Kitamura Tokoku's Horaikyoku and the Spirits of Free Verse

• In Event: X-Files from Modern Japan: Spirits, Spirituality, and Parapsychology in Modern Japanese Literature

Abstract

In his verse drama Hōraikyoku, a phantasmagoria that echoes Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Hamlet by turns, Kitamura Tōkoku pioneered a form of free verse in a classical register (bungo jiyūshi). In the Preface to Hōraikyoku, Tōkoku was careful to distance this poetic innovation from the “inbun no sensō,” the literary establishment’s “war” over the difference between in (poetry) and bun (prose), leaving it up to writers like Yamada Bimyō, Mori Ōgai, Ishibashi Ningetsu, Ōnishi Hajime, and others to debate the nature of poetic rhythm—which they did over a period of two years. Yet Tōkoku’s work certainly does have a bearing on that debate, insofar as it constituted a repudiation of the dictum, espoused prominently by Yamada Bimyō, that the very spirit of poetry lay in its metrical regularity. Tellingly, the main action of Hōraikyoku is the protagonist’s ascent of Mount Peng-lai (Hōrai)—a legendary mountain inhabited by spirits who speak in free verse. This paper will examine Tōkoku’s drama in the light of the contemporary debate on the nature of poetic rhythm, with additional contextual references to Tōkoku’s writings on Christianity and his brief involvement in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement.

Author

• Scott Mehl, Bard College