Ishikawa Takuboku — The Honest Liar

A Wedding Without a Groom

"Back then I told lots of lies. / I told them so calmly. / Now I break out in a sweat."

A man in his mid-twenties wrote this tanka, a very short Japanese poem, looking back at his younger self.

When was "back then"? What kind of lies were they? The poem explains nothing. It only says that thinking about it makes him sweat.

The poet was Ishikawa Takuboku. His real name was Ishikawa Hajime.

He was born in 1886, the son of a priest at a Buddhist temple in Iwate, in northern Japan, and grew up in a village called Shibutami. He had two older sisters and one younger sister. He was the only boy.

He was smart. But when he moved up to the upper grades at middle school in Morioka, the main city of the region, his heart turned toward poems and love. He later wrote a poem about slipping out of class.

"Slipping out the classroom window, / I went alone to sleep / in the ruins of that old castle."

He cheated on exams twice. At sixteen, he quit middle school and went to Tokyo, meaning to make a living by writing. But he found no work, and his father came to get him, and he went back to the village. Still, his poems kept winning notice. They appeared in the magazine Myōjō ("Morning Star"), and he began to call himself "Takuboku," a pen name. In May 1905, at nineteen, he published his first book of poems, Akogare ("Longing").

A genius boy poet. That is what people called him then.

Much later, he himself confessed how he used to write poems in those days.

There was a small empty lot, with a tree about three meters (ten feet) tall standing in it, and the sun was shining on it. Even if he felt something when he saw it, he could not write it down as it was. He had to turn the lot into a wide field, the tree into a giant tree, the sun into a morning sun or an evening sun. He had to turn himself, the one who was looking, into a poet, into a traveler. If he didn't, even he was not satisfied.

Just before the book came out, his father had lost his place as head priest of the temple back home. That had happened at the end of the year before, because he had not paid money owed to the Buddhist sect. In spring, the family left the temple and moved to Morioka.

Around the same time, a marriage had been arranged. The bride was Horiai Setsuko. They had been together since his middle school days. On May 12, Setsuko was entered in the Ishikawa family register, the official record of a family. The groom was still in Tokyo.

In Morioka, preparations for a wedding were being made for Takuboku's return. The ceremony was set for May 30.

In May, Takuboku left Tokyo with his new book of poems. But he got off at Sendai on the way, and did not move for about ten days.

The day of the ceremony came. He did not come home.

The wedding was held without the groom.

Why he did not come back is not clear.

Around this time, a group of his friends from middle school days told Takuboku they were cutting him off. He had let them down over money again and again, it is said.

Even so, Setsuko did not call off the marriage.

On June 4, Takuboku finally came back to Morioka. His father, his mother, his sister, and now his wife. The life of the whole family was now on the shoulders of a nineteen-year-old.

Years later, he wrote about that moment.

"The duty of feeding a family with no property at all fell on me all at once."

And he gave a name, in one phrase, to what he was from then on.

"An extreme coward when it came to responsibility."

North, and Farther North

In the spring of 1906, Takuboku took his wife and mother back to Shibutami. At his old elementary school, he got a job as a substitute teacher, a teacher without a teaching license, hired for the time being.

One of his pupils later remembered that he used to turn up at the teacher's house every night, and on Sundays he begged for stories from morning on. Takuboku himself wrote in a letter to a friend: "I am, I suppose, the best substitute teacher in Japan." And he added: "Forgive me for saying this small boast out loud."

At the end of the year, his first daughter, Kyōko, was born.

All the while, he was trying to get his father back into the old temple. It did not work out. Life only got harder. At the end of winter in 1907, his father left the house at night without telling his family.

Takuboku decided to leave the village too.

But he did not leave quietly. In April, because he disliked the principal, he had the upper-grade children go on strike. Soon he was fired.

"As if chased away with stones, / I left my home village. / That sadness never fades."

Chased away as if with stones: that is how he later sang of leaving home. One cause of that departure was a stir he had made himself.

In May, Takuboku crossed the sea and arrived in Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido. There were young writers there who had read his poems. One of them was Miyazaki Ikuu. His family ran a shop that made miso and soy sauce, and he was about Takuboku's age. From then on, Ikuu would support Takuboku, with money and with heart.

Takuboku found a job as a substitute teacher at an elementary school, sent for his family that summer, and before long started working at a newspaper too. Then, on August 25, a huge fire burned through Hakodate. The elementary school where he worked burned down. So did the newspaper office.

Four years later, from a hospital bed, Takuboku wrote a letter to Ikuu. He looked back on his days in Hakodate like this.

"While I was in Hakodate, I loved Hakodate to my heart's content, and it loved me."

He left Hakodate, he added, "because of a fire, a thing that happened completely by chance."

From here, his days of wandering across Hokkaido began.

In September, he was in Sapporo. Noguchi Ujō, who later became famous as a writer of children's songs, wrote down what it was like to meet Takuboku for the first time, that month.

Early in the morning, the maid at his boarding house woke Ujō. A visitor had come. The man wore an old, worn summer robe and a faded summer coat. His head was cropped short. The maid apparently thought he was a monk from some temple.

Ujō washed his face and came back. The man was smoking Ujō's cigarettes.

"The truth is, I've had no tobacco since yesterday evening, and I was in trouble."

Don't they sell it? Ujō asked. They do, but he had no money to buy any. That was Takuboku's answer, Ujō wrote, and Takuboku laughed in a big voice. Whenever things were like this, they say, Takuboku always laughed out loud.

He stayed at the Sapporo newspaper for less than two weeks. At the end of September, he moved to a new newspaper being started in Otaru. His family had already moved to Otaru ahead of him.

At that newspaper, Takuboku had a quarrel with people at work and was beaten. Saitō Taiken, who had run the newspaper where Takuboku worked in Hakodate, was in Otaru by then too, and he wrote about that day. Takuboku appeared before him laughing. He was laughing so hard that he held his stomach. On his head, it is said, were two big bumps.

In December, Takuboku quit that newspaper and welcomed the New Year in Otaru without a job.

According to Taiken, Takuboku's rented house even had a room with no straw mats on the floor. Still, to every guest who came, he apparently roasted plain tea leaves fresh and served the tea. As for the formal coat with the family crest, worn for New Year's visits, there was only one for the two of them. Each time one of them finished his round of greetings, the coat was taken over to the other, they say.

In January 1908, Takuboku left his family in Otaru and headed east for a newspaper in Kushiro.

There, an older man introduced him to people. "He is a new-style poet." He meant it kindly. But Takuboku wrote that he had never felt such contempt as he did from that person's kindness.

In April, Takuboku left Kushiro by ship and went back to Hakodate. Ikuu was there.

I want to go to Tokyo and write novels. When Takuboku told him so, Ikuu took on the family he would leave behind. He let Takuboku's wife, daughter, and mother live in a rental house that his own family owned. Takuboku took fifteen yen from Ikuu, went to Otaru, and came back to Hakodate by train with his family of four.

At the end of April 1908, Takuboku left Hakodate alone, by ship, for Tokyo.

If my novels start to sell, I will call my family to Tokyo right away. That was what Takuboku had in mind.