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The Four Thousand Days and Nights ~ A few words
on Ryuichi Tamura
Ryuichi Tamura (田村隆 ~ Tamura Ryūichi ) was born in
Otsuka, Tokyo in 1923. He graduated from the Third Tokyo High School
in 1940 and entered the Literature Department of Meiji University
in 1941. He was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Navy
in 1943, serving at the Yokosuka Second Naval Barracks as an instructor with
the Naval Flying Corps. This would have seen him when necessary having also to
man one of the gun emplacements in the case of an American invasion and,
although this never happened, because of the USA’s nuclear strikes, he had
already lost a good many friends in the Kamikaze missions, and his hometown no
longer existed - this would obviously have a major impact on his writing.
His career as a poet started before the war. Whilst still in his teens, he contributed to the coterie* magazine Shin-ryodo (New Territory**), with Taro Kitamura a fellow student & member of the Arechi (The Waste Land) group. It was in the post-war period, with the revival of Arechi and with Tamura being instrumental in establishing it as a literary magazine with his surviving friends, that his reputation took off. The Arechi poets mixed the influences of T.S Elliot and W.H. Auden with the Existentialist musings of writers such as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre to express their perception of themselves and through that their country. This featured a harder tone than had been previously seen in Japanese poetry, and perfectly described the sense of dislocation and crisis that was the post-war experience of most Japanese as they tried to come to terms with the destruction and onslaught of a rapid modernisation programme that saw most of what was originally considered to be “Nihon”*** being brushed aside.
This was the subject matter of his first anthology Yosen
no hi no yoru ("Four Thousand Days and Nights", 1956),
particularly in the title poem which starts;
In order for a single poem to come into existence
you and I have to kill,
have to kill many things,
many lovable things, kill by shooting, kill by assassination,
kill by poisoning.
He followed this with the publication of his second
collection The World Without Words, in 1962. This was to establish him
as a major poet and would see him universally regarded as an important figure
in modern Japanese poetry. In 1998, Ryuichi Tamura received Japan's highest
honour, The 54th Japan Academy of Arts Award for Poetry. Later that same year,
he died of cancer of the oesophagus.
EMPEROR.
There are eyes in the stone, the eyesclosed in grief and fatigue.The man in black passes my door -You, the Emperor of Winter,my lonely Emperor, walking to your owngrave in Europe,your white forehead shadowed bycivilisationyour back to the sun.Your self-punishment is so painful,Flowers! You stretch out your hands tothem.But universal winter has set inafter the era of reason and progress.European beauties are nothing butfantasies.Who will kiss your handswhose fated palms are dark and dry andbarren?Flowers! Those scars are flowers.
* Japanese poets usually form groups of like-minded writers with the aim of helping each other to become better poets & they usually publish their own magazines - such groups are called coteries.
** A title in homage to Michael Roberts's anthology of contemporary English
poetry New Country.
*** The
constitutional monarchy occupying the Japanese Archipelago.
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Thanks for that Gary - a great introduction to a writer I hadn't heard of before :) Has anyone else tried Tamura? Do you have any favourite Japanese poets?
If you are itching to post on your favourite Japanese writer, just let me know - next time, it could be your post adorning the blog ;)
*****
Thanks for that Gary - a great introduction to a writer I hadn't heard of before :) Has anyone else tried Tamura? Do you have any favourite Japanese poets?
If you are itching to post on your favourite Japanese writer, just let me know - next time, it could be your post adorning the blog ;)
