Bookchats: Not even to the rain

Welcome to Bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

I am happy to be writing again for this vibrant group, and the presence of readers writing and sharing about their latest adventures in reading or their old favorites, warms my heart. I have said it before, but the transformation of DailyKos’s top recommended diaries into a list of 2-minute long press releases, usually just a few quotes from another news article or some tweets, is always a depressing reminder of unnaturally short attention spans and the TikTokification of any and all discourse into microscopic, cursory and shallow engagements. As such, and because I also always get multiple complaining comments on diaries I write for being too long (like seriously, why waste time commenting about that), I figure I will put a trigger warning: this is a substantial text, a couple of pages long (on a Word Processor).

I am writing today about Kenji Miyazawa, one of the most famous poets and writers of modern Japan. Right now, as I write this, there is a critically acclaimed and very popular movie out in theaters in Japan right now that delves into him and the complicated but close relationship he shared with his father. I am not exceptionally familiar with Miyazawa’s life; without recourse to internet resources the only things I would be able to mention from memory would be that he was from rural, agricultural Iwate Prefecture in the upper northeast region of Japan’s main island, and that he died rather young from repeated lung-related illnesses.

Kenji Miyazawa was born in 1896 and died in 1933, and he was an eclectic individual. Miyazawa studied agriculture and worked as a teacher for a time at an agricultural college. He was a vegetarian, a devout Buddhist and pacifist in an era where Japanese militarism and nationalism seethed throughout public life. The farmer’s group he started in Iwate, the Rasu Farmer’s Association, which was also involved in cultural events and public discussion of ideas, was itself shut down by the government in 1928 for being subversive.

Miyazawa dabbled in music, and had a deep interest in farming and spent most of his life trying to enrich the struggling agricultural industry of his home region–perhaps out of guilt for his own family’s wealth, which was based on pawnbroking and money-lending, something that also led to many farmers in the community deeply mistrusting him and his work. The most productive years of his life were also years interspersed with frequent bouts of pneumonia and continually poor health prior to his death at 37 years of age. During his own lifetime, Miyazawa never achieved widespread fame, outside of literary circles where many of his works were well-shared amongst writers of the era, and he died as a local eccentric in Iwate.

I would describe Kenji Miyazawa as the very rare children’s writer who didn’t just write for children. After his death, Miyazawa became one of the most famous free verse poets of Japan’s modern pantheon, but he also wrote numerous short stories and fables for children, including Chuumon ga ooi ryouri ten and Ginga Tetsudo no Yoru (known in English as Night on the Galactic Railroad). Don’t take the term “children’s writer” and load it with preconceptions of simplicity though; adult, college educated Japanese people, including school teachers who teach his material, agree with me that Miyazawa is very challenging to read. He has a superbly idiosyncratic style, a profound imagination, and his sentences blend very ambiguous chains of causal action with unusual descriptions. If I had to pin it down, Miyazawa often breaks the reader’s expectations and preconceived notions–he doesn’t describe the obvious part of a scene, he describes something you wouldn’t normally see described (like peaches falling into the water of a creek on a sunny day, as seen by crab children from below), and does so in peculiar ways.

By example, I have also read several of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short stories, including “The Spider’s Thread” and “In a Thicket” (one of the two stories that formed the basis of Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon), in Japanese. Akutagawa is a classic literary figure, among the top five in all of modern Japanese literature. Akutagawa is also a beautiful writer–there is no other way to describe it; his sentences are pure elegance, clear and precise, even when they are complex and multi-layered. Kenji Miyazawa is a children’s writer, and he’s harder for me to read than Akutagawa, something several of my Japanese teacher friends have agreed with me on. There’s something messy, over-powered, and elusive about Miyazawa, that can leave me with no frame of reference while reading, even repeat-reading, sentences. Others, like the story about the crab-children in the river, are intentionally framed in dreams, with very intense, and convincing dream-like logic, which includes a certain portion of the text being unexplained nonsense or else having that kind of unclear connection and randomness so often found in dreams, like that time I dreamed I had to sing into a banana in order to get past airport security.

However, rather than Miyazawa’s fiction, my main focus for this installment is one of Miyazawa’s poems (he was primarily, after all, a poet), a single poem. I will include both the Japanese version and my own personal translation of the poem as I explain why and how the poem works so well and cannot really be translated, or even approximated into English. That poem is 雨ニモマケズ, written phonetically into English, Ame ni mo makezu and often translated as “Be not defeated by the rain”, an awful translation. If you are being literal and true to the original Japanese, I prefer “Lose not even to the rain” or, more obliquely, “Not even to the rain” for the title of this piece.

