更新日：2010年7月5日

Nakahara Chuya

Nakahara Chuya was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1907 and he graduated from the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

It is said that he first began to write poetry at the age of 8, on the death of one of his younger brothers. By the time he was in the upper grades of elementary school, he was sending tanka verse to newspaper poetry columns. In his early teens, he published his first collection (Sugurono) of verse with a friend. In 1923, he moved to the Ritsumeikan Middle School in Kyoto, where he was introduced to dadaist poetry. Two years later, he moved again, this time to Tokyo, where he met Kawakami Tetsutaro and Ooka Shohei, with whom he began publishing a poetry journal, Hakuchigun (Idiots). Beginning with "Samui yoru no jigazo," (Self portrait on a cold night), he published verses in quick succession, including a collection called, Yagi no uta (Poems of the goat). Also from around this time, he began contributing poems to the famous literary journals, Shiki (The Fours Seasons) and Bungakukai (The Literary World), and joined the coterie at Shiki and another journal, Rekitei (The Traveled Path), but was only really acknowledged by the critics Kobayashi Hideo and Kawakami Tetsutaro. He was never fortunate enough to be counted among the mainstream of poets, but his verses confessing the loneliness of the soul have a wide following even to this day, and he is a truly representative poet of the early Showa era. After losing his child in 1936, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Despite his ill health, he worked on his second collection of poems, Arishi hi no uta (Poems of bygone days) but died in 1937 at the age of 30, before seeing its publication.

Nakahara's connection with Kamakura was all too brief. He moved to a house in the grounds of Jufukuji temple in Ogigayatsu, in February 1937, but he died in October the same year at Kamakura Yosei-in (now Kiyokawa Hospital). His funeral took place at Jufukuji.