While Tanikawa is not the first Japanese poet to use the sonnet form, he has made unique contributions to the sonnet genre through his 62 Sonnets (62 no sonetto), in which the poet seems to have used the form of the Sicilian strambotto, comprising two quatrains and two tercets.

But due to fundamental differences between Japanese and Western languages, Japanese sonnets, including Tanikawa’s, lack the metrical and rhyming patterns of Western sonnets, depending instead for their rhythm on syllable patterns within their lines, just as in their different ways tanka (5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllables per line) or haiku (5, 7, 5) do.

“Sonnet 41,” with its nostalgic opening line about looking up at the azure of the sky, is one of the most famous and best-loved poems not only of this sonnet sequence but of Tanikawa’s entire output. More than a love poem, the sonnet expresses pantheistic rather than monotheistic feelings about the fallen state of humanity (e.g., “But the brightness that has come down through the clouds / Will never go back to the sky”).

The combination in this sonnet of pantheism—a traditional Japanese sensibility—and Judeo-Christian religiosity in response to humanity’s fall seems to appeal greatly to modern Japanese readers, whose psyches subsume the two different sensibilities.

Throughout the poem, the fallen state of humankind is suggested through contrasting images of the primary innocence (or divinity) of the universe/nature and the greed of human beings: the sun “everlastingly lavishly expends itself” in contrast to people busily picking up even after dark, or humans who “are basely born / and don’t know how to rest well, like the trees.”

The image of cutting and hurting (“The window cuts off what is overflowing”) in the penultimate tercet is completed in the metaphysical conclusion of the last tercet: “To be is to injure space and time, / and the pain reproaches me. / When I’m gone my health will return.”

This tercet’s startling self-referential equation/union of “I” (the human speaker) and the universe recapitulates and intensifies the speaker’s statement of cosmic and pantheistic loneliness and nostalgia expressed in the sonnet’s opening quatrain, a human longing for that lost, original innocence when there was no painful rift between human speech and nature’s “speech,” or between culture and nature.

Hence the poet’s paradoxical, animistic, and pantheistic statement: “When I’m gone” (i.e., when base human speech ceases) “my health will return” (i.e., nature’s divine “speech” will resume).

Thus Tanikawa’s “Sonnet 41,” and by extension 62 no sonetto, together with his Nijūokukōnen no kodoku (Solitude of Two Billion Light-Years, 1952), communicate a cosmic loneliness and yearning for union with nature through pantheistic and Judeo-Christian sensibilities, expressing the essential tone of his entire creative career and thereby attracting not only Japanese but also international audiences to his work.

Bibliography
Tanikawa Shuntaro. 62 Sonnets and Definitions. Translated by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura. Santa Fe, N.M.: Katydid Books, 1992.

Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature, World Literature

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