Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the centennial process where European sonnets have been adapted to Japanese verse, and developed into 'Japanese Sonnets'. From the viewpoints of versification and musicality, all the achievements by Japanese modern poets should be analysed and summarised as a new movement.

Paper long abstract:

Various experiments have been done in modern Japanese poetry. Among them, this paper casts a new light on 'Japanese sonnets', an interesting invention in the history of Japanese literature. During Shintaishi movement in Meiji era, European sonnets were first introduced through translation as one of the fixed forms. Since then sonnets have been adapted and adjusted to Japanese language, and developed into sonnet-styled Japanese poems. The main focus in this paper is put on the process where European sonnets were accepted and adapted by Japanese poets, especially from these two viewpoints: the versification of Japanese language; the musicality of Japanese sonnets.

Ariake Kambara (1875-1952) invented a new experimental rhyme named 'Dokugen-chō', and developed the rhyme into the first sonnet form in Japanese literature. Ariake was followed by his friend Kyūkin Susukida (1877-1945), who arranged the rhyme more effectively both in versification and in vocabulary. Another Shintaishi poet Hōmei Iwano (1873-1920) tried adapting French symbolist sonnets to Japanese poems, both in form and in theme. Their achievements proceeded into those in early Shōwa era, when sonnets remained still fresh and new, as a challenging and charming genre in Japanese poetry. Chūya Nakahara (1907-37) and Michizō Tachihara (1914-39) left fourteen-lined poems with slightly-devised ending rhymes, trying to follow European sonnet convention. In 1942, during World War II, a group of young Japanese poets, including Shūichi Katō (1919-2008), Takehiko Fukunaga (1919-79) and Shinichirō Nakamura (1918-97), started 'Matinee Poetique' movement, influenced by French poets and poetics. Their poetical experiments culminated in an aesthetic completeness of musicality in Japanese sonnets. The movement was short-lived, finished in 1950, but Yoshinao Nakada (1923-2000) appreciated their musicality, and composed four musical settings to the poems (1951) as if in the same way as traditional Italian sonnets were in accordance with musical settings. Our contemporary sonneteer Shuntarō Tanikawa (1931-) and his works should be introduced to examine the future possibility of Japanese sonnets.

In this way, looking through all the attempts and experiments that Japanese modern poets have done for more than a century, this paper concludes a genealogy of the great achievements in Japanese sonnets.