![]() His ecological and humanistic impulses can be seen in his most famous poem, “Ame ni mo makezu” (雨ニモマケズ or “Undefeated by the rain”), a poem known by many Japanese from an early age and transcendent in its selfless simplicity. Miyazawa was also a professional agronomist, amateur geologist, Buddhist scholar and rural activist. “‘Ginga Tetsudou no Yoru’ has become a source of imagination in contemporary culture and subculture.” A few of his many literary innovations include borrowing words from German and English and combining them with Japanese kanji, inventing hundreds of new onomatopoeia and utilizing local Iwate Prefecture dialect. “His vocabulary and style are really unique and original,” said Koji Toba, Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Waseda University. His shadow extends not just over Japanese literature, but over film, anime, manga, art and agriculture. His novels are read by children in school, adapted into popular animated films and studied and re-studied by academics. ![]() ![]() It’s hard to overstate Kenji Miyazawa’s significance and fame in Japanese culture. Kenji Miyazawa, Japan’s great rural novelist How do you translate a work that crosses such vast expanses of space and time, much less a work like “Ginga” that doesn’t seem to have much of a time or place to begin with? “Ginga” has enthralled adults and children and puzzled scholars in Japan and abroad for 85 years - both a little more than that, and a little less. And the entire novel is underscored by his nuanced concept of a Fourth Dimension, the daiyojigen (大四次元, lit. His writing is dense, chock-full of scientific detail, popping with improvised onomatopoeia and woven throughout with threads of stream-of-consciousness. Miyazawa’s fierce preoccupation with death is enough to defy the book’s common label as children’s literature. The story is perhaps best-known for its haunting and tragic ending, when Campanella is found to have drowned in a river, and Giovanni is left alone. Along the journey they stop at the five million-year-old Pliocene Coast, birdwatch in the fantastic Swan Zone, cross over Connecticut and Lancashire and encounter the dead of the sunken Titanic. Along with his friend Campanella, he boards a magical train that soars into the depths of the Milky Way on its way to heaven. Ginga’s protagonist, Giovanni, has a sick mother, an absentee father and is bullied in school. ![]() It wasn’t translated into English even once until 1996 since then it’s been translated at least four times with dramatically different tones, registers and styles. “Ginga ” is ripe with Buddhist imagery and echoes of Miyazawa’s rural hometown in Iwate Prefecture, yet it seems to take place in Christian Italy. It’s a novel that defies clear identification with any one time, place, or ideology. Miyazawa (1896-1933) wrote, rewrote, and wrote it again, and again the version commonly used by scholars is at least the fourth version that he composed. Translated alternately as “Night on the Milky Way Railway ,” “ Night on the Galactic Railroad” and “Night Train to the Stars, ” the novel underwent many different versions. It’s been both more and less than 85 years since Kenji Miyazawa’s masterpiece, “Ginga Tetsudou no Yoru ” (銀河鉄道の夜), was published posthumously in 1934.
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