Photo/Illutration Bokusui Wakayama (Provided by Numazu Bokusui-kai)

When autumn deepens, I always recall a poem by Bokusui Wakayama (1885-1928) and recite it to myself.

It goes to the effect, "On an autumn night, you should drink sake in tranquility, fully savoring its aroma spreading through your teeth."

In my imagination, this evokes a scene where a mature adult, who has been through the vicissitudes of life, preaches social drinking rules to a young man.

However, I learned recently from "Bokusui no Koi" (Bokusui's love), a critical biography by tanka poet Machi Tawara, that the above piece implied Bokusui's remorse for his own past as an out-of-control sot whose excessive drinking repeatedly got him into trouble.

As a student at Waseda University, Bokusui was a young literary enthusiast whose tangled love life drove him to drink and wind up in mindless capers, such as stopping a train by sleeping on the railway tracks and getting reamed by a police officer for jumping into the Imperial Palace moat.

His unrequited love interest, Saeko, was an older married woman Bokusui likened to an immaculate white bird in this poem: "A lone white bird stays in the air/ without fading into the blueness of sky or sea/ and I can’t help wondering/ how profound its sorrow must be." (Translation by Gregory Dunne and Goro Takano)

Saeko had come to Tokyo, leaving her two children in her hometown, and was living with her male cousin.

Trapped in this "love quadrangle," Bokusui was buffeted violently by treacherous waves, so to speak.

But his dream of spending time alone with Saeko came true when they traveled together to a seashore in Chiba Prefecture.

He penned this piece: "Look at the mountain/ the sun shines on the mountain/ look at the ocean/ the sun shines on the ocean/ let me kiss you."

Tawara visited this beach. "Bokusui's jubilance in fulfilling his dream enabled him to produce many masterpieces," Tawara noted.

But the romance ended, and Bokusui drank as if he were drowning in liquor, sinking to the bottomless depths like a deep-sea fish.

He wrote: "Whenever I hear/ a story about an eyeless fish/ living in the deep sea/ I’m desperately sick for the sight of it/ ah, my eyeless fish." (Translation by Gregory Dunne and Goro Takano).

When I first learned this poem in school, it was all Greek to me. But now that I know how badly his five-year love affair ended, I can totally understand it.

Bokusui later started a family and left a huge footprint as a poet, as we all know.

Many of his works with which I became familiar were written in his early 20s. His lost love proved truly fruitful.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 5

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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