Here’s another post on Kyoto poets and poetry by our guest contributor, Keiji Minato. Keiji writes…
Last time I took up Yosa Buson, a great poet-cum-painter in the 18th century. The topic this time is a man who also both wrote poetry and left great paintings, but in a totally different era.
MURAYAMA Kaita (村山槐太; 1896-1919) was born in Yokohama but grew up in Okazaki, Kyoto City. He started to paint and write as an early teenager, and, according to a chronology, “fascinated with Edgar Allan Poe, he wandered around Kaguraoka [which is now usually called Yoshida-yama, near Kyoto University] with a grotesque masque he himself devised and strolled in the east side of the ancient capital playing the ocarina in primitive intoxication.”* Such experience is clearly reflected in his early poetry.
The poem entitled “A Lively Evening (にぎやかな夕ぐれ; nigiyaka na yugure)” is fascinating in its use of the Kyoto dialect. It begins:
「にぎやかな夕ぐれやおへんか (Nigiyakana yugure ya ohen ka)
ほんまににぎやかやおへんか (Honma nigiyaka ya ohen ka)」
“It’s a lively evening, isn’t it?
What a lively evening it is!”
These lines are repeated throughout the poem. Translated in English they certainly lose their original registers. In the original the speaker is a maiko or geiko in Kyoto, with their typical way of speaking, with coquetry and pride. The poem goes on:
What is so lively? What is lively?
It’s all pale blue in the evening.
Beautiful sky on Mt. Higashiyama
Purple beads like rain on Mt. Higashiyama
Stars in a spring sky drunken as if with gore
Stars in purplish red
“What a lively evening it is!”
Passing through are ladies in groups
as wanton as their matching jewelry
shining on the white-powdered skin
Probably, it is more like the Paris of Charles Baudelaire (not Poe’s grotesquerie), with a decadent air in an ancient city. In the last article about Buson I wrote about the narrowness of Kyoto City, surrounded by mountains. Here too the presence of Mt. Higashiyama gives us a kind of claustrophobic feeling. The poem ends:
“It’s a lively evening, isn’t it?
How lively
That fair girl I adore is,
how beautiful is she now?”
Under Konoe-zaka the pond reflects
the sky the light-purple-starred stage
faint sounds of a silvery flute drop
from a window of my loved one’s house
“It’s a lively evening, isn’t it?
What a lively evening it is!”
Then in one-sided love I weep:
“Yet to be honest it’s lonely, isn’t it…”
A poem about unrequited love, it also successfully captures the distinctive atmosphere, wet and slightly gloomy, that you feel strolling in Gi’on, the largest old pleasure quarter in Kyoto, in the evening.
Here is another poem about the place, a tanka by YOSHII Isamu (1886-1960):
かにかくに祇園はこひし寝るときも枕の下を水の流るる
(Kanikaku ni Gi’on wa koishi Nuru toki mo Makura no shita o Mizu no nagaruru)
Whenever it is
I yearn after Gi’on
even when I am asleep
the water’s running
under my pillow
* 「エドガー・アラン・ポーに心酔しグロテスクな仮面を作りそれをかぶって神楽丘をさまよい、またオカリナという笛をふき、原始的な陶酔のまにまに洛東を逍遥していた。」Yamamoto Taro, ed. Murayama Kaita Sishu (Sekai no Shi 70). Tokyo: Yayoi-shobo, 1974.
Of Related Interest:
Poetry and Discussion with Trane DeVore
One Hundred Poets on Mount Ogura, One Poem Each
A Hokku of Yosa Buson
Introducing Keiji Minato
Songs and Stories of the Kojiki retold by Yoko Danno