Yamamura Bochō: Of Prisms and Clouds

Mainly remembered as an author of poetry in non-traditional forms (shi)—his most famous effort being a highly experimental (and controversial) collection titled The Holy Prism (Seisanryōhari 聖三稜玻璃, 1915)—Yamamura Bochō (1884–1924) was a writer of aphorisms, novels, and children’s literature. He was also a Christian minister and missionary, another aspect that sets him apart from contemporary Japanese practitioners of poetry. Despite their relatively low canonization, Bochō’s works appear, in the context of Japanese modern poetry, as exemplary in many ways. They reflect some of the tensions that traversed the Japanese cultural feld in the early decades of the twentieth century: between art and religion, symbolism and naturalism, urban centers and provincial peripheries, and “Western” and “Oriental” aesthetics and thought.