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This paper offers a historical and aesthetic discussion of the influence that Keats’s poetry had on Japanese modern poetry. The enthusiastic reception of Keats in the period roughly ranging from 1880 to 1910 coincided with Meiji Japan’s obsessive appropriation of Western culture. The coincidence between the acceptance of Keats and Japan’s Westernization articulates a situation not solely attributable to the incorporation of Western poetic diction and imagery into Japanese poetry. Rather, Keats’s influence on Japanese poetry was an extension of the contemporary changes in perception that had been cultivated through the reading of Chinese literature. The transformation in the mode of perception illuminates how English Romantic poetry initiated a turning point in the cognition of Meiji literati to reinvent landscape in a new language; the acceptance of Keats in Japan advanced a process that enabled modern Japanese poets to defamiliarize conventional topoi and invent a new, more “real” landscape.
The enthusiastic reception of Keats in the Meiji period from around 1880 to 1910
coincided with the larger process of Japan’s obsessive appropriation of Western
culture. In their acknowledgement of Keats’s art, Japanese poets experimented
with alternative voices that deviated from conventional aesthetic codes
embodying premodern modes of perceiving the external world. In other words,
introduction to Keats enabled modern Japanese poets to defamiliarize
conventional topoi and invent an alternative, more “real” landscape. This paper
considers how Keats’s poetry initiated a turning point in the cognition of Meiji
literati leading to their reinvention of landscape. The newly invented landscape
illuminates the modes of expression they acquired to project the internal space
of the self—the inner self that vigorously swells into expression and
articulates lyrical passion and intensity.
As Augustin Berque argues, aesthetic modes invent “landscape”; without modes of cognition, there can only exist the pre-artistic conditions of “circumstance” (49–50). It is the aesthetically educated “eye” which composes the vision of scenes into “landscape.” Similarly, in his highly influential book,
[M]edieval European painting and landscape painting share something in common that differentiates them from modern landscape painting. In both,The issue is, as Karatani points out, our lack of awareness that “the painter is not looking at an object but envisioning the transcendental” (21). Therefore, to deviate from the established “transcendental vision,” modes of poetic vision have to be replaced byplace is conceived of in transcendental terms. For a brush painter to depict a pine grove meant to depict the concept (that which is signified by) “pine grove,” not an existing pine grove. This transcendental vision of space had to be overturned before painters could see existing pine groves as their subjects. (27)
Consequently, the exploration of the unfamiliar terrain of English poetry involved implementing a transformation of the conventional Japanese mode of perception to a new aesthetic manner. The absorption of English Romantic poetry was not only a matter of semiotic change in the relationship between language and things, but it also meant inventing landscape by abandoning the transcendental model which the premodern Chinese literature had historically constructed in Japan. Karatani accurately regards the birth of the “inner man” stationed in “an introverted, solitary situation” as the occasion in which landscape was “discovered” (25). Landscape does not exist as what is outside. The “external world” itself had to be “discovered” (26). For the new poetry, it was the “inner man,” who did not “look outside,” that was able to reinvent “landscape” and demonstrate the period’s alienation from the transcendental vision of landscape (25). A more “real” landscape was formulated in the radical innovative mode of expression, which was developed to project the introverted self.
Indeed, a metamorphosis in perception was required to engender a modern poetic mode that challenged the aesthetic codes informed by the premodern legacy of Japanese literature. In alignment with the reformative movement, Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), who is regarded as having instituted a new language in his novel
I have never had any ideas about what style I should choose to describe nature. Neither do I care much about a particular literary style for depicting nature. In any case, you can choose whatever style you might like. However, we should take it into consideration that the writers, who are cultivated enough to appreciate the numerous travelogue-styledKunikida proposed an appropriate response to nature, aiming to drive poetry instinctively towards the “real” entities of the external world. A writer’s motives to reproduce the natural world originate in subjectivity, the human agency that responds dynamically to the visible object. Turning away from the formats prescribed by traditional criteria, the poet’s perception is valorized by envisioning “nature”waka compositions, and read and skillfully manipulate passages from the Chinese, tend to intensively focus on the style of writing, and end up ruining nature as their subject. To observe and depict nature, we have to describe simply what we see and what we intuitively perceive. (299)The translation of the quotation from Kunikida is my own.
Historically, the established modes of imagery, rhythm, and diction in
traditional Japanese verse were overshadowed by the long-cultivated aesthetics
derived from Chinese literature and Japan’s own literary legacy of
A stock visual vocabulary of signs—a mountain, a pine tree and a
waterfall—pre-conceptualizes the actual scenery to the extent that in the
While people traditionally shared enculturated perspectives for viewing the world, the entrenched artifice in the Chinese context had exhausted the possibility for profuse meanings of “real” nature, and it gradually eroded other possible conceptions of the natural in poetry. In fact, in pre-Meiji poetry, “real” nature had always been a vital presence, but modern Japanese poets were confronted by a burgeoning awareness of “landscape” and the necessity of overthrowing prolonged Chinese influence.