Ame ni mo makezu is a poem read and studied by essentially all Japanese school children. It is the Japanese The Road not Taken, a seemingly simple but multi-layered widely accessible poem widely dispersed in popular media and which endures as a popular and influential literary work. Before going further into it, here is the original Japanese text and my translation.

雨ニモマケズ

風ニモマケズ

雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ

丈夫ナカラダヲモチ

慾ハナク

決シテ瞋ラズ

イツモシヅカニワラッテヰル

一日ニ玄米四合ト

味噌ト少シノ野菜ヲタベ

アラユルコトヲ

ジブンヲカンジョウニ入レズニ

ヨクミキキシワカリ

ソシテワスレズ

野原ノ松ノ林ノ䕃ノ

小サナ萱ブキノ小屋ニヰテ

東ニ病気ノコドモアレバ

行ッテ看病シテヤリ

西ニツカレタ母アレバ

行ッテソノ稲ノ束ヲ負イ

南ニ死ニソウナ人アレバ

行ッテコワガラナクテモイヽトイイ

北ニケンカヤソショウガアレバ

ツマラナイカラヤメロトイヒ

ヒドリノトキハナミダヲナガシ

サムサノナツハオロオロアルキ

ミンナニデクノボートヨバレ

ホメラレモセズ

クニモサレズ

ソウイフモノニ

ワタシハナリタイ

Lose not even to the rain

lose not even to wind

nor defeated by snow or the heat of summer,

with a strong body,

without desire

without a trace of anger

always laughing silently

four cups of brown rice a day and

miso soup and a few vegetables to eat

consider all manner of things

without the shadow of my own emotions

without forgetting to look carefully and listen to understanding

without forgetting

the small shed with a roof of thatched straw

in the shade of the pine tree woods

if, in the east, there is a sick child

I will go to nurse them

if, in the west, there is a tired mother

I will go and bundle the stalks of rice

if, in the south, there is a person who seems to be dying

I will go to them and say “You don’t have to be afraid”

if, in the north, there are people fighting

I will tell them it is stupid and they should stop,

I will shed tears in times of drought*

and tremble as I walk through cold summers

called a good-for-nothing by all

praised by none

and worried over by no one

this kind of person,

is what I want to become.

There’s just so much to break down in this poem that I can’t do the work justice in this context. Just the act of translating it proved to be far more difficult than I had anticipated when I chose this topic for my Bookchat, and the process has far deepened my own understanding (including dispelling several misunderstandings I had apparently developed of the poem).

“Not even to the rain” is not a poem Kenji Miyazawa published in his lifetime, and it comes from a page he wrote in 1931 in his personal notebooks, where he wrote poetry, reflections, comments on his daily life and his various impressions. The biographical elements of the poem are strong; by this point in his life, Miyazawa had a very tense relationship with farmers in his hometown, many of whom resented him for his father’s business dealings and blamed him for poor harvests and bad advice. He was viewed as a well-meaning over-educated rich boy playing farmer to poor effect.

The poem’s entry in Miyazawa’s journal’s correlates to a period when he had caught pneumonia again, and indeed, he would never fully recover. While I believe that all works of art, but poetry especially, can be and even should be enjoyed in the pneumatic chamber of their own existence, without any appendixes of backstory, such backstories are often very important to understanding the intent but also to full appreciating the richness of the work. The image of Kenji Miyazawa, sick and suffering, nearly everything he strived to accomplish and all his grand ideals mostly withered away, and to sit and write this poem, is a gut-wrenching image.

One interesting aspect of “Not even to the rain” is that the impact on native Japanese readers has changed substantially from when it was initially written and published. In Miyazawa’s time, katakana was the primary syllabary. Textbooks were written in it and school children learned katakana first. In addition, laws were written in katakana alongside kanji. Today, hiragana are the primary syllabary and are taught first, while katakana has been restricted to its original purpose and use, to demarcate foreign loan words. Thus, for contemporary Japanese readers, the katakana visually gives the poem a sleek and austere appearance, and the unfamiliarity of reading Japanese in katakana forces them to read it slowly, making it more intense and creating a sense of dissonance. A remarkable situation where the poem is now doing something for readers that is totally unintended in the context of its own time period.

Personally, I choose to think that Miyazawa was imagining laws, and setting a series of small personal rules and examples for himself, trying to imagine a way forward in life at a low point. Regardless of what the reasoning for writing the poem mostly in katakana is (legalistic or simply casual and easy to read, because katakana was the basic syllabary and he wanted people who were not fluent in kanji to be able to read it), the poem has a beautiful effect of using kanji only for clear objects, things like rain, wind, sickness, and even bowls of rice. But everything else, including the word for “I” or “myself” are written in katakana, which creates a sense of distance–a reflection of the actual Buddhist compassion without ego that Miyazawa is pledging to in the poem.

