A good-for-nothing dredging up stars
In Japan in 1912, a brilliant tanka poet who believed in socialism died at just twenty-six, still hoping to overcome “the stagnation of his age.”1 To transform society, he had written fiction and modern poetry burning with revolutionary passion. Yet people remembered only his tanka—the short poems he regarded as “sad toys.” Acclaimed as a genius and admired by Mori Ōgai and Yosano Akiko, he met with setback after setback in everyday life, borrowed money to support his household, and finally died in poverty and illness.
He was Ishikawa Takuboku.
In April 2020, an anime called Woodpecker Detective’s Office, with Ishikawa Takuboku as its protagonist, began airing. At the start, Kindaichi Kyōsuke describes him this way:2
It has been ten years since my dear friend died. He was dashing, fond of lying and mischief, quick to cry, loyal and affectionate, and full of himself. Talkative and vain, fond of drink and women, he was a romantic sadist, a poet with foresight. And he was a genius of tanka.
Adapted from Ii Kei’s novel of the same name, the twelve-episode Woodpecker Detective’s Office is set after Takuboku’s arrival in Tokyo. It follows him and Kindaichi Kyōsuke—a schoolmate and close friend from his home region—as they solve one baffling case after another. (That’s Kindaichi the linguist, not the one from The Kindaichi Case Files!)
Woodpecker Detective’s Office focuses on Ishikawa Takuboku, imaginatively reconstructing the painful, conflicted, transformative period of his life from 1908 to 1909.
The story begins in September 1908. Staking his literary future on a second move to Tokyo, Takuboku takes rooms at the Gaiheikan boardinghouse, where Kindaichi also lives. A letter exposing wrongdoing at the Arakawa mine, the death of the geisha Otaki, “the Moon in the Throat,” a murder involving the doll “Honeysuckle” . . . As the weather grows colder, Takuboku and Kindaichi solve case after case, gradually picking up the central thread of a conspiracy.
But now Takuboku begins coughing up blood. In the misery of approaching death, he starts searching for the meaning of life, like so many minds too clever for their own good throughout the ages. It is then that he meets a woman who changes his values: Sonobe Tamaki. Tamaki leads him toward a simple left-wing outlook—finding life’s meaning in contributing to society. A “New Woman” like Tamaki is just the sort of person Takuboku admires and longs for. It is hardly surprising that they fall in love. Changed by Tamaki, Takuboku says, “Writing tanka can’t change society. I want to contribute to society. That’s what gives my life in this world meaning.”
Their romance is short-lived: Tamaki is killed by her villainous husband, a human trafficker. Her death shakes Takuboku profoundly. To get people talking, to change society, he feels he needs to write a novel.
After working without sleep or rest, Takuboku finishes the novel and takes it to Natsume Sōseki, hoping he will read it. But it wins no praise. Drunk, Takuboku burns the manuscript. If he cannot write a good novel, he cannot change society; if he cannot change society, his life has no meaning. That winter of disappointment, he frequently visits prostitutes and even begins harming himself and thinking of death. Kindaichi saves him just as he is about to kill himself, and he returns to Tokyo. Through brilliant deduction, Takuboku identifies the mastermind behind the series of cases.
Many of the anime’s events really happened. Ishikawa Takuboku did borrow money from everyone he could, running up enormous debts. When he first came to Tokyo, he really could not pay his rent and had to borrow from Kindaichi. Kindaichi really did pawn two boxes of his own books to cover Takuboku’s rent. Even the detail of Kindaichi living upstairs from Takuboku at the Gaiheikan is true.
In reality, Takuboku did not develop chronic peritonitis until February 1911. By making his physical illness coincide with his inner turmoil, the anime not only intensifies his despondency during this period but also lends the story the sadness of a “countdown,” making us worry all the more about him.
Fiction really was a stumbling block for Takuboku. In 1908, he quit his job as a reporter in Kushiro and resolved to go to Tokyo. After much thought, he concluded that he should concentrate on fiction. He genuinely regarded tanka as nothing more than “sad toys.” After a month of sleeplessness and exhaustion, he had written five works of fiction totaling some 120,000 characters. Yet despite Kindaichi and others doing all they could to recommend them, none reached publication; only one was sold, for a very small fee. This failure dealt Takuboku a severe blow. Indeed, it is as a tanka poet, not a novelist, that he is remembered. The misery of writing fiction really did lead him to thoughts of suicide and to self-harm.