For instance, Tayama Katai (1871–1930), who made a great contribution to the
original Japanese style of the
The illustrations of pine trees and rocky shore convey the
poet’s alienation from the addressed beloved. However, Tayama’s utterly
conventional fabrication of the seascape and its environs is largely dissociated
from his subjectivity. The
The year 1897 was crucial in its heralding of a new age of Japanese poetry—it was the year Shimazaki Toson (1872–1943), one of the period’s leading men of letters, published his first book of lyrical poems entitled
Shimazaki’s “Song of Autumn” adjusts the already-established codes of autumn to a sense of pathos, employing the seven-and-five-syllable meter characteristic of traditional Japanese verse. However, his subtle celebration of autumn reaches for the radically unconventional images of an aeolian harp and a cup of wine, derived from Coleridge and Keats respectively. The Japanese autumnal landscape blessed by nature’s prolific growth and conventionally enhanced by the yellow and brown hues of rice fields and chestnuts, is associated with Western figures of the harp and the purple wine. Moreover, in the last stanza, by granting “you” a face aware of winter’s approach, the poem extends the pathos of life’s transiency, so that the first person narrator wishes to share this melancholy with “you,” by asking to play the pipe while the “I” sings. The “I” attempts to overcome the evanescence of life by finding consolation in love and in the arts; and this escapist manner of lamentation is highly reminiscent of the Keats’s imaginative flight away with the nightingale. In this way, the scene is embellished with Keatsian poetic visions, and the poet’s attempts at observation and description reveal significant adjustments to a pathetic autumnal landscape with the introduction of intoxicating wine and subsequent melancholy. Eventually, Shimazaki’s “Song of Autumn” renovates the formulaic autumn scene by remarking on the sensuous pleasure of ripeness and the pathos of time’s transiency producing the season’s dynamic disharmonies.Autumn has come. Autumn has come. On one leaf and flower, dew gathers. Caressed by the breeze, the sound of the harp has touched The unripe vines with dark purple hue, And the grapes naturally mellow into wine. (1–6) 秋は来ぬ (a ki ha ki nu) 秋は来ぬ (a ki ha ki nu) 一葉は花は露ありて (hi to ha wa ha na wa tsu yu a ri te) 風のきて弾く琴の音に (ka ze no ki te hi ku ko to no ne ni) 青き葡萄は紫の (a o ki bu do u ha mu ra sa ki no) 自然の酒とかはりけり (si ze n no sa ke to ka ha ri ke ri)
Autumn has come. Autumn has come. On all autumn flowers in late bloom and the early florescence, A winter frost will form. Fill a cup of sorrow With pleasant wine. (7–12) 秋は来ぬ 秋は来ぬ おくれさきだつ秋草も みな夕霜のおきどころ 笑ひの酒を悲みの 盃にこそつぐべけれ
Autumn has come. Autumn has come. All leaves and trees turn to red hues. Who could not be intoxicated with autumn? I feel melancholy seeing your face with a wise visage. So you, pipe, and I will sing. (13–18) 秋は来ぬ 秋は来ぬ くさきも紅葉するものを たれかは秋に酔はざらめ 智恵あり顔のさみしさに 君笛を吹けわれはうたはん
Predictably, however, Shimazaki’s poetry was not totally dissociated from the established literary criteria of traditional Japanese form, because the addressed “you” is an impersonal figure, and the expressive mode of “you” functions as a rhetorical figuration solely to articulate the other person to whom the “I” vainly dedicates his love (Isoda, “
Intriguingly, discerning a new mode for describing nature, Shimazaki was attracted to Keats’s idiosyncratic and highly subjective application of the term “indolence” in reading Book II of
From this perspective, we can see that Japanese literature customarily shared
received narratives in order to embrace the public sphere, but this was never
received as the dissociated space of private territory. For instance, the elite
samurai were well-grounded in literary knowledge appropriated from Chinese
literature. This cultivation of literary taste endorsed an ideal which worked to
both the public and the private good, enabling better comprehension of how the
world was organized in the service of the nation, while also educating
individuals in aesthetic taste as a samurai’s silent but eloquent proof of
devotion to his lord. Instead of advocating dilettantism, the samurai’s
self-cultivation of tastes in Chinese literature involved a common cause of
loyalty and patriotism, since the style modeled on Chinese classical literature
was employed in contemporary political and diplomatic scenes, and the
acquisition of a thorough knowledge of Chinese writings meant the samurai’s
constant awareness of affairs of state (Saito 126–29). Therefore, the Japanese
literary milieu entailed a preestablished harmony between the individual and the
public sphere, disclaiming the deployment of the individual as an isolated
figure cut off from the outer world (Isoda, “English Romanticism” 150).
