Zenmaro Toki
Zenmaro Toki (
Biography
[edit]Zenmaro Toki was born in 1885.[1] He was born in Tokyo.[2]
He first took up tanka composition in middle school.[2] He became a disciple of Kun'en Kaneko ,[2] a minor poet who had studied under Ochiai Naobumi and who, according to historian and critic Donald Keene, never fulfilled his early potential.[2] Kun'en experimented with just about every tanka school,[2] and the characteristic that critics have traditionally associated with him is his having been a "city poet".[3] This was likely a characteristic that attracted Zenmaro to him, as the two shared little else in common.[4]
Zenmaro attended Waseda University,[4] where he fraternized with Bokusui Wakayama and other poets.[4] He also studied European literature extensively.[4] Upon graduation, he found work as a journalist.[4] His talent as a poet first garnered attention in 1910 when he published Nakiwarai ("Smiling Through the Tears"), a collection of 143 poems written entirely in roman letters, in three-line stanzas.[4] Takuboku Ishikawa praised this work as being unlike that of any other tanka poet of the day;[4] although the poems were written in classical Japanese, their subject-matter was drawn from everyday life in a manner typical of the Naturalist poets.[4] The three-line form Zenmaro's collection pioneered was soon thereafter adopted by Takuboku.[5]
He adopted mild socialist tendencies in the 1910s,[6] and when, in the 1930s, the militarist government began to crack down heavily on left-wing literature, he shifted over to writing scholarly works rather than produce propaganda.[7]
He wrote for the Asahi Shimbun from 1918 to 1940.[4]
Zenmaro died in 1980.[1]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Keene 1999, p. 37.
- ^ a b c d e Keene 1999, p. 38.
- ^ Keene 1999, pp. 38–39.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Keene 1999, p. 39.
- ^ Keene 1999, p. 40.
- ^ Keene 1999, pp. 40–41.
- ^ Keene 1999, p. 41.
Works cited
[edit]- Keene, Donald (1999) [1984]. A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 4: Dawn to the West – Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (Poetry, Drama, Criticism) (paperback ed.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-11435-6.