Miyazawa Kenji and the Lost Gandharan Painting

Abstract

M IYAZAWA KENJI RNW6, 1896-1933, was a writer of astonishing imaginative powers. The reader of his poems and stories enters a world where the familiar has been subtly altered, charged with new meaning, and interspersed with the exotic, erudite, and unfamiliar. Scenes from the everyday world are apt at any moment to give way to vast, unexpected vistas richly ornamented with motifs from Buddhist scriptures and early twentiethcentury science. Anyone who looks into Kenji's work becomes perforce a traveler in a strange land and, like most travelers, is better off in the company of a guide. In the past several years scholars have been reading his work closely and supplying definitions of difficult vocabulary as needed.' Using a system of crossreferences between the poems and stories and their various drafts, they have begun to reach a consensus about the meaning of landmarks and characters in Kenji's world. The driving idea behind this project is the realization that Kenji assigned a relatively consistent value to his images and figures; if it is possible to understand what a raging asura or a whisp of frozen nitrogen is doing in one piece, it is reasoned, then there is a good chance of understanding what it is doing in another. The present article takes a single recurrent image from Kenji's work, that of a lost Gandharan Buddhist painting unearthed from the sands of western China, and examines it in all its manifestations. This quest will lead to the home of the mural (or murals) in the far west of China to an area historically called Hsi-yti (J. Saiiki or Seiiki) NAi and referred to as the Western Marches in English-language works. Assuming that this theme held a related and consistent set of associations for the poet, we will examine a number of pieces, both stories and poems, in which he uses a similar image taken from Central Asian art. In this way we will be able to bring greater sensitivity and depth to our reading of all the pieces in the corpus of Kenji's literature that deal with the