Before long, I had to admit that the hard work of that year had come to nothing. I did not really believe I was capable of killing myself, but then I would think: what if I could manage to die . . . So, in a room at a boardinghouse in Morikawachō, I took out a friend’s razor and secretly tried it against my chest several times at night . . . I spent two or three months like this.
—“Poems to Eat”
That boardinghouse in Morikawachō was the Gaiheikan. Episode 10 of Woodpecker Detective’s Office recreates this scene:
Episode 10 is titled “Over Many Mountains and Rivers.” The title comes from a celebrated poem by Wakayama Bokusui, included in Japanese school textbooks:
How many mountains and rivers must I cross
to find the country
where loneliness at last comes to an end?
In search of it,
today I set out again.
In the anime, Takuboku flees after Kindaichi catches him harming himself and happens to run into Bokusui. Too drunk to notice anything wrong, Bokusui simply recites his new poem, “Over Many Mountains and Rivers,” to him. (It was actually written in 1907.)
After hearing Bokusui’s poem, Takuboku boards a train for Iwate District and returns to his hometown.
Is there no way
to end this life
with the feeling of leaping from a height?—A Handful of Sand
My chest hurt again today.
I thought, if I am going to die,
I might as well go home to die.—Sad Toys
It is spring in his hometown. Just as Takuboku is about to jump from a high terrace, he hears Kindaichi Kyōsuke’s voice behind him. Kindaichi is reciting “Over Many Mountains and Rivers.” No one needed to tip him off: the two understand each other too well. Hearing the poem made Kindaichi want to go home, too. Saved by Kindaichi, Takuboku returns to Tokyo and resumes his investigations. In episode 12, he finally identifies the mastermind behind the chain of cases. The mastermind believes that a person’s life has meaning only if they change society. Takuboku gives his own answer:
All I can do is write tanka, to preserve the little glimmers around me. Perhaps that is what gives my life as a human being meaning.
The anime’s story ends there, in April 1909. Takuboku has been saved by his friendship with Kindaichi. Believing that he could do nothing but play with his “sad toys,” he had been unable to find meaning in life. Now he once again locates that meaning in himself, becoming a poet who lives for his tanka.
By stopping here, the story leaves us with the impression of an “unruly genius of tanka.” It leads us to imagine that Ishikawa Takuboku will keep shamelessly borrowing money from Kindaichi, keep working as a detective, keep carousing at Asakusa’s Twelve-Story Tower, and keep writing tanka, taking comfort in the meaning they give his life until he dies of illness. The anime never mentions his family, and even his left-wing ideas seem like a temporary wrong turn. The friendships of literary greats continue to play out in late-Meiji Tokyo. Only Takuboku’s approaching death lends the story a faint sadness.
But in reality, Ishikawa Takuboku was simply a brilliant tanka poet and an unsuccessful novelist, not a detective. The man who seems so carefree in the anime was already married, had a daughter, and needed to support his family.
Reality was far crueler than the anime. In reality, Takuboku did not return home to kill himself. In the spring of 1909, no one saved him. His Romaji Diary, which also appears in the anime, lays bare his confusion and suffering during this period. At this point, he sank utterly into emptiness.
“Ishikawa is a pitiful fellow.”
Sometimes I say this to myself
and grieve alone.—Sad Toys
In June, Takuboku’s family came to Tokyo, and they rented a place in Yumichō. Their reunion did not lift his spirits. Conflict between his mother and wife made his life even more of a mess. Rather than enjoying this supposed reunion, he missed his days at the Gaiheikan.
Would you let me go and live alone
at the boardinghouse?
