NAKAHARA CHUYA

(1907–1937)

Nakahara Chuya was a poet from Yamaguchi Prefecture. When Nakahara was just eight years old, his younger brother died and Nakahara sought solace for his mourning in poetry. He originally composed tanka, but in his teens became more interested in free verse poetry, particularly that of the European Dadaists. He graduated from Tokyo University, and while there rubbed shoulders with many of the leading men of letters of the day, including Ooka Shohei and Kobayashi Hideo, who introduced him to the works of French symbolist poets. Mainstream publishers rejected Nakahara’s works throughout his life, so he published in small literary journals. The death of his only child in infancy was a great source of anxiety and pain depicted in his later writings. Nakahara died of cerebral meningitis. Although only one of Nakahara’s anthologies, Yagi no uta (1934; tr. Poems of the Goat, 2002), was published during his lifetime, Kobayashi and Ooka promoted his poetry posthumously, and his poems are now studied in Japanese schools. The city of Yamaguchi established the annual Nakahara Chuya Prize in 1996, awarded to a poetry anthology characterized by a “fresh sensibility.”