Romaji Diary and Sad Toys by Takuboku Ichikawa, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda (Tuttle)

Takuboku Ichikawa was a Japanese poet born in 1886 in  Iwate Prefecture, near current day Morioka City at Joko Temple where his father was the head monk. He moved to Shibutami, also in Iwate Prefecture, a year later. He died at the young age of twenty-six from tuberculosis. 

He is mostly known for writing tanka, a genre of Japanese classical poetry. Unlike haiku which follows an on of 5-7-5, on being a phonetic unit, tanka follows a 5-7-5-7-7 on pattern. However, Ichikawa became famous for breaking with tradition as many of his tanka does not follow the standard pattern, nor does it deal with classical subjects. Ichikawa wrote his tanka to describe the mundane, the ordinary, he wrote them as a diary in poetry form.

Romaji Diary and Sad Toys is actually a collection of two books in one volume. The first half of the book, Romaji Diary, originally published as ロマジ日記 (Romanji Nikki) was a diary the Ichikawa wrote between the months April and June in 1909 before his death. 

The latter half of the the book, Sad Toys, which was originally published in the Japanese language as 悲しき玩具 (Kanashiki Gangu), is a collection 194 of Ichikawa’s tanka translated into English by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. 

Ichikawa had been living in Tokyo for a year when he started writing his diary. He had yet to send for his family because he didn’t feel he would be able to support them. It appears Ichikawa wrote his diary as a means to leave the stress he felt from what he thought were his own shortcomings. 

In one his earliest entries, he writes, “Why have I decided to write this diary in Roman letters? What’s the reason? I love my wife, and for the very reason I love her, I don’t want her to read it.” Many of his entries are full of contradictions. He goes on to write, “I love her is the truth, and that I don’t want her to read it is equally true, but these two statements aren’t necessarily connected. 

Ichikawa continued to write his diary until his wife and daughter came to Tokyo to live with him. Reading his diary, you can feel his frustration at not being able to achieve what he set out to do. He is often cynical and self-loathing. He often praises his wife but then in another entry, wonders why he even got married. 

The latter half of the book, Sad Toys, is a collection of Ichikawa’s tanka. In this edition, the publisher includes the Japanese original which were all written in three lines. The translators not only provide the English equivalent of each tanka but have also included their own interpretations and explanations of each to make it easier for the reader to understand them.

As with his Romaji Diary, his tanka are also little stories about himself, how he felt at a certain time, what his exact thoughts were. Some of the tanka are about his friends, others are about his family, and there are a few about a woman he became very infatuated with although their friendship remained platonic. 

As a recent resident of the Tohoku area of Japan, I have become quite interested in regional authors. Not as many of their works have been translated into English with the exception of Osaumu Dazai. If you want to expand your knowledge of Japanese literature and want to read more than just Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, or Soseki Natsumi, you may find the works of Takuboku Ichikawa to be an interesting alternative. You might even think of it as a breath of fresh air. ~Ernie Hoyt