How can innocence and worldliness coexist in a people? Does not the black whip of cynicism, with its burr and sting, send naivete sailing for more gentle and accommodating shores?
When I first arrived in Japan in 1967 I was perplexed by the seeming paradox of a Japanese sensibility that could harbor both a clear-minded sophistication and a perfect sense of guilelessness . . . perplexed, that is, until some time after my arrival I encountered the sublime literature of Kenji Miyazawa.
Kenji, who was born in 1896 and lived through roughly the first third of the 20th century, spent virtually all of his life in his home town of Hanamaki in Iwate Prefecture. Agronomist, amateur geologist, dilettante in intellectual endeavors from Esperanto to musical composition, his view of the world stemmed from him seeing himself as a figment of nature's imagination.