As Augustin Berque argues, in Western aesthetics since the Renaissance, when the
concept of “landscape” was instituted, the cognitive mode of seeing had
presupposed the Cartesian model based on the demarcation between the subject and
the outer world, a clear division witnessed later in the device of the
Conversely, the Meiji literati regarded themselves as socially integrated presences, devoted to public virtue, and simultaneously refined both private and national tastes, having acquired the aesthetic codes established through Chinese literature. However, in the process of Japan’s economic and cultural Westernization, a clearer articulation of inner identity was to gain prominence over a harmonious attitude toward the external world. Eventually, the formulation of a modern autonomous self engendered a greater sense of human agency in Japanese aesthetics, which inflected the outer world with a deeper interiority and invented a new phenomenology of landscape through a new mode of seeing. Indeed, in the Meiji era, the literary sensibility derived from the Chinese context came to be destabilized through the techniques gained from the West, establishing a more engaged interaction with the modern private self.
Therefore, the acceptance of Romantic poetry implies that Japanese poets were
conscious that the communally adopted stance with which to perceive the visible
object could be modified, and they confronted this by observing the phenomenal
presence of the outer world. Over and against the cultural climate embedded in
the Chinese context, the process of revolutionizing Japanese culture focused
less on the balance between the communal sphere and private interest than on the
centrality of the individual. Unlike the integrated classical chorus, modern
voices could be realized through the celebration of a landscape invoking the
introverted space of the private self. Indeed, there was a prevailing sense that
a
In effect, the Westernization movement initiated
In fact, as in Romantic poetry, Japanese traditional
Struggling to explore visions embedded in the inner self, the Japanese poets needed a gestation period to invent a new mode of expression. Japanese Romantic landscape was to finally gain ground in the work of Susukida Kyukin (1877–1945). His first volume of poems
Bodily imagery enters to convey agony, not through the distance of metaphor, but through the immediate description of the “emaciated arm,” as in Keats’s agony in his “living hand” (“This living hand” 1), or Hyperion’s “giant nerve” (Brewed in the deep-cooled cellar, Its light purple turned to a deep hue, A cup of wine with bubbles, Bring to my lips. Bewildered by the waning Spring, I found my emaciated arm getting cold. (1–6) 冷たき土窟に釀されて、(tsu me ta ki mu ro ni ka mo sa re te) 若紫の色深く、 (wa ka mu ra sa ki no i ro fu ka ku) 泡さく酒の盃を、(a wa sa ku sa ke no sa ka zu ki o) 吾唇に含ませよ、(wa ga ku chi bi ru ni fu ku ma se yo) 暮れ行く春を顫きて、 (ku re yu ku ha ru o wa na na ki te) 細き腕の冷ゆる哉。 (ho so ki ka i na no hi yu ru ka na)
The next stanza witnesses
The fallen petals of the cherry blossoms resonate with the
transience of pleasure and the pathos of the human journey towards the ground
and the final burial beneath flowers. In this distinct appearance,
Tracing
In the next stanza, as the poet shifts his gaze from the
shades of the flowers to the dusk, the bright star which heralds Summer’s return
holds him in derision, causing an anguished recognition of the difference
between the eternally glittering starlight and mortal existence, as in Keats’s
“Bright Star.” Then his indolent but intense sensory impressions occur within
the darkness:
Susukida expands his poetic effects in a further range of
sensory impressions: the Japanese harp added to the peony and its fragrance.
Whereas according to the poetic convention, peonies, like
Yet, the last stanza suddenly bursts into an unprecedented intensity of feeling:
The spring dusk might extinguish the poet’s passion, which he
hopes does not burn itself out, as it is the very feverish emotion that the
fading Flora inspired, although she too almost expires in her vitality. However
overwhelming the ephemeral visions in the Spring dusk seem, the landscape is
entirely dominated by the “burning passion” through which
Susukida envisions the evening as the introverted darkness within the poet,
whereas Keats defined a valley or a bower as a place to celebrate the extreme
feelings of pleasure and pain. These specific spaces are also shared by
Susukida, who embraces the opportunity to dramatize the inner self in the
passion and intensity of sensuous imagery. In particular, Susukida reinvents the
conventional Japanese scenery with his own personalized Romantic formulae,
rather than restrictively borrowing from the catalogue of Westernized imagery.
The particular configuration of the spring dusk,