Chieko Shō is Takamura Kōtarō’s best-known book. The collection consists of 31 poems and three essays. Chieko Shō is a unified collection and a poetry sequence in the true sense, chronicling Takamura’s life together with his wife, Chieko.

The sequence begins in 1912 with his courtship of Chieko and ends in 1940, two years after her death. Early poems, such as To Someone (Not to Play), record their youthful and exuberant love for each other. Others, such as Deep Night Snow, show a deep-seated and mature love. All of the poems of this period, however, emphasize their unique relationship.

In a time of arranged marriages, their marriage—based on love and gender equality—was unusual for the time. These early poems also focus on Chieko’s spiritual role in Takamura’s life. Throughout his life Takamura looked upon Chieko as having rescued him from a life of decadence. He saw Chieko as having a close connection with nature, and for Takamura, Chieko was a spiritual guide and the means to a purifying communion with nature. These early poems also express the couple’s isolation from society, which seems to have resulted largely from their unique relationship.

Chieko Shō goes on to record their poor but content existence together until Chieko’s depression and attempted suicide in 1931 and her diagnosis of schizophrenia the following year. The close connection between the couple chronicled in the earlier part of the book heightens the poignancy of the series of poems that records Chieko’s journey from madness into death.

As Chieko drifts ever further from him, tender poems, such as Chieko among the Plovers and Two of the Foothills, chronicle both Takamura’s sadness at Chieko’s plight as well as his loneliness at losing someone who had become woven into the fabric of his existence.

The most touching part of the sequence occurs in the last few poems, beginning with Lemon Dirge, in which Chieko, on her deathbed, momentarily returns to sanity and to Takamura just before she passes away. Bleak Homecoming follows, a poem in which Takamura expresses his extreme isolation both during Chieko’s funeral arrangements and after she is gone, when he finds himself alone in his studio.

The sequence moves on to a note of consolation in To One Who Died and Plum Wine. In the former, Takamura comes to see himself communing once again with Chieko as her spirit becomes one with nature, and in the latter Takamura later discovers a bottle of plum wine that Chieko had made many years earlier and then sits sipping the wine and feeling once again connected to Chieko.

The sequence concludes with Six Songs, a series of six vignettes of their life together. The latter part of the book includes three essays: a biography of the last half of Chieko’s life, a short essay about Chieko’s time living near Kujūkuri Beach while Takamura tried to care for her in her illness, and a short essay about Chieko’s cut paper art.

Bibliography
Takamura, Kōtarō. The Chieko Poems. Translated by John G. Peters. Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2005.

Categories: British Literature, Japanese Literature, Literature

Tags: Analysis of Takamura Kōtarō's The Chieko Collection