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1. Blow the Bloodstained Bugle: Murayama Kaita and the Language of Personal Sensation
- University of Minnesota Press
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37 Early in the morning of February 20, 1919, in Tokyo, a young artist named Murayama Kaita passed away from tubercular pneumonia, which had been exacerbated by the influenza epidemic that swept through Japan and much of the industrialized world in 1918 and 1919. A writer and art student, Kaita was only twenty-two years and five months old at the time of his death. Although his untimely demise brought an end to a promising career that had barely gotten underway, ironically, it set in motion the mythology of Kaita’s life. Soon after his death, his friends published his work, which inspired the Japanese literary and artistic world to reexamine the life of this young artist and identify him as a passionate, inspired “genius.” As this interpretation took hold, Kaita’s name exploded into literary history. Kaita is now best remembered as an aspiring student artist who, during his time at the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute), painted some of the most extraordinary, visionary, and iconoclastic paintings of the Taishō period. At the time, however, it was his Kaita no utaeru (Songs of Kaita) and its sequel—two posthumously published volumes containing Kaita’s diary, poetry, and short stories—that really took Japan by storm.1 With their bold, daring, and lushly worded expressions of personal desire, they struck an entire generation of readers as auguring a new era in personal expression , and many now canonical novelists and poets, including Arishima Takeo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), Murō Saisei (1889–1962), Kusano Shinpei 1 Blow the Bloodstained Bugle Murayama Kaita and the Language of Personal Sensation 38 Blow the Bloodstained Bugle (1903–1988), and Edogawa Ranpo, expressed their unabashed admiration for his work. Much of his earliest poetry dates from his days as a student in Kyoto; in fact, approximately half of his entire output dates from 1913 and 1914, when he was in love with a fellow schoolmate. Perhaps not surprisingly, his passion for this schoolmate features prominently in his youthful, exuberant, Self-portrait of Murayama Kaita from 1916. Collection of the Mie Prefectural Art Museum. Photo copyright Fukushima Prefectural Art Museum and Mie Prefectural Art Museum 1997. [18.213.110.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:03 GMT) First edition of Kaita no utaeru (Songs of Kaita, 1920) with a cover illustration by Murayama Kaita. The words under the drawing are borrowed from the Naturalist writer Iwano Hōmei’s treatise Shinpiteki hanjūshugi (Mysterious half-animalism, 1906). In Kaita’s hands, these words serve as a sign of the brash, masculine, decadent vitality he thought should infuse modern art and literature. Collection of the author. 40 Blow the Bloodstained Bugle floridly worded work, which he circulated in the form of chapbooks. Some of the fanciful titles of these chapbooks—Mara (a Sanskrit-derived term for the male member) or Aoiro haien (The ruined garden in green)—hint at an interest in decadence, while others—such as Sora no kan (Feeling of the sky), Kujakuseki (Malachite), or Arukaroido (Alkaloid)—demonstrate a penchant for the rich, beaux-arts, exotic imagery just coming into vogue among Japanese poets. The poetry represents a convergence of romanticism and symbolism, both of which had played an important role in late Meiji letters , yet at the same time, their language is filled with a brevity, directness, and raw power that anticipate later modernist writing. It is because Kaita’s poetry strains from a rich, indulgent, symbolist brand of romanticism toward modernism that his visionary works became bestsellers and influenced many other subsequent writers. Many of the poems in these collections are in the first person, and because they, like the diaries and personal notes in Kaita’s posthumous collections, describe personal feelings, including his passionate love for several young men, they give the impression of being unmediated records of Kaita’s innermost thoughts. In fact, this strong senseof personal presence was a large part of what appealed to readers in the 1920s, judging from the frequency with which commentators wrote about his work in biographical terms. As this chapter argues, however, Kaita’s writing, including even his diaries, strongly reflects current poetic and stylistic trends. Nowhere is this more prominent than in his writing on same-sex love. In describing his amorous and sexual feelings, he drew extensively on the motifs and stylistics of the newly burgeoning Japanese symbolist movement. Kaita’s writing indicates how keenly aware he was of standing at a...