Sparks from the Clouds: a modern Buddhist poem

Abstract

Although published only two years after Eliot’s famous modernist poem “The Waste Land” (1922), Miyazawa Kenji’s 52-line “Haru to Shura” (1924) is already very nearly as modern. The two poems, examined here using my expanded version of Riffaterre’s semiotic theory, have analogous propositional structure. One proposition concerns the faithless majority of mankind; the other involves a heavenly personage of potentially rehabilitating power. In Miyazawa’s case, the former is represented by Japanese peasants; the latter is the “Shura” – normally an unruly member of the lowest rank of Buddhist demigods. Miyazawa’s modernist message reverses the roles of these two personae: the Shura only wants to be recognized by the peasant he spies below his abode in the clouds. The peasant comes off as the lesser of the two beings because of his obdurate fixation on the soil. Miyazawa enhances the contrast of roles by painting the spring landscape – normally a season of burgeoning nature – in somber colors. This is a spring (haru) in which no birds sing, and the ranks of cypress trees are black. Commentaries by Japanese critics, plus one by one of my students, are examined: none can distance themselves from common sociolectic concepts of the seasons and the peasant population. Miyazawa, a devout Buddhist, is thus expressing a novel view of the people’s attitude to religion which they themselves are culpably unaware of. Their attitude is thus very close to that of the various personages in Eliot’s poem.