Between New Objectivity and Existential Reflection: Reading Murano Shirō’s Taisō shishū

This paper focuses on Taisō shishū (Poems on physical exercise), a collection of modernist poetry published in 1939 by Murano Shirō (1901–1975). This collection contains nineteen poems on the subject of athletes performing different sports and has been discussed often in connection with Murano’s fascination with German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), a movement that he had actively made known in Japan in the previous years. Murano’s poems stand in a complex intertextual relationship with visual texts, such as Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Olympia and Paul Wolff ’s photographs of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and also reflect his interest in the philosophical investigation of the modes of human existence. The specificity of this collection resides in an original interplay between New Objectivity, sports, photography, and existential reflection. In this paper, I explore the ambiguities of this collection’s poetics and examine its historical significance in the context of interwar Japan.