Rats’ Nests. The Collected Poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro
Rats’ Nests. The Collected Poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro (Translations of Modern Japanese Poetry Series) by Hagiwara Sakutaro
In Front of the Bridge…. October 1, 2000
By the end of the nineteenth century, several anthologies of Western literature had been translated and published introducing Japanese writers to a variety of new literary styles and genres. After a long and natural period of imitation and derivative writing, as a result of the fresh exposure to the outside world, Japan, deeply affected by its centuries of sakoku or forced isolation, produced its first truly modern poet in Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942). Born northwest of Tokyo in Maebashi, “in front of the bridge,” at the center of Japan, Hagiwara made himself into a Japanese Baudelaire, writing in an at times obscure symbolist free verse, in the colloquial tongue, about alcoholics, bars, squalid love, and sin. He also acknowledged Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski as Western writers who were important to him, while an heir of the lyrics of Saigyo and Basho. Hagiwara has been commonly recognized by Japanese critics as the most important modern Japanese poet since the publication of his first book of poems in 1917, Howling at the Moon, which he wrote in provincial Maebashi, often longing for life in Tokyo where he did at times live. In “Sad Moonlit Night,” Hagiwara gives voice to his sense of life in modern Japan, after hearing a dog howling on a wharf: A damned thief dog is howling at the moon above the rotting wharf. A soul listens, and in gloomy voices, yellow daughters are singing in chorus, singing in chorus, on the wharf’s dark stonework.
Always, why am I like this, dog, pale unhappy dog? (tr. Hiroaki Sato)
The symbolic moon of Saigyo no longer reflects transcendence but misery, alienation, self-pity, and despair, a psyche as distressed as the “damned” dog. Hagiwara is painfully conscious that something is lacking in or has gone wrong with “the rotting wharf” of modern life. At the end of the poem, identifying not with the moon but with the howling dog, he further projects his own feelings of loneliness and unhappiness and ponders the nature of the modern self, lost and restlessly struggling in the same malaise as the West. In 1925 Hagiwara published a collection of poems that includes “Owatari Bridge,” which I quote in full. The Japanese poet and critic Miyoshi Tatsuji wrote about this poem that “It is not only the jewel among Hagiwara Sakutaro’s poems, but a masterpiece that occupies a prominent place among the countless poems written since shintaishi [new style poetry] became free verse”:
The long bridge they’ve erected here No doubt goes from lonely Sosha village straight to Maebashi town. Crossing the bridge I sense desolation pass through me. Carts go by loaded with goods, men leading the horses. And restless, nagging bicycles. When I cross this long bridge Twilight hunger stabs me.
Ahh–to be in your native place and not go home! I’ve suffered to the full griefs that sting like salt. I grow old in solitude. How to describe the fierce anger today over bitter memories? I will tear up my miserable writings And throw every scrap into the onrushing Tone River. I am famished as a wolf. Again and again I clutch at the railing, grind my teeth,
But it does no good: something like tears spills out, Flows down my cheeks, unstanched. Ahh–how contemptible I have been all along! Past me go carts loaded with goods, men leading the horses. This day, when everything is cold, the sky darkens over the plain. (tr. Donald Keene)
Having lived for a year and a half in Maebashi, where I taught at Gunma University, I cannot read this poem without stirring up my deepest emotions. While it is true that Maebashi is a provincial town, since everything of cultural importance to most Japanese takes place in Tokyo, I can’t share Hagiwara’s bitter feelings. I have many warm memories of Maebashi which is now surely less isolated than during Hagiwara’s lifetime, or even when I was there. Almost daily I saw the cemetery of the Buddhist Shojun temple where Hagiwara’s remains are buried. It was while I was living in Maebashi that I first forced myself to read Baudelaire and recall reading him on the express train from nearby Takasaki to Tokyo. Crossing the Tone River on its bridges at least a couple of times a week, I enjoyed the sight of fishermen in rubber waders fly casting, the bridge crowded with bicycles, often children on their way to school. Hagiwara’s poem “Owatari Bridge” impresses deeply upon me how the state of the consciousness of the individual poet affects perception. Accepting the decadent clichés of the poète maudit of modern Western literature, Hagiwara chose to view life through tainted, distorting lenses. Standing between express cars, rocking along between Maebashi and Tokyo, I knew Baudelaire’s vision of life, though true in terms of social change and loss, was essentially unhealthy, the product of a sick mind. Modern life in Maebashi helped me to understand that. Unfortunately, Hagiwara never learnt that lesson but ended his ever-darkening life, as he put it, “in the shadow of the hazy landscape of Nihilism,” writing poems heavily influenced by Nietzsche while militarism took over his country.