Shuntaro Tanikawa, who pioneered modern Japanese poetry, poignant but conversational in its divergence from haiku and other traditions, has died aged 92.
Tanikawa, who translated the Peanuts comic strip and penned the lyrics for the theme song of the animation series Astro Boy, died on 13 November, his son Kensaku Tanikawa said on Tuesday. The cause of death, at a Tokyo hospital, was old age.
Tanikawa stunned the literary world with his 1952 debut work Two Billion Light Years of Solitude, a bold look at the cosmic in daily life, sensual, vivid but simple in its use of everyday language. Written before Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, it became a bestseller.
Tanikawa’s Kotoba Asobi Uta, or Word Play Songs, is a rhythmical experiment in juxtaposing words that sound similar, such as “kappa”, a mythical animal, and “rappa”, a horn, that makes for a joyful singsong compilation, filled with alliterations and onomatopoeia.
“For me, the Japanese language is the ground. Like a plant, I place my roots, drink in the nutrients of the Japanese language, sprouting leaves, flowers and bearing fruit,” he said in a 2022 interview with the Associated Press at his Tokyo home.
Tanikawa explored the poetic, not only in the repetitive music of the spoken word but also the magic hidden in little things.
One of his works is titled “I wanted to talk to you in the kitchen in the middle of the night”.
“In the past, there was something about it being a job, being commissioned. Now, I can write as I want,” he said.
Tanikawa also translated Mother Goose, Maurice Sendak and Leo Lionni, and has in turn been widely translated, including English, Chinese and various European languages.
Some of his works were made into picture books for children and they are often featured in Japanese school textbooks. He also incorporated Japanese words derived from foreign origins into his poems such as Coca-Cola.
“Tanikawa’s poetry reflects a metaphysical and quasi-religious attitude toward experience. In simple, spare language, he sketches profound ideas and emotional truths,” according to the Poetry Foundation, a US literary organisation.
Tanikawa was born in 1931, a son of the philosopher Tetsuzo Tanikawa, and began writing poetry in his teens, circulating with the famous poets of that era, such as Makoto Ooka and Shuji Terayama.
He said he used to think poems descended like an inspiration from the heavens. But, as he grew older, he felt the poems welling up from the ground.
In person, Tanikawa was friendly and unassuming, often reading in public with other poets. He never seemed to take himself too seriously but used to confess his one regret in life was never finishing his education, having dropped out amid stardom at a young age.
His relative isolation from the bleakly serious scholarly poetry scene of postwar Japan likely helped him take his free-verse approach that went on to innovate and define Japanese contemporary poetics.
Tanikawa said he wasn’t afraid of death, implying he perhaps meant to write a poem about that experience too.
“I am more curious about where I will go when I die. It’s a different world, right? Of course, I don’t want pain. I don’t want to die after major surgery or anything. I just want to die, all of a sudden,” he said.
He is survived by his son, Kensaku, a composer, his daughter, Shino, and several grandchildren. Funeral services were held privately with family and friends. A farewell event in his honour was being planned, Kensaku Tanikawa said.
“As they did with all of you, Shuntaro’s poems stunned and moved me, making me chuckle or shed a tear. Wasn’t it all so fun?” he said. “His poems are with you forever.”
