Shuntaro Tanikawa, Japan’s most popular poet for more than half a century, whose stark and whimsical poems, blending humor with melancholy, made him a kind of Everyman philosopher ideally suited to translating the “Peanuts” comic strip and Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese, died on Nov. 13 in Tokyo. He was 92.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Shino Tanikawa, who did not specify a cause.
A perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mr. Tanikawa was revered in Japan, not just in literary circles but also among casual readers. It was not uncommon to see commuters reading his books on the subway.
He published more than 60 collections of poetry, beginning in 1952, when he was 21, with “Alone in Two Billion Light Years” — a book that heralded a bold new voice who shunned haiku and other traditional Japanese forms of verse.
In the title poem from that collection (translated by Takako U. Lento), he wrote:
On this small sphere
humans sleep, wake, work
from time to time want friends on Mars
I don’t know what Martians do
on their small sphere
(maybe they sleep’eep, wake’ake, work’ork)
but from time to time they want friends on Earth
that’s absolutely for sure
Universal gravitation is
the force of being alone, attracting each other
The universe is warped
that is why all of us seek each other
The universe is growing fast
that is why all of us are uneasy
Standing alone in two billion light years
I sneezed, in spite of myself
Being alone and sneezing at the universe’s bewitching tendencies were sentiments that echoed throughout Mr. Tanikawa’s writing. In poems like “Before We Were Born,” “At Midnight in the Kitchen I Wanted to Talk to You” and “A Morning Takes Shape,” he sketched the beguiling and lonesome moments of daily life.
In “Can You Hear,” he wrote:
Can you hear the quiet
that lurks between lovers at dusk?
Can you hear that quiet
in the gentle eyes of a deer looking at you?
Can you hear the quiet
the sky is always secretly hiding?
“My poetry is the expression of a moment rather than of history,” he said in a 1998 interview with the Australian literary journal Southerly. “I often say this: The novel captures events within a certain time frame, but poetry, I believe, cuts through life to reveal a cross section of experience.”
That point of view made him a vital voice in Japanese letters after World War II, when hundreds of literary journals emerged amid the nation’s economic and cultural recovery. Many writers, especially poets, continued to work in traditional Japanese forms, but not Mr. Tanikawa.
“I think that is the core of his popularity,” Ms. Lento, who translated Mr. Tanikawa’s “The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952–2009” (and who died recently), said in an interview. “Anyone from a young child who has no life experience to a senior literary critic can see something substantial in his work.”
In the late 1960s, as Western pop culture took hold in Japan, a local publisher hired Mr. Tanikawa to translate Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” into Japanese.
“Peanuts” collections were best sellers in Japan, and eventually Snoopy-branded stores, hotels and cafes popped up throughout the country. In 2016, the Charles M. Schulz Museum opened a satellite outpost in Japan called the Snoopy Museum Tokyo.
Cultural critics, podcasters and even academic publications like the Journal of General Management have sought to unravel the popularity of “Peanuts” in Japan.
One reason they point to: Mr. Schulz’s simple drawing style, which mirrors the sleek, stark aesthetic of Japanese design and pop culture.
Another, possibly bigger, reason: Mr. Tanikawa’s extraordinary ability to mimic the voices of “Peanuts” characters, whose philosophical sensibilities — encapsulated in Snoopy’s line “You play with the cards you’re dealt … whatever that means” — resonated with Japanese society.
Mr. Tanikawa and Mr. Schulz’s widow, Jean Schulz, discussed the poet-cartoonist mind meld during a 2016 conversation published in one of the Schulz Museum’s exhibition catalogs.
“I had the impression that he was like a philosopher,” Mr. Tanikawa said, according to a translation of the conversation provided by the museum. He added, “I think Snoopy is a dog sometimes becoming really close to how humans feel.”
Shuntaro Tanikawa was born on Dec. 15, 1931, in Tokyo to Tetsuzo and Takiko (Osada) Tanikawa. His father was a philosopher and a university professor.
Shuntaro did not excel in high school, which he hated. He did not attend college. He did not dream of becoming a poet.
“I didn’t start writing poetry because I liked poetry or read a great deal of it or because I wanted to become a poet,” he told Southerly. “My relationship with poetry is best described as more of an arranged marriage than a love match. Without knowing exactly what poetry was, I simply wrote about how I felt in the same way as young people write in a diary.”
One day, he recalled, his father asked him, “If you’re not going to university, what are you going to do?”
He showed his father some poems.
The elder Mr. Tanikawa liked them and, using his university connections, sent them to the Japanese poet Tatsuji Miyoshi, who thought the writing showed promise. Mr. Miyoshi helped him get several poems published in a literary magazine.
Mr. Tanikawa’s poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, including several collections in English. In addition to translating “Peanuts” and the Mother Goose rhymes, he wrote the lyrics for the theme song to the popular TV cartoon series “Astro Boy.”
His marriages to Eriko Kishida, Tomoko Okubo and Yoko Sano ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son, the composer Kensaku Tanikawa; a stepson, Gen Hirose; four grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
Mr. Tanikawa was frequently asked by younger poets how they should go about writing poetry. His advice was typically pithy.
“I tell them to find a poem they like,” he said. “I’ve got to the stage where I can get away with this sort of thing but, in the final analysis, it ends up with me saying that people who write poetry were born to write poetry.”
The post Shuntaro Tanikawa, Popular Poet and Translator of ‘Peanuts,’ Dies at 92 appeared first on New York Times.