One thing that I really wanted to try with my translation, though it may not work ideally in English, is to both preserve the ambiguity of the Japanese language–for instance, frequently elided subject markers–with the simplicity and chant-like cadence of the original. “Not even to the rain” is simply a wonderful work to read aloud in Japanese. And Japanese is an absolutely wonderful literary language that English is utterly incompetent and ill-equipped to represent in the slightest, as in not at all. I’ve translated with German, and seen translations from say, French (which I don’t speak) and other European languages into English and while you have to make compromises, there exists a vocabulary and a type of structurally oriented expression that carries over and which can preserve key features of the original, but with Japanese, the struggle is that the very nature of expression in the language, especially visual choices inherent in kanji-based languages, as well as the structure of expression, don’t work in English. I still want to refine my translation further, but for Bookchats, this is all I had the time for.

The poem gets me every time when I read the first two lines with use “makezu” a somewhat casual and strong negative for the verb “makeru”, which means “to lose”, and then the third line Miyazawa flips the cadence and the register with “makenu”, which is an older, more formally coded negative conjugation of the verb (and there is another, more informal/more modern conjugation as well, “makenai” which is the general conversational negative form used in Modern Japanese, and the more formal version of that, “makemasen”). I liked it and I was at a loss for what to do to express that in English, given I wanted to keep the conciseness of the original lines and their rhythmic development, along with the ambiguity of the subject matter. I debated writing “I will not lose … I will not lose … I shall not lose, but ultimately I decided that using this structure undermines the self-less Buddhist nature of the poem by continually grounding everything in the speaker and subject of the poem.

I tagged a hyphen at the end of one line–one I’ve misread, embarrassingly, (overlooking the diacritic mark that changes “to” to “do” in “hidori”), for years: this line is the subject of intense debate among Japanese academics and experts in Miyazawa between whether it was miswritten or a misspelling or if he was using an obscure local dialect term, and debating between several different ways of reading it. Seriously, I read an 8-paragraph summary of the debate, in Japanese, while translating the poem and ultimately tried to work around what I understood as the most plausible explanation. I’d always simply (mis)read it as being “I will cry alone.” Just as I misunderstood the third to last line as “without country.” That’s the thing about learning a non-native language, even when you are fluent (I have N1, the highest level of proficiency under the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and use Japanese daily for work and use it exclusively in my day to day home life, as my wife does not speak English), there are always things you interpret the wrong way.

Especially without kanji. I always make a point of emphasizing to people who are like “woe is me, I can never learn Japanese (or Chinese), because of all those kanji I have to memorize” by noting there are far too many homonyms in either language for either to be comprehensible without the traditional characters. Furthermore, the actual memorization of kanji is not difficult, it’s just time-consuming and requires a steady and consistent process, and you also don’t have to memorize how to write them to read them (I am too out of practice and can only write a fraction of the kanji I used to be able to write by hand).

But having kanji also makes Japanese much less frustrating to read than other languages. So like say I see a word like 解説 in a book and don’t know what it means (I do) and have never seen it before (I have). Well, I know the first kanji means “understand” or “untie” and the second means “opinion” or “theory”. Just like that I can intuit the word means explanation. I also know the reading is “kaisetsu” because I know what the alternate pronunciations for the kanji are when they are combined into compound words as opposed to being alone or in verb form. I know all that for thousands of potential words just because I studied a few hundred base kanji that are themselves built of components (call radicals) that are limited (like the alphabet is limited) and indicate either meaning and/or pronunciation (though this is preserved less in Japanese than in Chinese).

I studied German in college. The start is fairly easy, then it gets super hard on you (3-page long flow chart of how to conjugate adjectives and “6 forms of passive voice that each have distinctive rules for use” hard on you). Reading a German text, I come across a word I don’t know, and unless the general context it is in is super clear (which is rare in practice for second-language learners) or I don’t mind half-assing a potentially wrong interpretation (I am very obsessive compulsive about not doing that), I have to look it up. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars. Go to the dictionary. Go straight to the dictionary.

