There are lots of fun things in this story.
I confess that it took me a while to work out who our 主人公 was, and the connection to the previous story. (But I laughed when I finally worked it out!)
I had no idea who most of the poets were listed on page 46. Here is a helpful explanation (thanks to Chat GPT)
Poet
Dates / tradition
Very roughly, what kind of poet?
萩原朔太郎 Hagiwara Sakutarō
1886–1942, Japanese
Pioneer of modern Japanese free verse; psychological, urban, lonely, uncanny. The author of the 「猫」 in the story His 月に吠える (1917) was enormously influential. (国立国会図書館)
William Wordsworth
1770–1850, English
Central English Romantic: nature, memory, childhood, ordinary experience, the inner life.
Guillaume Apollinaire
1880–1918, French
Avant-garde modernist; experimented radically with form, typography and imagery; associated with Cubism and the beginnings of Surrealism.
伊藤整 Itō Sei
1905–1969, Japanese
Poet, novelist, critic and translator. Interestingly, he was himself strongly affected by Sakutarō when young—so much so that he later said he deliberately stopped reading him because he feared being influenced too much. (Otaru Tourist Association)
室生犀星 Murō Saisei
1889–1962, Japanese
Poet and novelist; intensely personal lyric poetry, often concerning loneliness, family and longing for home. Particularly important here because he and Sakutarō were extremely close friends and literary collaborators. They founded the poetry journal Kanjō together. (Asahi Net)
Georg Trakl
1887–1914, Austrian
German-language Expressionist; dark, dreamlike poems filled with autumn, twilight, decay, silence, madness and death.
立原道造 Tachihara Michizō
1914–1939, Japanese
Lyrical poet who died very young; delicate, musical poetry of landscape, youth, love, longing and loss. He belonged to the generation of poets strongly affected by Sakutarō. (note（ノート）)
Charles Baudelaire
1821–1867, French
Les Fleurs du mal. Beauty and corruption, eroticism, melancholy, modern city life, ennui. One of the fundamental ancestors of modernist and Symbolist poetry.
石原吉郎 Ishihara Yoshirō
1915–1977, Japanese
A very different postwar Japanese poet. Spent years imprisoned in Soviet Siberian camps after WWII; his severe, compressed poetry grapples with survival, responsibility, silence and human existence.
Paul Celan
1920–1970, German-language, born in Romania
Jewish Holocaust survivor; one of the major postwar European poets. His increasingly compressed, difficult German confronts memory, extermination, language and the possibility/impossibility of communication.
Emily Dickinson
1830–1886, American
Intensely compressed, idiosyncratic poems about death, immortality, consciousness, nature, God, doubt and the self.
I also enjoyed the Hagiwara poem. Also needed a bit of help in making sense of it, but once I did, I thought it was very apt for the atmosphere of the story. A page or so later, we have Ogawa’s own bit of eerie poetry -
On first reading, I confess to being completely confused by the section featuring Juraku the horse. I understood that for some reason there was a horse backstage, but couldn’t work out why.
On second reading, I finally worked out that this was all in relation to a stage production of Gone with the Wind (風と共に去りぬ). Apparently, the Imperial theatre in Tokyo famously opened in 1966 with a 9 hour stage version of the classic American film/novel. This was later adapted locally to a four hour musical version. Both productions featured a horse called Juraku who was said to have his own dressing room!
This suggests to me that Ogawa is enjoying weaving a bit of real history into her novel (as she did in ミーナの行進). It will be interesting to see if we can spot the bits where she is doing this.
Presumably, the ghost child is made up, but there are quite often ghost stories associated with theatres (actors are superstitious folk!) I did find this article which includes an interview with Ogawa and describes her having been inspired to write this book after speaking with one of the theatre managers. (I can’t read the whole article as it is behind a paywall).
Thank you for investigating all this @domjcw and the notes about the poets - I would have been puzzled about the horse too!
About our 主人公
I did wonder about this character in オタルさんへの手紙 but then promptly forgot about that, then when things started getting a bit weird with the poetry reading actor, i.e. the 少年 reading the same line of each poem at the same time as him, I wondered for a while whether the 猫 poem was a hint that our 主人公 was a cat! I did work it out shortly after that though…
A few other thoughts so far, (I am interested to see if we will find out more about the 少年 in the second half of this chapter) are:
There seems to be a kind of symmetry/contrast between the father in chapter 1 and the 少年. For example, the father could hear but not see, the 少年 can be seen (by some at least), but apparently not heard. They are both no longer in the physical world in the normal way, but one suffered from getting old, and the other is young (with the desires of a young person) but not able to communicate/act on those feelings.
Anyway, that’s as far as I have managed to think about it so far.
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