Recently published books on Shiki, a poet of the haiku and the tanka form, respectively present slightly different images of the poet, and I should like to give some comments on them. 1) Mr. Yasuyoshi Gomi, in his Shiki the Man (1959), offers us a figure of what we may call a "static" poet who merely contemplates natural phenomena as they are and accordingly gives them poetical expression. This is an image of an etiolated poet and, it seems to me, a reflexion of the author's position as a defender of the etiolated authority of the "Araragi" School in tanka poetry. Shiki was really a great poet with a dynamic idea of what poetry should be, and an eager investigator of the nature of beauty and the technique how to expreess it in the constricted form. 2) Mr. Kenkichi Kusumoto, in his Shiki Masaoka (1961), adopts the method of recounting plentiful episodes about Shiki one after another, but most of the author's remarks are quite commonplace. For instance, he regards Shiki's "shasei" or what we may call "sketch-realism" as an equivalent to "anti-lyricism." But we know the precedent of Mokichi Saito, who as early as about the end of the Meiji Era endeavoured to take over Shiki's achievement in tanka poetry by grasping synthetically his lyricism and realism. 3) Shiki Masaoka by Mr. Toshihiko Matsui (1962) is a mere accumulation of detailed records. The author's positivistic method is highly scholastic, but we can neither find the core nor evoke the poet's image in this book. 4) Mr. Takeshi Umehara, in the Nationalism in Aesthetics (1961), first defines Shiki as an opponent of the Anthology of the Kokinsha and admirer of the Anthology of the Manyoshu, but it is my belief that this attitude of Shiki's is only a means to the end of making tanka poetry equal to the richness of modern literature. Mr. Umehara then, after dividing human mental activity into four stages-consciousness, self-consciousness or reflexion, understanding and reason-proceeds to say that Shiki's achievement was the poetical expression of the first stage only, whereas in the Anthologies of the Kokinsha and the Shinkokinshu are found many excellent poems incarnating the higher stages of our mental activities. He explains this as an inevitable result of Shiki's incapability of understanding the importance of those stages which necessarily include emotional and rational functions. But my opinion is that though Shiki knew well enough of it he hated to be addicted to emotionalism because of his modesty typical of the Meiji Era. Lastly Mr. Umehara reproves Shiki as an imperialist representative of the Meiji nationalism, but I believe his nationalism was essentially based on the ideal of democracy and had an object of achieving real independence both of an individual and of a nation.

View full abstract