TOKYO -- After a while, the craze surrounding Donald Keene, who obtained Japanese citizenship following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, calmed down. The Japanese literature scholar set about writing on modernist poet Ishikawa Takuboku. His efforts were published as "The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku." The Japanese version was produced by Yukio Kakuchi, who has translated works by Keene for decades, and it became a year-and-a-half series from 2014.

The following passages taken from the book mention Masaoka Shiki -- the founder of modern haiku -- before introducing Takuboku as a poet who further revolutionized Japan's classical tanka and poems with a new sensibility.

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The poems of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), the leader of this new movement, were rarely about the beauty of cherry blossoms or colored autumn leaves and the other lovely but exhausted subjects of poetry. Instead he described in his poems what he had perceived and felt, without worrying whether they might seem unpoetic to readers of traditional poetry. Shiki's insistence on writing his poems in modern Japanese resulted in bringing tanka and haiku into the new age and saved both forms from being demolished by the European influences that swept over Japanese poets beginning in the 1880s.

This in itself did not make Shiki a modern poet. He rarely revealed, as a modern poet usually does, his deepest emotions, and he seldom referred to himself in the first person. His best-known tanka sequence requires an understanding of unspoken background poems: Shiki did not reveal that he wrote these poems when he was almost completely paralyzed from an illness that eventually killed him.

Unlike Shiki, Takuboku was a truly modern poet. About sixty years ago, Kosaka Masaaki, a professor of philosophy at Kyoto University, told me he was convinced that Takuboku was the first modern Japanese. This statement lingered in my memory, though at the time I did not know Takuboku's work well enough to understand what made him "modern".

[The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku]

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Keene's fascination with Takuboku seems to have started when he was studying at Kyoto University 60 years ago. He chose the following tanka poem from Takuboku's anthology "A Handful of Sand," along with its English translation, as shown below.

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ho ni tsutau

namida nogowazu

ichiaku no

suna wo shimeshishi

hito wo wasurezu

never forget

that man, tears

running down his face

a handful of sand

held out to show me.

The word "sand" occurs in all of the first ten poems of A Handful of Sand, Takuboku's most celebrated collection. This poem suggests the passing of time, like sand in an hourglass. Even though Takuboku does not tell us what he felt on seeing the weeping man, he makes us feel almost unbearable sympathy.

Takuboku believed that the tanka was the ideal form for a poem.

[The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku]

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While Keene had expertise in classical short poems of the Meiji era (1868-1912), he was also intrigued by Japanese diary literature from early on. Takuboku's "Romaji Diary" was a unique piece, which is said to have recorded the poet's infidelity in romanized letters so that his wife would not read them. Keene's thoughts on the diary, which he read thoroughly, are shown in the passage below.

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Although less widely read than his poetry, Takuboku's diaries are his most unforgettable works. Because they were written day by day and were not rewritten at a later date, they inevitably contain passages of only ephemeral interest, but hardly a page is without literary interest. Takuboku did not hesitate to show himself naked even when his actions were plainly foolish or deplorable. He did not keep the diaries with possible readers in mind, nor was he making a confession. He occasionally did use material from his diaries in his works of fiction, but never long passages or successfully.

[The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku]

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Keene wrote the following in an essay (originally in Japanese) after finishing his work on Takuboku.

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If one reads the diary entries in which Takuboku bared his heart, the unordinary complexity of his human side emerges. While whispering words of love for his wife, he drowned in infidelity. He felt indebted to a friend that lent him money, but broke off ties with them. While being thankful toward a poet that helped him, he also denounced them. His attitude changed constantly, and was full of contradictions. Takuboku is a poet with nationwide popularity and was loved by many Japanese people. He had angelic features and left a variety of impressive poems. Struggling to make ends meet, he also suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, and died young without receiving much treatment. His life was full of drama.

Perhaps because of his image as a magnificent poet, researchers seem to have avoided pursuing his negative aspects. However, then, you can't get a full picture. It was over 60 years ago that I read Takuboku's diary for the first time. After becoming a Japanese citizen, I was finally able to make this venture into Japanese literature's taboo, something I've wanted to do since back then.

[Donald Keene no Tokyo Shitamachi Nikki]

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Takuboku died at age 26 in April 1912, and it was only after World War II that his popularity rose. He became widely known as a "master poet who had an early death." Keene likely wanted to portray Takuboku as he was, but it took many years before he was able to write freely without reservation.

Keene was 92 when he started writing on Takuboku. Kakuchi recalls, "Naturally, it took longer for him to revise the manuscript, and he began to get more and more frustrated at himself." He may have sensed that this would be the final biography of his career.

Takuboku was the perfect subject for this final large-scale work.

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This series navigates the past century by following the life of the late scholar Donald Keene, who contributed to the elevation of Japanese culture and literature in the world. In this installment, news from the Mainichi Weekly that made headlines in Keene's time is introduced alongside Keene's personal history. The series began in 2022, the 100th anniversary of Keene's birth -- also the centennial of The Mainichi.

(This is Part 59 of a series. The next "Donald Keene's Japan" story will be published on June 18.)

(Japanese original by Tadahiko Mori, The Mainichi Staff Writer and Donald Keene Memorial Foundation director)