Japan’s Baudelaire: Hagiwara Sakutaro’s Poetic World Under the Moon

Abstract

Hagiwara Sakutaro is viewed as the father of Japanese modern poetry as well as Japan’s Baudelaire. As such, Japanese scholarship on Sakutaro has centered around the identification of the modernity of his poetry. Toshiko Ellis, based upon Karatani Kojin’s critical term of “the discovery of landscape,” estimated that Sakutaro opened the door of modern poetry in Japan by discovering the interiority of a man and defamiliarizing nature as a landscape. Yasko Clairemont, comparing Sakutaro to Charles Baudelaire, illuminated Sakutaro’s perception of Tokyo echoes that of Baudelaire’s flâneur. Acknowledging Japanese scholarship, this paper tries to make an experimental reading of Sakutaro’s Howling at the Moon in the frame of world literature. Reading both original and translated texts, this paper acknowledges the weakness of a foreign reading and yet purports to carry out a new constructive reading that illuminates Sakutaro as a poet living inside the historico-cultural moments of Taisho Japan. By indicating a so far shaded facade of Howling at the Moon, this paper tries to connect the literary significance of Sakutaro’s modernism to the global literary context of the early twentieth century, in which modernist poets of the East and the West all explored the gloomy melancholy and the hollowness of modern man, and the role of a modern intellectual- poet.