Biography of Chuya Nakahara

Chuya Nakahara was a Japanese early modernist of conflicting impulses: apolitical but iconoclastic; a progressive formalist; occasional swain of his own urban pastorals; an agnostic singer of prelapsarian hymns. He was dismissive of institutions, and yet was a successful auto-didact, his mastery of waka (formal, 7/5-syllabic verse) combining with a competency in French to provide for his hybrid evolution. He wrote in the wake of his Meiji-era predecessors, while straining towards those Symbolists and Surrealists he admired and translated. His English, however, was inadequate to an academic understanding of English-language poetry.

One should not, therefore, consider him in the context of Western poetry, although he is admired today as one of the most scrupulous pre-war Japanese writers of poems informed by European models. Fundamental differences between Japanese and French mean that while incorporating some Western elements of form, Chuya had to devise Japanese versions of others. In his sonnets, for example (“The Moon” below being one), since Japanese is non-accentual, he refigures iambic meter as waka-form syllablic lines.

Chuya died of tuberculosis, and his biography leads one to think of certain Western poets whose early deaths also spawned cult followings: Keats; Rimbaud; Plath. He published only one volume of poetry in his lifetime—Goat Songs, which sold about 50 copies. A second, posthumous book, Songs of Days Past, went a modest 1000. But in 1947, penniless post-war Japan bought over 20,000 copies of a new Chuya collection, and interest in his unpublished poetry and prose has continued at a peak ever since. The 1967 edition of his collected works spans six volumes, and more criticism has been written on him than any other Japanese poet.