Kenji Miyazawa; Japanese writer and poet

I like reading biographies. Not biographies of celebrities, but of authors, scientists and artists from long time ago. However it is quite hard to find any books like that in book stores. Biography section of the book store is usually filled with celebrity biographies and only scientist you could find may be Albert Einstein. When I was in college, there was one text book of computer science that had short biographies of mathematicians throughout the book and I really enjoyed reading them than studying the content of the book.

Kenji Miyazawa is a famous Japanese writer born in 1896. He had mostly written poems and children's stories. If you ever attend elementary school in Japan, you may encounter his story in a text book. Or at least, his stories are in the recommended reading list. He may not be that well-known outside of Japan though. He didn't write that many stories but most of his stories aren't translated in English. Since his stories are old, they are already in public domain, so anyone can choose to translate and publish it in any languages. Maybe I try translating some of his short stories in this blog in future.

He was born in Iwate prefecture, which is the northern part of Japan. In 2011, the largest earthquake in the history devastated in that area but he was born to this farming community. At the time he was born, there was another large earthquake in the area and he saw the suffering of people and farmers. He believed in Buddhism philosophy and studied agricultural science and worked as a teacher. He was not physically strong and passed away due to illness in 1933 at the age of 37.

His stories maybe difficult to understand without knowing the era and how people lived in country side of Japan at that time. Even the words he uses are not the type of words used today in Japan. He also uses large variety of ideophones (sound describing the situation, phenomime, psycomime) and phonomime (sound imitating the real voice or sound) and many of them are his own invented sounds. Another thing that makes difficult to translate into another languages maybe that the way he carries the story. There's special feeling that comes with the way he writes, which is probably not possible to translate into anything.

I am not a fan of poems and I don't really read his poems either. There is one poem of his called "Ame nimo makezu" (Not defeated by the rain) . This is probably the most famous poem of his and you will likely to find in the middle school text book in Japan. This is basically his ideal way of living as a human being based on Buddhism philosophy. My favorite thing is his stories. He has several short stories published before he passed away, but many of his unpublished stories and drafts came out and printed at later time. Many of his stories are dream-like and some of his expressions are very pure and clean. It also reminds me of traditional Buddhism stories that teach life lessons to children.

More information about him, you can visit Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenji_Miyazawa