This article appeared in the Kokumin shinbun on May 22, 1894, six days after Tōkoku committed suicide.
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In 1889, upon my first visit to Tokyo, I happened to be walking through the Ginza district when I came across a book in a shop; it was called Poems of a Captive. I read it and was struck by the profound melancholy of its verses. Two years later, while I was staying in Tōtōmi, a friend, Sakurai Akashi, presented me with a book called Song of Hōrai. It was the work of the same author who had written Poems of a Captive. That summer, I traveled to Tokyo once again. One day, while visiting Sakurai at his small residence in Hongo, I encountered a guest. Sakurai introduced him to me, saying, “This is Kitamura Tōkoku, the author of The Song of Hirai.” That meeting marked the beginning of my friendship with Tōkoku. If I were to speak without reserve, I would say that Tōkoku is a man of rare quality in this day and age. There is not a trace of malice in him. He is quick to believe what others say and ready to acknowledge their merits. He is a man capable of showing the deepest empathy toward others. Faced with this, I could not help but deeply admire the kind of person he was; because of this, a friendship formed between us. Before long, his literary reputation had spread widely among our circle of friends. He first distinguished himself as a deep-thinking critic, then sought to make his mark as a poet of unrhymed verse and as an idealist playwright. We all pinned our hopes on him, yet he left us behind. In the literary world, I was the one he attacked most fiercely; in our private lives, I was the one with whom he was closest. Only a few days after publishing a scathing essay in Bungakukai to refute my views, he sat at my table sharing a simple meal of yam soup and rice. Whenever I met him, I frequently criticized his views, but he never once offered the slightest resistance. There was a time when my residence adjoined Takekoshi Yosaburō’s, and his home stood opposite Tōkoku’s. The three of us would often visit one another and converse cheerfully, never failing to share a good laugh, undeterred by our differing views or tastes. Takekoshi once remarked, “When conversing with Tōkoku beneath the moonlight, he appears so refined, ethereal, and otherworldly, like an immortal, that one feels he does not belong to the realm of ordinary mortals.” Tokutomi Sōho once said to me, “Tōkoku is a silver spoon, whereas you are merely an iron kettle.” We all recognized that otherworldly quality in him. Now he has passed away; the literary world has lost a poet of great promise, and we have lost a cherished friend. Furthermore, I have lost an intellectual adversary, one who was utterly guileless and entirely worthy of trust. Among the members of Min’yūsha, I was the one who had known him the longest; how could I fail to offer a word of mourning? As for his posthumous work, Emerson, public opinion has already acclaimed it as a masterpiece of prose for the contemporary literary world, a work that stands in no need of my praise.
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Notes:
This translation was prepared with the assistance of Google Translate and ChatGPT.
