Background
Kenji Miyazawa was born on August 27, 1896 in Hanamaki, Iwate, Japan. He was the son of a pawnbroker specializing in used clothing.
(A collection of classic, fantastical tales from Northern ...)
A collection of classic, fantastical tales from Northern Japan that are equal parts whimsical and sophisticated, perfect for readers of all ages. Kenji Miyazawa is one of modern Japan’s most beloved writers, a great poet and a strange and marvelous spinner of tales, whose sly, humorous, enchanting, and enigmatic stories bear a certain resemblance to those of his contemporary Robert Walser. John Bester’s selection and expert translation of Miyazawa’s short fiction reflects its full range from the joyful, innocent “Wildcat and the Acorns,” to the cautionary tale “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” to “The Earthgod and the Fox,” which starts out whimsically before taking a tragic turn. Miyazawa also had a deep connection to Japanese folklore and an intense love of the natural world. In “The Wild Pear,” what seem to be two slight nature sketches succeed in encapsulating some of the cruelty and compensations of life itself.
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Kenji Miyazawa was born on August 27, 1896 in Hanamaki, Iwate, Japan. He was the son of a pawnbroker specializing in used clothing.
Miyazawa studied at two local agricultural schools with an eye toward helping the peasants. His strict Buddhist beliefs led him to study at a religious school in Tokyo (Nichiren Buddhist school), but he returned to his birthplace to be present during the final illness of his beloved sister Toshiko. After her death, he remained in Iwate, which was known as “the Tibet of Japan” because of its harsh topography and poor soil.
Miyazawa dedicated himself to a life of hard work, first teaching agronomy and science, then resigning his job in 1926 in order to work directly with the peasants at their own labors. A devout follower of the Lotus Sutra (one of the most important texts in Mahayana Buddhism), he overworked himself for others and sustained himself on an even poorer diet than was customary for the local people.
Miyazawa’s single most famous poem has been translated as “November Third,” although the author left it untitled; the title refers to the date in 1933—two months before the poet’s death—when the work was composed.
Miyazawa himself, rather than being purely self-denying, loved to observe nature, so that his poems are filled with technically precise descriptions of the natural phenomena around him. His nature poems, even when up to eight hundred lines long (as in “Koiwai Farm,” in which he describes, in reverse chronology, a walk from a train station to a farm) are not mere catalogues, because of the extraordinarily free visual imagination that could encompass a huge landscape or a microscopic speck within a few lines, and which amounted almost to a hallucinatory quality.
Miyazawa’s poems are available in English in a few translations, some of them published in anthologies. The premier single-volume edition is Sato’s A Future of Ice, which greatly expands upon and supersedes that translator’s Spring and Asura. Fine translations of eighteen of the poems are to be found in Beat poet Gary Snyder’s 1968 collection Back Country.
A lesser, though still major, strand in Miyazawa’s work consists of his stories, fable-like pieces which are often published as illustrated children’s books. The most famous of these was translated into English by Sarah M. Strong in 1991 as Night of the Milky Way Railway.
Both in his fiction and in his poetry, Miyazawa was a restless reviser who continued to refine his poems in notebook after notebook, and whose personal esthetic viewed the work of literature as a fluid thing-capable of undergoing continual change and improvement. Many of his poems exist in various versions.
(A collection of classic, fantastical tales from Northern ...)
Miyazawa was known as a devout Buddhist.