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18 Saitō Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei Haga Tōru To see into the reality of things and represent the life where nature and the self are unified in the original one. This is shasei, drawing from life, in tanka poetry.1 This is the famous definition of the word “shasei” given by Saitō Mokichi (1882–1953). The words are all unusual and resist any easy misappropriation. Was this a sort of incantation? No, this was a definition the poet dared to put forward in 1920, at the age of thirty-eight, after many years of experience and reflection on the creation of tanka. It is, therefore, difficult to understand, still unique and spellbinding, endowed with the power of an inner impulse the poet could not contain. Still stressing his belief in “shasei,” he continues his discussion in the following passage, even using the word “setsujitsu” (serious) twice: Those who do not like “shasei” have no need to discuss it. But for me it is a very serious question and I intend to found the basic principle of my poetic creativity on this notion. For me neither such “isms” as realism, naturalism, expressionism, idealism, symbolism, futurism, nor any theory of psychic elements have any serious appeal. Mokichi says that his notion of “shasei” differs from any of these contemporary theories and ideologies of art. His Treatise on Shasei in Tanka Poetry (which has this definition as its pillar) is 120 pages long and appears in volume 9 of the Iwanami edition of his complete works. It was first published serially from April 1920 to January 1921 in eight issues of the organ of the tanka association to which Mokichi belonged, Araragi, and then appeared in book form in April 1929, with a postface added. The Treatise had a strong and long lasting 206 impact on the literary and intellectual milieu of his time and stimulated many polemics and different interpretations into the postwar years. The most important and central essay of poetics by the most representative and the greatest poet of modern Japan, it merits reexamination. 1 It is a well-known fact that in his critical essays and historical studies Saitō Mokichi ’s method of tracing the usage of and grasping the meaning of Japanese and Chinese idioms was very idiosyncratic. For instance, a collection of short essays, Doba Mango (Chattering of a Foal), published one year before the Treatise on Shasei, contains many interesting surveys and suggestions on the usage of old and new poetic terms, such as “inochi narikeri,” “wadachi” (a rut), “ko-koto ” (resoundingly), “shin-shin-to” (piercingly), “agaki” (pawing), “kibun” (mood, Stimmung), and so on.2 The same is the case with “shasei,” the central word in his Treatise. Nearly one-third of the discussion in the Treatise is devoted to citations and examinations of earlier usages of the term. This is why the Treatise is not easy to read through and has a peculiar form as a theoretical essay. The essay’s difficulties did not concern the author, however, because his aim was to reconfirm and reinforce his own idea of shasei. Because the word originally came from the field of painting, the first chapter of the Treatise deals with the use of “shasei” in old Chinese and Japanese art treatises. Mokichi did not do any direct survey of original texts but profited from an anthology, titled Tōyō Garon Shūsei (A Collection of Art Treatises of the Orient). This was a large two-volume work edited by Imazeki Toshimaro and published by Dokuga Shoin in 1915–1916. The Catalogue of Natsume Sōseki ’s Collection of Books also has this entry and shows Sōseki’s interest in this field in his final years. In the first lines of his essay Mokichi says that, as soon as he had purchased the book by subscription, he began to check and collect the old usages of the term in the book. At the time of the writing of the Treatise , Sakazaki Tan’s big volume, Nihon Gadan Taikan (An Anthology of Talks on Art in Japan, 1917), must have been available to the author, but one cannot tell whether he used this book as another source. Mokichi first points out that the Chinese word “shasei” was already used in praise of the works of such painters of flowers and birds as Huang Quan (d. 965) or Xu Xi (937–975) of the Northern Sung dynasty...

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