Today, again, I almost said it.—Sad Toys
Takuboku began to emerge from this inner emptiness in 1910. To frame Japan’s socialists and anarchists, the authorities manufactured the so-called High Treason Incident, falsely accusing Kōtoku Shūsui and others of plotting to assassinate Emperor Meiji and sentencing twenty-four people to death. This incident deepened Takuboku’s dissatisfaction with conditions in Japan. He wrote this poem in response:
Looking at that gloomy,
dark gray sky,
I seem to want to kill someone.—A Handful of Sand
Contrary to the anime’s portrayal, Takuboku did not make writing tanka the meaning of his life. Instead, he took it upon himself to overcome “the stagnation of his age.” He firmly opposed “poetry for poetry’s sake,” believing that literature needed to intervene in politics and serve social struggle. He began writing longer poems and criticism with a political bent. The works Zhou Zuoren first translated and introduced to Chinese readers were likewise those longer poems with their revolutionary coloring, not the much-admired tanka.
All gathered here are young,
the young who are always creating new things in the world.
We know the old will soon die; victory will be ours in the end.
Look how bright our eyes are, how fierce our arguments!
Yet not one of us pounds the table with a clenched fist
and cries, “Go to the people!”—“After Endless Discussions”
Death, however, interrupted Takuboku’s work. In November 1911, he developed pulmonary tuberculosis and a persistent fever, and was subsequently hospitalized. In April 1912, the ailing Takuboku repeatedly called Kindaichi Kyōsuke’s name. Kindaichi hurried over when he heard. Takuboku said only, “I’m counting on you.” On April 13, he died, aged just twenty-six—or twenty-seven, according to some accounts.
My friends and wife seem to find it pitiful, too—
sick as I am,
I still cannot stop talking of revolution.—Sad Toys
Impoverished, Takuboku died on the path toward transforming society. Could such a death offer any consolation? Perhaps not, because he had yet to experience even the smallest result. Perhaps so, because had he lived longer, he would have seen still more things that chilled his heart and that he was powerless to change.
What is remarkable about Woodpecker Detective’s Office is that, with only slight alterations to a cruel reality, it produces a warm story that feels entirely different. At the end of the anime, ten years after the events of the story, Kindaichi Kyōsuke revisits the Gaiheikan. In the empty room that once bore the sign “Woodpecker Detective’s Office,” he leaves a copy of Sad Toys, the tanka collection published only after Takuboku’s death.
In the anime’s final image, the Takuboku of those earlier days picks up Sad Toys and smiles at Kindaichi’s retreating back.
If we speak from a radical standpoint, Woodpecker Detective’s Office beautifies Ishikawa Takuboku, diminishes him, and renders him harmless. Takuboku was a passionate young leftist determined to transform society. In the anime, however, he writes “poetry for poetry’s sake,” while the left-wing ideas he embraces lead to self-doubt, self-harm, and attempted suicide. The anime’s Takuboku locates life’s meaning in tanka and friendship; this can be called a form of petty-bourgeois ideology. Its lovable, “dashing” Takuboku was, in reality, a father who had dropped out of middle school and could not support his family, yet still spent lavishly on drink and prostitutes. Six descendants of “literary greats” and five memorial museums assisted with the production of Woodpecker Detective’s Office. It even used materials from the Ishikawa Takuboku Memorial Museum to reproduce his handwriting. The series works hard to recover Takuboku and just as hard to dress him up as someone audiences will like. The result is that we cannot recognize either its beauty or its shortcomings unless we read it against his life.
One of the series’ central themes is the friendship between Ishikawa Takuboku and Kindaichi Kyōsuke. Yet Kindaichi’s gestures are markedly “feminine,” and his characterization includes “switching to feminine speech forms when angry.” This is very likely intended to pander to contemporary viewers’ tastes—in other words, to provide homoerotic fan service.
As a detective in Woodpecker Detective’s Office, Takuboku encounters the classic problem every detective must face: should he uncover the truth in the service of justice as defined by law, or allow a “just” crime to occur? In the winter of 1908, he learns that Tamaki’s husband is using a church as a cover for human trafficking. He also sees that Tamaki intends to murder her husband. Takuboku chooses to save the husband, preventing Tamaki from becoming a murderer. But events then take a turn he did not foresee: before the police can restrain her, Tamaki rushes at her husband with a knife. He takes it from her and kills her. His act is ruled self-defense. Bitterly regretful, Takuboku follows the husband with a knife, only to discover that he lacks even the courage to draw it. This deepens his self-doubt. In this story, Ishikawa Takuboku is a detective, and a detective cannot be a criminal—that is a rule of detective fiction. Nor can a commercial anime advocate acts such as “just” killing. Yet the real Takuboku had a strong rebellious spirit from childhood. At Morioka Middle School, he actively participated in and led student movements that had conservative teachers of the old guard transferred and the principal replaced. His encounter with socialism made that rebellious spirit still stronger:
Whenever I raise my eyes to look at society, they all but burst with rage; when I close them and quietly contemplate society, my heart darkens with shame, and I do not know how to change it. Whenever I think of this, my ears hear the sound of revolution, my eyes see the blood of revolution.
