“Life” and “blood” as core concepts in Murayama Kaita’s poetry: tradition and innovation in the Japanese Decadent movement

Abstract

This research paper will analyze Murayama Kaita’s poetic production. Kaita, a Japanese painter and poet from the Taisho period, had an overwhelming talent and became one of the most renowned art innovators of the time. Despite it, he faced uncountable traumatic adversities throughout his life, such as familiar rejection, spitefulness, and illness. As a result, he encountered death at the early age of 22. The literary analysis carried out in this paper pursues the definition and the clarification of the role the concepts of “life” and “blood”, repeated uncountable times in Kaita’s verses, have in his poetry. Both ideas are complex and multidimensional, and by looking at how they intertwine and complement each other, a deeper understanding of his worldview and his poetry will be achieved. Besides, although Kaita, as a painter, has been profusely studied, and his works reach exorbitant prices in art auctions nowadays, his poetic production has been ignored for decades. Along with clarifying the meaning of the previous two concepts, this paper aims to highlight the importance of Kaita’s poetry and promote his literary production in the hope that other readers and researchers pay attention to his work in the future.