Repeating this process ten times a page, often just double-checking words I think I kinda knew but wanted to make sure I wasn’t mistaking them, is exhausting. I don’t have to do this in Japanese; I know the semantics and, basically, the etymology of the words from studying kanji–because you have to study kanji to have any kind of functional and professional grasp of Japanese. The flip side of this also means 95% of the time I can get by just looking at the characters and nodding. I don’t have to worry that I’m misremembering “kaisetsu” because look, it has the damned characters for unravel/understand and explain/theory right in the effing word and even if I only studied the word once 10 months before and have never used it before, I don’t need to double-check that I remember it right or not.

This is what I mean when I tell people that Japanese is a reverse pyramid language; it requires enormous amounts of energy and practice to establish the basic foundation and the upper levels are often much simpler. As opposed to languages with the same alphabet and lots of cognates that start out pretty simple to get a basic general foundation in, like French or German, and then become extremely hard to advance into upper levels.

Slight aside I know. I can already picture the keyboard warriors, their eyes bulging, screaming at me for bothering to share my thoughts, formed from 10 years of study, in more than 140 characters or for bothering to explain the importance of kanji before returning to my other long-standing misinterpretation of the poem. A poem I read dozens of times and memorized pieces of.

The third to last line is read as “kuni (クニ) mo sarezu” and I, not being a native speaker, just casually assumed it meant kuni as in 国, or “country” and while I did have an initial sense of “oh, that’s a somewhat odd turn of phrase” that quickly gets overwritten by the justification of “well, it is a poem and all.” So I read the phrase as meaning “without country”, taking the negative passive form of “to do” (as in to not be done) to mean without country as in the sense of “without being forced into the box of nationality” kind of meaning, which was nice and it’s easy to see why I jumped to that conclusion, but also totally wrong. The actual kanji is 苦, which in this case is in the phrase 苦にする and means to worry (over/about). This is what happens with second languages; your brain leaps to the familiar connections and then tries to interpret them, because you are always interpreting unfamiliar phrases and expressions. Sometimes you just make the wrong connection, but it’s still frustrating whenever you realize you’ve synaptically misfired, and sometimes these little misconstrued phrases or words can cause troublesome misunderstandings in work and life!

There’s so much that I like about the poem. I liked it from the first time I read it, (which was quite a struggle because of the weird juxtaposition of katakana and kanji), and before I had any knowledge of the background of the poem or about Kenji Miyazawa’s life. The poem spoke to me, to my ascetic desires. I identify with the aspirations expressed in the poem. Just reading “Not even to the rain” causes a tight feeling in my chest, and a sense of yearning.

The pathos of the second half of the piece sometimes makes me teary-eyed. The English doesn’t do justice to the gentleness, the caressing softness of expression in Japanese, nor how this contrasts to the often steely and abstract, ambiguous nature of Japanese writing and literary expression. I am especially dissatisfied with the translation of “if, in the south, there is a person who seems to be dying / I will go to them and say “You don’t have to be afraid”.

The poem embodies Miyazawa’s gentleness and dedication to others. The kindness of the poem is so striking, Buddhist in tone and ascetic mentality but also at other times Christ-like. Note that the final sections detail how the writer’s aspirations are not tied to delusions of grandeur–they aren’t out to be loved by anyone or respected by anyone, nor are they necessarily going to succeed and indeed the image of success is far removed from “Not even to the rain”. To the contrary, the poem asserts that this is a worthy way to live in and of its own sake, in spite of even the contempt of others.

I sympathize with the perspective of the poem, and have come to understand that the very nature of being an idealist is first and foremost a personal act of liberation. It is the grounding of underlying principles, and understanding the fundamental needs of human life and of you, as a singular human, over the demands of hyper-capitalistic societies (and their obsession with narrowly defined results as a form of success and social currency), or even feudal/autocratic societies. True idealism isn’t a play for sympathy or virtue signaling because true idealism is a form of asserting one’s autonomy, something I think, ultimately, “Not even to the rain” embodies quite well as a literary work.

This poem is one of my personal lodestars, but Kenji Miyazawa is a fascinating author with a wider portfolio of work, including many poems he officially wrote as poems and published professionally in his lifetime. I am quite impressed by what he managed to do in 37 years, many of them hindered by debilitating illnesses and a generally weak physical constitution. I am planning on reading his longer novella-length work Night on the Galactic Railroad sometime this year, or at least starting it, and will continue to explore his work as way to sharpen my Japanese and also experience the disconcerting and ambiguous dreamworlds of his imagination. I definitely recommend those of the BookChats group who have never read anything by him to check him out, particularly “The Restaurant of many orders” (chuumon no ooi ryouri ten). For all those who have, I’m eager to see what your reaction to his work was, and to share thoughts and notes as a fellow fan and a fellow reader.

Until the next edition of Bookchats~

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