Shuntaro Tanikawa-Japanese poet

Shuntaro Tanikawa

(Japan, 1931) 
 Born in 1931, Tanikawa was a middle-school student at the end of the war. He was just young enough to have been spared the pain and despair experienced by those poets who faced death, loss and devastation during the war. And yet his thoughts were never too far away from death, which was colourlessly woven into his worldview, lending his work philosophical depth.

Following the end of World War Two, a group of young Japanese poets who had survived the battlefield and military oppression were determined to create a new poetry of their own, one which totally negated the poetic conventions and traditions of the pre-war era. Their poetry was characterised by angst, pain and fear, and was overshadowed by death. Out of this poetic movement came a series of anthologies, based on the group’s new poetics. The Waste Land in 1951 was the first of these annual anthologies, which continued to 1958.

In 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect, marking the end of the Occupation by Allied Forces begun in 1945. Japan was well on the path to recovery from the war’s devastation under its new democratic constitution. Socio-political changes were generating hope and creative energy within society.

It was against this background that Tanikawa launched his career as a fresh voice, set apart from those of the post-World War Two poets, resonating with the spirit of new times. On the occasion of the publication of Tanikawa’s first Collected Poems in 1968, poet and critic Shiro Murano wrote, “Right from the first volume, Alone in Two Billion Light Years, no book of poetry in post-World War Two [Japan] has been as spectacular as Tanikawa’s. It is astounding to see that his poetry is so widely beloved, yet shows absolutely no sign of compromise.” In the decades since, Tanikawa has maintained the position of being the foremost poet in Japan, in terms of both his widely acknowledged artistry and his unprecedented popularity, having garnered a huge following among the general public.

Tanikawa has published over 60 books of poetry, encompassing lyrical poems, analytical prose poems, narrative poems, epic poems, satirical poems and highly experimental poems. In virtually every book of poetry he consciously and artfully adopts a different mode and style and has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Japanese poetry throughout his career. His words are clear, his lines are easy to understand, yet his poetry is highly sophisticated. He says he writes like Beethoven – who was said to have written music through great pain and with considerable effort – and yet makes his lines look as effortless as the work of Mozart, known for the ease with which he could compose. As singer-songwriter Akiko Yano writes: “A very complex wiring is employed, but it’s as if his methods and techniques are all hidden beneath the surface, which is itself fully covered by a pretty stainless material . . . and I think to myself ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be great if I could write a poem like that?’”

Over the years, Tanikawa has been actively involved in poetry readings and has participated in poetry festivals both in Japan and around the world. He has visited all continents except for Antarctica and has collaborated with various international writers, creating linked poems and dialogue poems. His poetry has been widely translated into Mongolian, Korean, Chinese and most Eastern and Western European languages. He has received many awards, recognitions and prizes for his poetry. His work (in Tian Yuan’s translation) was widely praised across China, where it received two awards, of which one was the prestigious Zhongkun International Poetry Award of Beijing University in 2011.

Tanikawa has also been very active in promoting and supporting the translation of other contemporary Japanese poets, helping to make their work available to readers around the world. 

Some of his poems

Self Introduction

I am an old man, short and bald
For over half a century
I have spent my life grappling with words:
nouns, verbs, postpositional particles, question marks and the like
Now I rather prefer silence

I do not dislike mechanical tools
Though I love trees, too, including shrubs
I am not good at remembering their names
I am somewhat indifferent to dates in the past
I harbor antipathy against so-called authority

I am cross-eyed, astigmatic and presbyopic
My house has no Buddhist altar or Shinto shrine, but
I have a gigantic mail box that connects directly to my room
Sleep is a sort of pleasure for me
If I dream, I do not remember it when I awake

All the above are facts, but
once I put them down in words like this, somehow they do not ring true
I have two independent children and four grandchildren, do not keep a cat or a dog
In summer I am in T-shirts most of the time
A price may be paid for the words I write

The River

Earth-colored water hesitates, flows
I realize it is a river
The descendant of formless underground dwellers,
the water is heading toward the sea, that much I know
but I don’t know when and how it welled up

As the train crosses the river a young woman next to me yawns
There is something welling up, too, from the shadowy depth of her mouth
Suddenly I realize my brain is more dull-witted than my flesh

Feeling uneasy that I, the flesh, riding a train,
am made mostly of water
I, the brain, prop myself up with words

Sometime in a distant past, somewhere in a distant place
words were much less voluminous, but
their ties to the nether world were perhaps much stronger

Water remains on this planet
morphing into seas, clouds, rains and ice
Words, too, cling to this planet
morphing into speeches, poems, contracts and treaties

I, too, cling to this planet

To Meet “Me”

Veer off the national highway onto the prefectural road,
turn left again onto a village road and come to the end
“Me” lives there
It’s a “Me” that is not myself

It’s a modest house
a dog barks at me
some vegetables are planted in the yard
As always I sit on the ledge of the house
a cup of roasted-leaf tea is served
no greetings are offered

I was given birth by my mother
“Me” was birthed by my words
Which is the true me?
I am sick and tired of this topic, but
as “Me” suddenly starts to wail
I choke on my tea

The shriveled breasts of a senile Mom
that’s the dead-end of my birthplace,
says “Me”, sobbing terribly
But as I gaze at the daytime moon in silence
it slowly begins to settle in my mind
that the beginning and the end go farther than that

The day has ended
Listening to frogs
we fall asleep in futons placed side by side
both “Me” and I are now

It's morning

First I stretch myself in bed
I rise up in one breath
I go take a pee
I fetch newspapers
I am a miniscule power plant

The power of dry leaves falling
The power of tears from a fussing child
The power of the resonance of a Jews’ harp moving away
The power of casually placed punctuation
The power of Good Morning!

An invisible matrix
unites miniscule powers
I am one of its joints, too
A globe is placed on the table
I try to stare down the Earth

I drink a glass of carrot juice
I turn on my desktop computer
I sit unfocused for a little while
Unexpected words come to me
like water bubbles, like now