Tachihara Michizō: Poetics of “Pure Lyricism” (Introduction and Translation of Poems)

Abstract

Tachihara Michizō (1914–1939) succeeded in refashioning the poetic language of the 1930s, inventing the genre of the “pseudo-sonnet,” which would prove to be the most convincing attempt to adapt the European sonnet to Japanese poetry. Tachihara was fascinated by German romanticism, in particular Friedrich Hölderlin, but he cannot be called a westernizer. Tachihara did not work in traditional Japanese poetic genres, but studied the anthology Shinkokinshū, which had a major influence on his stylistics. Tachihara’s poems seem to be detached from everyday life: with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the subsequent militarization of society, the themes of his poetry did not change. A close examination of his work reveals that the changes in society were also a concern to Tachihara, a sickly young man who was not subject to conscription. His poems are monotonous: they are either landscape sketches or love poems, the choice of vocabulary or themes varies little from collection to collection. His poetry’s attitude is not one of novelty, but of full disclosure of feeling/emotion/plot. A separate field of his work is architecture. He graduated from the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University, then he worked for two years as an architect. This article analyses the main motifs of his work, their stylistic and ideological origins. A translation of his major poetry collections, published during Tachihara’s lifetime, is annexed.

Keywords

• tachihara michizō
• shiki journal
• japanese romanticism
• japanese sonnet