Nakahara Chuya — The Man He Could Not Hate

Things That Break

The woman he had lived with was moving in with another man. On the day she went, he took the fragile things that were hard to fit in the car, the ones she could not carry alone, and delivered them himself to the house where the man was waiting.

Later, he began writing about that day like this:

"I may really have been a fool."

He was eighteen. It was the end of November. He was moving to a new boarding house that same day. He had already handed his own luggage to the movers, and he was helping her pack.

In his writing, he calls the man "my enemy."

Then he quickly adds more. The man was a close friend. And the man's house happened to be on the way to the station he had to reach that evening.

He adds one more thing. He had been getting tired of the woman, and inwardly he was even glad to see her go. But from the day it was settled that she would leave, he became terribly sad.

His name was Nakahara Chuya. He would later be remembered as a poet. This happened when he was eighteen.

The woman was Hasegawa Yasuko, three years older than he was. In his writing, the man's name is hidden. According to a chronology, a timeline of his life, it was Kobayashi Hideo.

Let me go back a little.

Chuya was born in 1907 in Yuda Hot Springs, in Yamaguchi, in western Japan, the oldest son. His father's work kept moving the family, and he lived in many places as a small child.

In Kanazawa he was five and six. Soon after they arrived, one evening, he and his brother went to a temple yard where the neighborhood kids were playing. One of them asked his name.

He hated his own name, "Chuya." He hesitated, and then said in a small voice, "Ichiro."

The kids heard it as "Ichio." Suddenly they warmed up to him and came over: Ichio, let's play! In his own words, he was called Ichio the whole time he lived in Kanazawa.

It was a town full of temples, and he saw many funerals. At every funeral, the children took name cards to the temple and came home with sweets. He envied them and asked his mother for a card. This was her answer:

"Only the children of people who go along to funerals get those."

Still, all the other kids went out with their cards and came back with sweets. Even now, he writes, it seems strange to him.

In January 1915, one of his younger brothers died of illness. Chuya was seven. His poetry began with songs about this brother. So says the chronology.

At fifteen he failed a school year. At the middle school in Kyoto where he moved, he met Yasuko. They began living together in 1924. They did not tell his family.

The next March, the two of them went to Tokyo. He took a high school entrance exam and failed. In Tokyo he knew only two people: Kobayashi, and Tominaga Taro, who had introduced him to Kobayashi. Tominaga, too, had died of illness about a month before Yasuko left, he writes.

Back to that day at the end of November.

He set the package of breakable things down in the entrance hall of the new house.

In the next room, Kobayashi sat reading a newspaper in a brown padded robe, his head bent low. Chuya turned to leave at once, but Yasuko told him to stay a little. Then Kobayashi said it too: come in for a minute. He went in.

He does not remember much of what they talked about. He only remembers saying something sarcastic to Kobayashi, he says.

Then Yasuko gave him a look, a signal, as if she were still his woman.

Anger rose in him. Then why had she needed to throw him away?

He said goodbye and put on his cold shoes. The house was newly rented, and there was no light bulb in the entrance. Only Yasuko came out to see him off into the dark hall.

In his hurry, the glass sliding door opened only a little. As he turned sideways to squeeze out, he saw Yasuko's face.

At that moment, he writes, he put on a smile that looked just like a villain's.

"I've been thrown away!"

The road in the suburbs was damp with night dew. From the dark woods far away came the sound of a train. He shivered.

The station was close, but he could not bring himself to ride the train. He walked along a path through a field that had only just been cleared, all the way to the next station.

He reached his new boarding house at half past midnight. Upstairs, his luggage had already arrived. At least the bedding had to be unpacked that night. The thought made him feel terribly low. The smell of the packing cord, the way it rose to his head, he remembers even now, he says.

With nothing else to do, he took out a Bible and began to read, but he did not remember at all what he read. Why a Bible? It is almost funny now, he also writes.

The tears did not come.

The Frustrated Man

"I was just so frustrated. I was 'a man of frustration.'"

After Yasuko left, the more days passed, the worse the frustration grew. So Chuya writes.

His next exam was four months away. Both his father and his mother kept asking whether he was ready.

Every morning he left his boarding house. Two or three times he carried study books for the Chinese classics and English. He simply wandered the streets of Tokyo.

The books turned out to be nothing but heavy luggage.

He went back to his room only to sleep. His parents did not know he had been living with Yasuko. He knew five people in Tokyo, slightly. Four of them respected Kobayashi. The last one did not seem likely to bother with someone like him, he writes.

"I was left all alone in the middle of the great city of Tokyo!"

Until the day the woman ran off, he writes, he had always been able to look straight ahead.

All that was lost. He began to dislike people more and more. The world grew narrower and narrower, as if it would strangle him.

"But I wanted to live. I wanted to live!"

He read whatever came to hand. Not because it was fun. Because there was nothing else he could do, he writes.

"To be betrayed by a friend is sadder than to be betrayed by a man you never knew."

Still, it was better for the woman to be with a man he knew than to go off to some place he did not know. He had that feeling, too.

Is it because he is a coward? Maybe so, he admits. Even so, he turns the question around. Perhaps he has some power in his heart that "cannot fully hate a person."

A novelist would write here about how the woman and the new man came together. But he has no interest in that, he says. Having said so, he goes on thinking about the woman in many ways.

"She doesn't even dislike me, and she didn't really need that other man either... She is the kind of woman who likes games... It would have been better if she had hated me to the core and run away..."

That winter he came across a book of poems.

It was Spring and Asura by Miyazawa Kenji, a poet not yet known to the world. It became his favorite. He bought several copies and took them to his friends.

This young man had written that he got nothing from the books he read. Yet this book he bought himself and delivered to other people.

In the spring of 1926 he entered the preparatory course of Nihon University, the years before the university proper. In September he quit, without telling his family.

His tie to Kobayashi had not been cut.

In April 1928, Chuya wrote a short piece and added to its title "a Cobayashi," meaning to Kobayashi. It begins like this:

"However kindly people try to treat me, it only looks to me like a shadow in a warm color..."

However kindly people treat him, he sees only a shadow. He was writing this loneliness to the man Yasuko had gone to.

In the same piece he also declares:

"Real life ought to be lived logically!"

That same year, Kobayashi, too, left Yasuko.

In December 1930, Yasuko gave birth to a child. The father was neither Chuya nor Kobayashi.

The one who named the child was Chuya.