Kunio Tsukamoto (Poet) -- Avant-garde Tanka and the Reflections of the Postwar Japanese Spirit

Kunio Tsukamoto (Poet) -- Avant-garde Tanka and the Reflections of the Postwar Japanese Spirit

Kunio Tsukamoto (1920-2005) was a poet who led the avant-garde tanka movement in postwar Japan. He was a unique figure who, while maintaining the traditional form of waka poetry, developed a thoroughly modern and anti-chronological aesthetic sense in his work. In 1971, Japanese society was at the peak of its rapid economic growth, and while the lives of ordinary people had become richer, there were also widespread shifts in values, such as the dilution of spiritual culture, political distrust, and the decline of the student movement. Tsukamoto's songs were a strong counterpoint to the buoyant atmosphere of the times.

After the war, Tsukamoto departed from the lyricism of traditional waka and praise of nature, and introduced themes such as artificiality, aestheticism, heresy, poison, death, and sex into tanka poetry, which was especially prominent in the magazines "Tanka Kenkyu" and "Shikka". His masterpieces, such as "Suibunsho Monogatari" (1954), "Kangenraku" (1961), and "Utajin" (1971), express the loneliness and craving of modern people in radical and exquisite language. The intellectuals and young literary youth of the time were enthusiastic about his use of language that "twisted the unpleasant reality of the modern world through the magic of words.

In 1971, Tsukamoto, while seeking the purity of artistic expression in works such as "Poems and Phrases," continued to weave poems in brilliant and critical language with an eye on postwar culture, which was being swallowed up by the waves of television, mass consumption, and capitalism. Tsukamoto, however, remained in the realm of "pure literature" and "pure tanka," while Terayama was more inclined toward popular art and visual images.

The year of 1971 was the year when the Security Treaty struggle subsided and the "results" of the high economic growth began to reach the people. However, it was also a time of crisis for tanka. While traditional poetic forms were being dismissed as "old-fashioned," Tsukamoto dared to stick to the tanka form, and paradoxically captured the sensibility of the present age by making full use of the classical language, literary style, and Chinese rhetoric in his creative approach.

His poems, for example--.

Thinking of the beautiful dead woman's breast, I drink my cold coffee

The style of his songs, in which beauty and death, sexuality and alienation, religious symbolism and modern emptiness intersect, approaches the reader as if tearing at the skin of the everyday. In the early 1970s, when Japan's consumer society was accelerating, these works served to visualize the forgotten signs of death and spiritual emptiness.

Kunio Tsukamoto's tanka poems, at the watershed year of 1971, vividly marked a cross-section of Japan's postwar spiritual history.