Kawaji Ryūkō and the New Poetry

Abstract

This chapter looks at the free-verse poetry of Kawaji Ryūkō, which displayed one extreme of the naturalist aesthetic being advocated in Japanese poetry circles in the first decade of the twentieth century. Ryūkō is the poet usually credited with writing the first free-verse vernacular-style poems in modern Japanese. The chapter then draws on the writings of the Soviet semiotician Yuri Lotman to explain why Ryūkō's poetry, not Tōkoku's, was recognized as the first Japanese free-verse poetry. It argues that the significant factor in the creation of a free-verse Japanese poetry was not the work of Ryūkō or any other single poet, but was rather the existence of a literary-critical environment within which the adaptation of a new verse form, based on a foreign poetics of free verse, was construed as both possible and desirable. The chapter then analyzes one of Ryūkō's early free-verse poems which will strike the reader as a remarkable departure from the poetry that has appeared so far in this study.