Japanese Language and Literature

Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese

jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 57 | Number 1 | April 2023 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2023.301
ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online)

REVIEWS

The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry: Translation and

Form

By Scott Mehl. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell East Asia Series, Cornell

University Press, 2021. xvi, 235 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by
Timothy J. Van Compernolle

This fascinating new book examines Japanese poetry during the period
1882–1907, a quarter century that witnessed an unprecedented degree of
formal experimentation, motivated in large measure by engagement with
and translation of European poetry as Japan opened its doors to trade and
diplomacy with the world and began its audacious program of
modernization. This dynamic between engagement with literature outside
Japan’s borders and formal experimentation within them is what generates
the subtitle of the book: Translation and Form. The title, The Ends of
Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, alludes to the overarching aim of the
monograph: “a prehistory of free verse in Japanese” (13). In other words,
the story traced in the book is how, stimulated by the translation and
reception of European poetry, predictable metrical shapes inherited from
the premodern era came to an end in Japan, to be replaced by metrical
unpredictability.
Mehl documents this historical process with nuance and shows it to be
an extraordinarily complex transformation. For non-specialist readers of
New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons
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This journal is published by the University Library System, University of
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54 | Japanese Language and Literature

The Ends of Meter, it may be useful to know that before the late nineteenth
century, Japanese poetry had seen many forms, including what in modern
parlance is called the tanka (literally “short verse,” thirty-one syllables
with a meter of 5-7-5-7-7) and two later forms ultimately derived from it:
the renga (linked verse) and, again in modern terminology, the haiku. The
former began as a tanka split into a 5-7-5 part from one poet and a 7-7 part
from another; in the late medieval era it evolved into an independent verse
form in which poets (typically three) took turns contributing these two
elements (5-7-5 and 7-7) to generate a communally produced verse of no
fixed length (though often one hundred links). The haiku originated in the
early-modern era when the initial 5-7-5 contribution to a renga became a
standalone seventeen-syllable poem. There are longer poems that
dominated a much earlier period during the formation of the court and the
state in the seventh and eighth centuries, but these, too, were built of
alternating lines of five and seven syllables in a verse whose length was
not fixed but which always concluded with a 7-7 couplet. There are
scattered experiments with alternative syllable counts and a long tradition
of verse-making in literary Chinese, but even this brief exposition should
show the dominance of a particular meter. In the simplest terms, modern
Japanese poetry is the story of the effort to escape the stranglehold of fives
and sevens and to create new verse forms. With a millennium of history
behind traditional meter, this was no easy task. Poems that did not adhere
to the inherited metrical scheme ran the risk of appearing not to be poems
at all.
The first chapter shows how lines of five and seven syllables
dominated the early experiments with translating European verse, even
though the foreign poems did not use that metrical scheme. These
translations appeared in the volume Shintaishi-shō (New-style poetry
collection, 1882), and they were also meant to be models for those devoted
to expanding the length, scope, and subject matter of poetry in Japan as
part of an engagement with the modernizing world around it. Shintaishi
might have relied on the inherited meter, but Mehl takes pains to
acknowledge innovations, too: “stanza divisions, lines of verse
demarcated by typographical means, a smattering of words from current
speech, and, not least, an openness to the possibility of new subject matter”
(33). In addition, the efforts of these translators and practitioners helped
shift the meaning of shi from designating a poem written in literary
Chinese to a more capacious term that included all poetry in whatever form
or language, even traditional Japanese forms.

Japanese Language and Literature | jll.pitt.edu

Vol. 57 | Number 1 | April 2023 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2023.301
 Reviews | 55

