Kunio Tsukamoto (Poet) -- Reflections on Avant-garde Tanka and the Postwar Japanese Spirit (December 1971)

Kunio Tsukamoto (Poet) -- Reflections on Avant-garde Tanka and the Postwar Japanese Spirit (December 1971)

Kunio Tsukamoto (1920-2005) was a heretical poet who revolutionized postwar tanka. While adhering to the traditional 5757 form, his content was thoroughly avant-garde, and he developed a unique worldview that blended aestheticism, death, sex, poison, religion, and history. The year was 1971, in the midst of high economic growth, when television and consumer culture were rapidly overtaking society. Amidst the setbacks of the student movement, political stagnation, and confusion of values that covered Japanese society, Tsukamoto's tanka poems were an aesthetic rebellion against such "frivolous modernity.

In this year, Tsukamoto was building a poetic landscape that blended decadence and lyricism in works such as "Utajin," while using exquisite and chilling literary language, archaic words, and Chinese words. While his contemporary Shuji Terayama expanded into theater and film, Tsukamoto consistently stuck to the formulaic form of tanka poetry. In one of his poems, "I drink cold coffee while thinking of the beautiful breast of the dead," Tsukamoto's keen sense of the loneliness of the civilized city, the presence of death, and the cold reality are evident. In 1971, tanka poetry was beginning to be regarded as "old," but Tsukamoto gave new life to the form and continued to pursue "the most modern voice in the classics. Tsukamoto's presence was a quiet gust of wind in the Japanese culture of the 1970s.