—“A Sprig on the Desk” (Takujō isshi)
In Woodpecker Detective’s Office, however, Ishikawa Takuboku is a detective who uncovers the truth, not a revolutionary fighter. He must retain that dashing, lovable image if he is to attract viewers. Takuboku the detective is like the South China tiger in Niu Han’s poem: caged, its claws and sharp teeth sawn off.
In Ishikawa Takuboku’s eyes, Woodpecker Detective’s Office would not be “good” literature. But if we return to history, to the spring of 1909, would we not want to give Takuboku, lost in that void, some small reason to go on living?
“Die for so little?”
“Live for so little?”
Enough, enough—no more questions and answers!—A Handful of Sand
The story of Woodpecker Detective’s Office does not extend to Takuboku’s death. Perhaps we can see it this way: it does not set out to address the larger course of history and society. It merely rescues, in imagination, the destitute Takuboku of spring 1909, adding a little warmth to his sorrowful life through an invented tale.
The series wants only to tell the story of a “good-for-nothing” being rescued, and hopes that such a story can have some reach in today’s world. Whether it means rendering him harmless or providing homoerotic fan service, without these devices the show’s rather bland mysteries would not attract many viewers. Besides, anyone unfamiliar with the Japanese literary world of that period could easily be scared off by the succession of unfamiliar names—Yoshii Isamu, Wakayama Bokusui, Nomura Kodō, Hagiwara Sakutarō . . . This is much like Takuboku writing his novel in the anime: although he detests “exposing his own shameful affairs,” he still turns the story of himself and Tamaki into fiction, hoping to make waves in public debate. Does this plot choice hint at the series’ own lack of alternatives? Just as the anime’s Takuboku cannot gain public attention without writing a tragic romance, we cannot bring Ishikawa Takuboku to a wider audience today without making a detective show that trades in homoerotic fan service. Might we hope that those who watch Woodpecker Detective’s Office will go on to learn about his life and thought, just as the anime’s Takuboku hopes his readers will not settle for a love story but will investigate its background?
To pass on fire in a night that is being watched, one must first put out the open flame.
Woodpecker Detective’s Office is like a prayer offered for an atheist. This is one way we commemorate Takuboku today: ignorant, vulgar, and deserving of criticism, yet full of deep and lasting affection. In today’s world, everyone is a “believer”; only prayer-like acts of remembrance can attract people’s attention. Adding critical elements to a commercial anime will only scare viewers away. According to figures from the Mingzuo zhi Bi forum (名作之壁吧), Woodpecker Detective’s Office averaged just 275 copies sold per volume—an outright commercial failure.
Perhaps all we can do with this vulgar memorial is criticize it with tears in our eyes. Even today, still carrying Ishikawa Takuboku’s unfulfilled hopes, we read his poems and watch anime adapted from his life. We hope that more people will come to know the Takuboku who shines with revolutionary light. We hope he can win people’s love and reverence through the sharp edge of his thought, without having to provide homoerotic fan service or play detective.
References
Zhao Lelai [赵乐猍]. Ishikawa Takuboku [石川啄木]. Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House, 1988.3
Ishikawa Takuboku. A Handful of Sand: Selected Poems of Ishikawa Takuboku [一握砂：石川啄木诗选]. Translated into Chinese by Zhou Zuoren. Beijing: New Star Press, 2018.
Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, et al. Moonflowers: 400 Japanese Tanka [夕颜：日本短歌400]. Translated into Chinese by Chen Li and Chang Fen-ling. Beijing: Beijing United Publishing Company, 2019.