Kenji Miyazawa

Kenji Miyazawa: Five Yen and a Galaxy

In the autumn of 1933 a wasted man in Hanamaki felt well enough to sit in his doorway and watch a Shinto procession pass. Local farmers spotted him and stopped, and for an hour he answered their questions about fertiliser. The conversation exhausted him. He died the next day, aged thirty-seven, having earned, in his entire literary life, exactly five yen — payment for a single story. Almost everything he is now famous for was still in a drawer.

The Pawnbroker's Son Who Hated Money

He was the eldest son of Masajirō and Ichi Miyazawa, prosperous pawnbrokers and second-hand clothes dealers in Hanamaki, Iwate — a northern prefecture where failed harvests and hunger were permanent neighbours. The business appalled him. Lending against the possessions of starving farmers struck him as a way of eating one's neighbours, and the disgust never wore off. From 1898 his father hosted regular Buddhist lectures, and the boy attended them alongside his younger sister Toshi. Natural history and poetry pulled at him early; the poet Ishikawa Takuboku, another Iwate son, gave him a model of what verse could be. After middle school he worked, unhappily, behind his father's counter.

Two conversions followed. Reading the Lotus Sutra in his high-school years, he abandoned the family's Pure Land Buddhism for the harder, more militant Nichiren school, joining the Kokuchūkai led by Tanaka Chigaku — a break that poisoned his relationship with his father. And in 1918 he graduated from Morioka Agriculture and Forestry College, staying on as a special research student in geology with a focus on soil science and fertilisers. The two conversions are the key to everything: he spent his life trying to make one man out of a saint and a soil chemist.

Tokyo, and the Death of Toshi

In January 1921 the quarrel with his father and his revulsion at commerce sent him to Tokyo, where he signed his inheritance over to his younger brother Seiroku and lived in poverty for eight months as a street preacher for the Kokuchūkai. A Nichiren priest talked him out of monasticism, arguing that a believer serves the faith better through ordinary professional work — advice that unlocked an astonishing torrent of writing. He went home when Toshi fell ill again, and took a post teaching at the agricultural high school in Hanamaki.

Toshi died on 27 November 1922, aged twenty-four. That same day he wrote the three poems gathered as "Voiceless Lament," including "The Morning of Eternal Parting," which Donald Keene judged among the best of his work. Miyazawa wrote at inhuman speed — Keene noted that in the months around her death he produced three long poems, one of them over nine hundred lines, in three days — and in the longest of them he dropped into Iwate dialect so thick he had to supply his own translations. Toshi's death is the wound the whole cosmology grew around.

Ihatov and the Rasu Farmers Association

In 1923 he coined a word for the imagined country his stories inhabit: Ihatov, a distortion of Iwate glossed by some as the heart of Iwate. It is his native province refracted into myth — the same mountains, the same cold, but permeable to talking cats, wind spirits and interstellar trains.

Then in 1926 he resigned from teaching to live as a farmer and reformer. He founded the Rasu Chijin Kyōkai, the Rasu Farmers Association, gathering young men from local farming families to lecture them on agronomy, resistant rice strains and improved cultivation. He also played them gramophone records of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Debussy, on the principle that a farmer's life should contain music and poetry as well as yield. It went badly. Some dismissed him as a city-slicker; some blamed him when his natural fertilisers underperformed the Western chemical ones; his religion and his father's loan book both counted against him. In 1928, as Japan turned militarist, the authorities dissolved the association. Around the same time he took up Esperanto, translating some of his own poems into it, though he never became fluent.

The Drawer

He published two books in his lifetime, both in 1924, both effectively ignored. *Haru to Shura* (*Spring and Asura*), a collection mixing tanka and free verse with Buddhist vocabulary, Sanskrit and scientific terminology, sold a hundred of its thousand copies — but those hundred, as one account has it, electrified the poets who read them, among them the Dadaist Tsuji Jun and the anarchist Kusano Shinpei. In December came *Chūmon no Ōi Ryōriten* (*The Restaurant of Many Orders*), self-published children's stories. Everything else — *Night on the Galactic Railroad*, *Gauche the Cellist*, *Matasaburō of the Wind*, *The Life of Guskō Budori*, thousands of manuscript pages — stayed unpublished.

He fell ill in the summer of 1928 and never fully recovered: pneumonia, then years of pleurisy that flattened him for months at a stretch. On 3 November 1931, in a notebook, he wrote "Ame ni mo makezu" — "Undefeated by the Rain" — the vow of a man who wants to be of no account, eat brown rice and miso, and go wherever there is suffering. It became the most famous poem in modern Japan. Keene, with some irony, thought it "by no means one of Miyazawa's best." Dying of pneumonia, Miyazawa refused eggs and milk; when his mother slipped him carp liver as medicine and he found out, he said he would rather die than take the life of a creature.

Why Kenji Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is fusion. Miyazawa is one of very few writers whose scientific training is not decoration but grammar: geology, meteorology, soil chemistry and astronomy enter his sentences as native vocabulary, sitting alongside Sanskrit, Buddhist terms, Iwate dialect and the occasional Esperanto word, and the collision produces a voice nobody else in Japanese has. The critic Makoto Ueda located his charm in "high idealism, intensely ethical life, unique cosmic vision, agrarianism, religious faith, and rich colorful vocabulary," and stressed the "dedicated effort to unify heterogeneous elements of modern life into a single, coherent whole." Keene noted he showed far greater interest in Buddhism than any other Japanese poet of the century. His fertility was freakish: he wrote rapidly, without plans, in some periods reportedly thousands of manuscript pages a month.

Honesty requires the counter-case, and it is substantial. He was not recognised in his lifetime by anyone but a handful of poets; his output is uneven, largely unrevised, and much of it survives as drafts he never settled. The mass of it was shaped posthumously by his brother and by editors, so the canon is partly a construction. And his sanctification — locals called him Kenji-bosatsu, Kenji the bodhisattva — has fused the work with a saint's biography in ways that make cool assessment hard. He is a genius of imaginative reach and moral seriousness, not of craftsmanship; the polish was never there and was never the point.

Legacy

Seiroku kept the manuscripts through the war. Friends began organising them in February 1934, publication crept forward over a decade, and the postwar years turned an obscure provincial schoolteacher into one of Japan's most-loved writers. Gary Snyder brought eighteen poems into English in *The Back Country* (1967). The Miyazawa Kenji Museum opened in Hanamaki in 1982; Studio Ghibli filmed *Gauche the Cellist* the same year; the 1985 animated *Night on the Galactic Railroad* put Esperanto on its station signs; a steam locomotive, the SL Ginga, was restored in his name in 2013. His grave moved from a Pure Land temple to a Nichiren one in 1951, when his family finally followed him.

Achievements

• Notable work: Night on the Galactic Railroad
• Notable work: Kaze no Matasaburō
• Notable work: Porāno no hiroba
• Notable work: The Life of Guskō Budori
• Genres: poetry