrace had then a feast with Ishikawa's life: two years later he himself becomes
bedridden with tuberculosis, the whole process well documented via his poems of this last period of his life. Then his mother died of the disease, Ishikawa deeply affected by her passing after enduring a life of privation. A month later Ishikawa himself dies, at age twenty-six. And just a year after, his wife Sachiko also went to her death for the same cause; the devastating epidemic -poorly addressed at the time- would still wreak havoc within Japan well past World War II. Apparently his first encounter with the disease dated back from his visit to Tokyo around 1903, during which he visited Akiko Yosano's family. Her innovative poetry had had a strong influence over Ishikawa's first productions.
Despite his financial hardships and health problems, Ishikawa proved to be not only a dedicated author but also someone capable of some social influence. His network of authors and artists included various small yet influential magazines, and he managed to meet in person important personalities such as Natsume Soseki. Moreover, he displayed some political bravery when advocating (and searching) for a lawyer's appeal in order to save Shūsui Kōtoku's life [幸徳 秋水], when Japan's first anarchist was condemned during the High Treason Incident. The casualties included Uchiyama Gudo and many other anti-war voices. Ishikawa himself also wrote some hidden anti-war poetry (especially during the annexation of Korea); these were not published at the time for obvious reasons.
Ishikawa's work was barely read about during his lifetime, and thus he belongs to that great majority of artists only remembered and valued long afer they're dead. However, he became -for obvious reasons- an important figure for all those left behind in Japanese society: the impoverished, the Coreans, the grinded workers at the brand new rising factories (also epicenters of tuberculosis and many other plagues). His demographic was thus quite different from that of Sōseki and others, better known about in polite society and academia. However, it is undisputable that Ishikawa's somber and austere approach better reflects the experiences of the vast majority of people during his lifetime, and on this front he remains undervalued. Not due to lack of style: there is a rich, deep sentimentality and imagery in his poems; but they are not for entertainment purposes. They rather belong to the kind of things often left unsaid, as in too true to say. And likewise, someone with such spirit was reading his poems in prison, barely ten years after his death: Kaneko Fumiko took over his free verse style, citing him as a model. Without ever meeting, they shared the same too-honest spirit. She -dead at 23- and him -dead at 26- wrote the following poems: Takuboku Fumiko
The flavor of things Why can't I avoid thinking
Which may be called sorrowful- Of myself at age six, when I too soon
I tasted it too early Found about the sadness of this life
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