As the second chapter documents, an engagement with Byron and

Goethe helped Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–94) conceive new verse forms in
his long poem Soshū no shi (The poem of a prisoner, 1889) and his later
verse-drama Hōraikyoku (The song of Hōrai, 1891). These two poems
were not only innovative in terms of poetic genre, with no real precedent
in the Japanese tradition, but they also featured no regular metrical scheme,
the implication of which is that, as Mehl points out, they can legitimately
be considered the first experiments with the free verse in Japan even if
they do not appear in standard histories as such.
Occupying the exact middle of the book, the third chapter centers on
haiku poet Masaoka Shiki’s (1867-1902) defense of brevity in Japanese
poetry and features an enlightening discussion of early European efforts to
translate these short verse forms from another literary tradition. Among
other things, Mehl shows how Europeans, fascinated with these brief
poems yet unaccustomed to seeing such brevity as substantive, padded
(there is no better word here) their translations to give them more heft and
added rhyming schemes that did not exist in the originals. The chapter is
compelling on its own, but, despite some loose connections, does not
really advance the central historical argument of the book. To use a film
analogy, the third chapter is like an instance of parallel editing, with the
feeling of “meanwhile, in the world of traditional forms and meters,” after
which we return to the main story in the final two chapters.
If puzzlement greeted Tōkoku’s experiments, when they were even
noticed at all, something closer to outrage was directed at the esoteric and
electrifying poetry of Kanbara Ariake (1876-1952), who is the focus of the
fourth chapter. Ariake is usually dubbed a symbolist poet, but, while
acknowledging this and exploring the critical discourse about their
difficulty, the chapter is more interested in his wildly experimental attitude
toward meter. As Mehl shows, translation of European verse is another
motor here, with fives and sevens again dominating the translation of
symbolist poetry from France especially, but new stanza shapes were
created by Ueda Bin for his translations, such as alternations of 7-5-7 and
5-7-5. Ariake used these metrical schemes while also experimenting with
many alternatives, including his signature 4-7-6.
These experiments opened the door for the free verse of Kawaji Ryūkō
(1888–1959), to whom the fifth chapter is devoted. In most histories of
Japanese poetry, scholars usually mark 1907 as the birth of free verse in
Japan, a year that saw the publication of Ryūkō’s “Four New Poems”
(Shinshi yonshō) in September. As Mehl argues, the salient difference

Japanese Language and Literature | jll.pitt.edu

Vol. 57 | Number 1 | April 2023 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2023.301
56 | Japanese Language and Literature

between these free verse poems and those of Kitamura Tōkoku is that the
latter, despite their metrical unpredictability, were in classical Japanese,
whereas Ryūkō’s poems were in the colloquial language.
In addition to successfully documenting the “prehistory of free verse,”
Mehl also seeks to answer the question of why some experiments have the
power to shape literature over the long term while others do not ultimately
take root. For example, although haiku and to a lesser extent waka
continue to be composed even today, no one writes shintaishi any longer.
The book’s epilogue begins with Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), one of the
three translators of the 1882 Shintaishi-shō, who had realized early in the
twentieth century that the new-style poetry he and his two colleagues had
so carefully crafted did not even survive his own lifetime. Why did the
shintaishi become defunct? Although it had its champions, it also had a
great many critics, including, predictably, the practitioners of traditional
forms, but also, intriguingly, the pioneering psychologist Motora Yūjirō
(1858–1912), who argued that the brain required variety of meter.
Nonetheless, there must be something more happening than just the critics
outnumbering the proponents to explain the failure of a new form to take
root.
Drawing critical momentum from semiotician Yuri Lotman, the book
argues that the surrounding critical context is crucial for the long-term
reception and diffusion of experiments with form and meter, and so in each
chapter Mehl documents “a series of interactions between those who wrote
poems and those who analyzed them” (13). For example, Kitamura
Tōkoku’s experiments were not recognized at the time, in large measure
because critics such as Yamada Bimyō (1868–1910), Uchida Roan (1868–
1929), and Ishibashi Ningetsu (1865–1929) were engaged in the
versification wars, a series of debates about whether the definition of
poetry should center on the meter (Bimyō) or content (Roan and Ningetsu).
These debates were prepared by the perceived lack of variety in the
shintaishi, but the centrality of a meter here kept Tōkoku’s innovations
with metrical unpredictability out of the spotlight. By the early twentieth
century, however, the critics had turned their attention to the prominence
of free verse from overseas, especially in France, and thus Japanese
experiments were recognized as instantiations of this new poetic style in
Japan itself. I am highlighting two pivotal points in the book’s overarching
argument, but each of the chapters shows how poetry and poetry criticism
were inextricably intertwined in this twenty-five-year period between the
publication of Shintaishi-shō and Kawaji Ryūkō’s “Four New Poems.”

Japanese Language and Literature | jll.pitt.edu

Vol. 57 | Number 1 | April 2023 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2023.301
 Reviews | 57

The translation of European verse is a constant impetus for

experimentation in Japan. This is a well-known part of the story, but in The
Ends of Meter it is yoked to a compelling historical framework and treated
with heightened sensitivity and a greater awareness of the global literary
and critical context than is typical of the author-focused studies of modern
Japanese poetry that predominate.

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Reviewed by
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Japanese Language and Literature | jll.pitt.edu

Vol. 57 | Number 1 | April 2023 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2023.301