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Paper short abstract:

This paper will use a selection of poems by the modern tanka-poet, Ishikawa Takuboku, that circle around the notion of furusato, in order to illustrate aspects of the modern condition humaine, such as, unequal development, non-simultaneity, and the temporalities of capitalist modernity.

Paper long abstract:

The poet, Ishikawa Takuboku (1885 - 1912), famous for his modern tanka-poetry and the innovations that he achieved within this traditional form, once explained in a conversation with a fictive friend that he devoted himself to the tanka form because it is the perfect vehicle for expressing the transitory, every-day “sensations” that may be regarded as petty and insignificant, but are in fact the building blocks of any real, lived experience. On the basis of the presumption that any such subjective experience corresponds with the objective political and economic circumstances that enable and condition it, we will use a selection of Ishikawa’s tanka, thematically circling around the notion of furusato – the “old village”, the place where one is coming from - in order to illustrate and to theorize some of the fundamental aspects of the modern condition humaine: urbanization and dislocation, uneven development and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, and the tribulations of the temporalities of capitalist modernity. This, indeed, also includes such notions as “tradition”, “history”, and “heritage” that in the form and content of Ishikawa’s oeuvre, and in his evocations of “the mountains back home”, are emphasized and undermined in a particularly striking fashion that, arguably, is symptomatic for a time of still ongoing transition, such as the late Meiji-period: “Here, it is easy to return or dream one’s way back to older times … Nature, and more than that, the ghost of history comes very easily … in a country with a particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material … ” (Ernst Bloch).