Zenmaro Toki (土岐善麿 ''Toki Zenmaro''; June 8, 1885 – April 15, 1980) was a Japanese Naturalist '' tanka'' poet. After initially taking up ''tanka'' in his teens, he studied under Kun'en Kaneko, and when in attendance at Waseda University he socialized with other notable Naturalist poets such as Bokusui Wakayama. Later, he earned the respect of the famous poet Takuboku Ishikawa, with whom he corresponded until the latter's death in 1912.

Biography

Zenmaro Toki was born in 1885. He was born in Tokyo. He first took up '' tanka'' composition in middle school. He became a disciple of , a minor poet who had studied under

Ochiai Naobumi was a Japanese tanka poet and scholar of Japanese literature of the Meiji Era. He was born as Ayukai Morimitsu and was the biological elder brother of the Korean scholar Ayukai Fusanoshin. Biography Ochiai was born in what was then Motoyoshi C ...

and who, according to historian and critic Donald Keene, never fulfilled his early potential. Kun'en experimented with just about every ''tanka'' school, and the characteristic that critics have traditionally associated with him is his having been a "city poet". This was likely a characteristic that attracted Zenmaro to him, as the two shared little else in common. Zenmaro attended Waseda University, where he fraternized with Bokusui Wakayama and other poets. He also studied European literature extensively. Upon graduation, he found work as a journalist. His talent as a poet first garnered attention in 1910 when he published ''Nakiwarai'' ("Smiling Through the Tears"), a collection of 143 poems written entirely in roman letters, in three-line stanzas. Takuboku Ishikawa praised this work as being unlike that of any other ''tanka'' poet of the day; although the poems were written in

classical Japanese The classical Japanese language ( ''bungo'', "literary language"), also called "old writing" ( ''kobun''), sometimes simply called "Medieval Japanese" is the literary form of the Japanese language that was the standard until the early Shōwa pe ...

, their subject-matter was drawn from everyday life in a manner typical of the Naturalist poets. The three-line form Zenmaro's collection pioneered was soon thereafter adopted by Takuboku. He adopted mild socialist tendencies in the 1910s, and when, in the 1930s, the militarist government began to crack down heavily on left-wing literature, he shifted over to writing scholarly works rather than produce propaganda. He wrote for the '' Asahi Shimbun'' from 1918 to 1940. Zenmaro died in 1980.

References

Works cited

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Toki, Zenmaro 20th-century Japanese poets 1885 births 1980 deaths People from Tokyo