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  • The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku by Donald Keene
  • Sarah Frederick (bio)
The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku. By Donald Keene. Columbia University Press, 2016. 288 pages. $35.00, cloth; $34.99, E-book.

Based on detailed readings of the diaries of writer Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912), Donald Keene's new book covers the span of Takuboku's troubled adult life, cut short as it was by tuberculosis when Takuboku was only 26. Through the lens of these diaries and related correspondence, readers gain a strong sense of the personality of this writer and a fascinating glimpse into the literary culture of late Meiji-period Japan. Especially richly depicted is what life may have been like for an individual and his family trying to live off poetry and fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century during the rise of modern publishing.

As the title suggests, this is a biography of Takuboku, but it is equally an account of Takuboku's diaries and a further extension of Keene's ongoing interest in Japanese diaries.1 While some corroborating information from acquaintances and other scholars appears here, the shape of information emerges from the diaries themselves. They were held first by his friend, linguist and poet Kindaichi Kyōsuke (1882–1971), and then for many years by Takuboku's widow, Ishikawa (Horiai) Setsuko. Since quite personal comments were made about both of them, the diaries were in danger of being destroyed; fortunately, however, these writings eventually made their way to a library archive in Hokkaido and into Takuboku's collected works, where Keene could turn his attention to them and produce this fascinating book.

Some readers will have encountered Takuboku in English, first through the selection from Rōmaji nikki in Keene's own Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, if not also the fuller translation by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda of Rōmaji nikki and the posthumous tanka collection Kanashiki gangu.2 Because of its status, I should clarify that Keene's biography is based on Takuboku's full set of diaries, spanning 1902 to his death [End Page 153] in 1912, of which the roman script diary was only a short section from the spring of 1909.

While the roman script diary is not his focus, Keene's broader readings of Takuboku's diaries as a whole shed insight on Takuboku's thinking behind the Rōmaji nikki. For example, Keene notes Takuboku's buying a copy of Oscar Wilde's Art and Morality in February 1909 and argues that it "may have given him the courage to describe behavior that, though considered immoral by society, might be fashioned by the poet into a work of artistry" (p. 139). Such a book was too expensive for Takuboku to keep for very long in the face of his many debts; it was purchased with an unexpected gift of cash sent by a geisha, Koyakko, whom he had abandoned in Kushiro, a relationship detailed in an early chapter of Keene's book. Just a few months after this purchase, Takuboku begins the romanization of his diary in earnest. Keene shows us also that Takuboku's explanation for the choice in script is that he does not want his wife Setsuko to be able to read it easily. Keene recognizes that she surely would have been able to decipher it if she truly wished, but like other readers of the day would be slowed considerably by the unfamiliar script. As is well known, this section of Takuboku's diaries stands on its own and details rather explicitly relationships with prostitutes. These are told less as the accounts of pleasure and adventure that one might see in Edo-style pleasure quarter diaries, but rather depict depression about his disappointment in relationships and life.3 Here too, Takuboku details his dismay of his own attempts at prose fiction, even though, ironically, the roman diary stands, as Keene puts it, as "one masterpiece of prose" (p. 152).

Throughout Keene's account, we see an ornery and flawed character who suffered a fair degree of personal misfortune. At the same time as he was beginning to publish...

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