Satoshi Yasu

In this paper, I analyze images of violence that appear in Hagiwara Sakutarō's poetry from his early tanka to his first poetry collection Howling at the Moon, such as pistols and executions by firing squad and the electric chair, while also referring to his unpublished notes. These images are grounded in Sakutarō's consciousness of the events of his time, such as the High Treason Incident, a form of state violence, and twentieth century war, beginning with the Russo-Japanese war and culminating in World War I. I assert that Sakutarō's ominous poetic symbols of the violent energy of war show that, while the destructive power of state violence terrified him, he was also strongly attracted to a pure violent energy that is akin to what Walter Benjamin calls “divine violence.” I also point out that Sakutarō's interest in violent energy may well have continued into his last years, during World War II.

Maruyama Kaoru is often regarded as a marginal poet among the members of the journal Shiki (Four Seasons), even though he was on its editorial board with Hori Tatsuo and Miyoshi Tatsuji from pre-World War Ⅱ period until the wartime. However, his keen sensibilities to the inorganic, manifested in his science fictions with cosmic visions, his interest in surrealistic “objets,” and his obsession that anticipates later “factory fetisism,” would place him in the broader contemporary contexts of the poetic history that is not limited to that of the poems and make him a nexus in the developments of poetic expressions in the pre-World War Ⅱ and post-World War Ⅱ eras. This essay clarifies these so far neglected aspects of his significance, focusing on the contemporaneity and influence he shared with such poets as Inagaki Taruho, Hagiwara Sakutarou, Tachihara Michizou, Nakahara Chuya, and surrealists like Ono Tozaburou, Takiguchi Shuzo and Yamanaka Chiruu, who are generally regarded to be the precursors of the poems of inorganic landscapes.

Sakutarō Hagiwara can be called a “suburban writer” not only because he moved to the suburban areas of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake but also because from his own suburban experiences he created insightful literary writings on modern urbanization. Tabata and Magome, then the small towns on the edge of Tokyo, meant to him a sort of imaginary hometown, a frontier soon to be swallowed up by the great wave of urbanization and commercialism. This paper will review his poems, essays, and novels to show how Hagiwara saw modern Japan from the viewpoint of a suburban writer.

type:P(論文)

記事種別: 書評