Nakahara Chûya (1907-1937) was born in the provincial town of Yûda-onsen, Yamaguchi prefecture, located in the southernmost part of Japan’s main island of Honshû. Chûya received a decent education because of his father’s profession as a doctor, and showed literary promise at an early age, writing a number of tanka (thirty-one syllable poems) that still survive today. It was shortly after 1923, at the age of sixteen, however, that he would abandon tanka. In that year the precocious teenager discovered Dadaisuto Shinkichi no shi (The Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi), an experimental volume of poems Takahashi Shinkichi wrote after reading some articles about the dada movement in Europe. This encounter largely seems to have allowed Chûya to open up his enormous creative potential, though some critics note that some of his tanka show tension and unusual creativity, as if the poet within was about to break free from formative exercises and start down the path of originality regardless. He began to experiment with form and content, and while most agree that these early poems seem immature and largely derivative of Takahashi’s own work, the year most certainly marked a turning point. Chûya never totally abandoned dadaism in his poetry– was in fact one of the last Japanese poets to continue using its playful, disjunctive language and imagery in some of his poems– but symbolist aesthetics he learned from 19th century French poetry began to take hold soon after the painter-poet-translator Tominaga Tarô introduced him to the tradition in 1924. Chûya had come around another corner, and this one would open enormous vistas.
Chûya’s knowledge of French literature drew from both the texts themselves and from secondary reading, not to mention his conversations with literary friends like Tominaga. The availability of this material and the excitement it sparked in its readers was in some ways a product of the times– the 1920s of Japan, when a democratic, cosmopolitan spirit was quickly emerging from decades of modernization and reform. In 1868, the centuries-old policy of strict isolationism had crumbled under the pressures of encroaching colonialism and domestic unrest, taking the feudal government down with it. Acting under the auspices of the reinstated emperor, in theory if not in practice, the new de-facto leaders (many of whom were actually forward-looking members of the old regime) then launched the country on one of the most ambitious modernization projects in human history. Government officials and promising scholars in every field traveled to countries around the world to acquire new technologies and information relevant to building a modern nation state. Education and literature was one such field, and translations of European and American work began to appear in increasing numbers concomitant with new styles of native literature and criticism.
By the 1920s, the availability of foreign literature had become a reality that artists like Chûya could take for granted. Chûya in fact became a translator of French literature himself after reading the many texts and reference works at his disposal. One particularly important example was a translation of Arthur Symons’ Symbolist Movement in Literature. We know from Chûya’s journals, as well as anecdotal evidence from his contemporaries, that he took a particular interest in Symons’ characterization of Verlaine’s poetry as “pure music, the voice of a bird with a human soul.” Had we never known this, we still would have had no difficulty drawing comparisons with Verlaine. Chuya’s poetry shows enormous attention to structural devices that many characterize as musical. The apparent sound effects of his poems derive primarily from rhythm. Chûya used traditional syllabic counts of five and seven that most of us are familiar with through haiku (seventeen-syllable poems) and tanka, but he frequently tripped this rhythm with differing syllable counts, creating interesting syncopations in his language. The ensemble Suruya, whose members Chûya befriended, even used several of his early poems as lyrics to their songs. It seems that the relationship between the two may have been symbiotic; Chûya gave them poetry that could easily be set to music, and they in turn must have been some encouragement for Chûya to write poetry with carefully wrought syllabic meter.
Chûya’s development from these early years until the end of his life owes something to his relationship with Kobayashi Hideo, who would become 20th century Japan’s greatest literary critic. Not long after meeting Kobayashi in 1923, Chûya decided to devote his life to poetry, and it was to Kobayashi that Chûya sent the first of some of the poems that would appear in Yagi no uta (Poems of the Goat). The love of Chûya’s life, however, left him for Kobayashi shortly after their meeting, and more than a few readers have drawn correspondences between this event and recurring themes in his first volume of poetry. Despite the difficulties this engendered between Kobayashi and Chûya, the two remained friends throughout their lives, and Chûya would have more than a few occasions to see his muse again as well (including on his deathbed). The years until Chûya finally published his first volume in 1934 after numerous rejections appear particularly productive and eventful. He continued working with Suruya, and began publishing many of his poems in small magazines, some of which, like Yamamayu, he launched with literary colleagues such as Kobayashi. He finally began learning French, after having found so much stimulation from Symons’ work, and diverted some of his energies to translating Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud among others.
Many of the poems he wrote during these years, though pre-dating the actual publication of “Poems of the Goat,” would appear in his next volume of poetry, Arishihi no uta (Poems of Bygone Days). Although Chûya collated this volume, he never lived to see it published. He died in 1937, a thirty-year-old poet of growing fame, from cerebral meningitis. The few years between the publication of his first volume and his death were not altogether happy ones either. He managed to marry despite his bohemian ways, and continued writing and publishing prodigiously in ever more prestigious journals, but the death of his first child, Fumiya, sent him into a depression from which he never fully recovered. Many of his later poems seem like remembrances and attempts to mitigate this enormous pain, if not outright cries of personal devastation. In society at large, the freedoms and liberal trends of the 1920s had lost irreversible ground to conservative and nationalistic politics, and the colonial situation in mainland Asia in 1937 turned particularly insidious as armed conflict broke out in earnest. Perhaps strange to say– and some critics do say it– but if Chûya had to die prematurely, it was a good year to die.
The posthumous publication of “Poems of Bygone Days” might never have been possible were it not for Kobayashi, to whom Chûya gave his manuscript shortly before his death. In April and June of 1938, Kobayashi published six hundred and three hundred copies respectively. The war effort that consumed the years after that and eventually pervaded all corners of society made further publication temporarily impossible. But the end of conflict came, and Chûya’s books were reprinted several years later, this time selling tens of thousands of copies. In the decades since, sales have steadily grown, matched by the poet’s fame and critical standing. Considered along with Hagiwara Sakutarô and Kitahara Hakushû as one of 20th century Japan’s greatest poets, Chûya is not only a subject of classroom study all across Japan, but also a romantic fixture in the minds of countless readers. His portrait with the vacant, haunting stare is not as ubiquitous as Natsume Soseki’s, which appears on the thousand yen note, but it is certainly a photograph that a large percentage of Japanese recognize. Still others keep a copy of his poetry nearby, or return to a poem or two on frequent occasion, like some readers of Rilke cherish his work as if it were written for them.
Chûya’s canonicity and the availability of his work demands some mention of another critic, Ôoka Shôhei. Easily the most prolific writer on Chûya, Shôhei is also responsible for collecting and editing “The Complete Works of Nakahara Chûya.” This important collection, which includes the poet’s uncollected poems, his journals, and many letters, has gone through numerous editions, including one in six volumes published as recently as 2000. And beyond Ôoka’s own books and articles, there are literally thousands of others on the poet, including some in other major languages of the world. Nevertheless, Chûya is not well known abroad, and this is due in no small part to the limited number of translations (and translators) available.
This homepage will hopefully contribute something toward rectifying Chûya’s unfortunate obscurity outside Japan (while generating further interest among native readers). His poetry has broad appeal with themes common to everyone– love, death, memory, loneliness, and awe of nature. Offering delicate treatment of these themes with masterful aesthetic execution, Chûya demonstrates that he deserves a place in the pantheon of world poets.
Ry Beville
Berkeley, CA
2005