Author Guide · 2026-05-04 · Reading time ~ 7 min
Saitō Mokichi — One Carp, One Door Into Modern Tanka
Master of Manyō-style tanka and a practising psychiatrist. One Korean translation on Pagera opens the still water of Araragi-school poetry.
Pagera Editorial
Saitō Mokichi (斎藤茂吉, 1882–1953) is not a name most readers outside Japan recognise. But remove him from the story of modern Japanese tanka and the twentieth century simply does not add up.
Poet, psychiatrist, heir to Masaoka Shiki
Masaoka Shiki planted the idea of shasei — direct, unsentimental observation — at the heart of the short poem. His student Itō Sachio founded the Araragi (アララギ) poetry society and kept that spirit alive. After Sachio's death, it was Mokichi who led Araragi through its most influential decades. His collection Shakkou (赤光, "Red Light," 1913) remains a canonical text of modern Japanese verse.
By profession he was a psychiatrist — trained in Germany, practising in Tokyo. His second son was the novelist Kita Morio (北杜夫). Two generations of Japanese literature lived under one roof.
The term Man'yō-style points back to the Man'yōshū, the eighth-century anthology prized for its unadorned directness. To write in that spirit means resisting decoration: observe, hold the emotion at arm's length, then let the image do the work. That sensibility runs through Mokichi's prose just as clearly as through his verse.
Reading "Carp" closely
The Korean translation 「잉어 (Carp)」, now on Pagera, was written in 1946 — Shōwa 21, the first full year after Japan's surrender. Mokichi had evacuated to Ōishida in Yamagata Prefecture, a small town on the Mogami River.
The essay opens with a carp seller. A fisherman friend named Ikari Yasuzo brings fish caught from the Mogami. What follows is careful, scholarly observation: the difference between true carp and look-alikes, weight in old Japanese units (monme, kan), methods of transport, how to cook them. Precise, unhurried, quietly expert.
And yet the precision accumulates into something else. Fact by fact, the surface of the prose grows still. There is no grief in this essay, no anger at the ruined country around him. The year is 1946. He writes about fish.
The closing waka holds the meaning:
The carp that live
in the Mogami River —
the longer I think of them,
even their forms
grow quiet in my mind.
Thinking of the fish long enough, even the image becomes calm. The whole essay flows toward that single phrase. The Korean translation preserves the old units with transliterated readings and metric equivalents, carrying the scholarly texture intact.
Tanka, stillness, and the art of watching
The exclamatory ending -nu na (しづかになりぬ) has a distant cousin in Korean sijo — the -ro da or -gu na endings that mark a moment of recognition. Both traditions capture the instant when sustained attention to a natural object dissolves the boundary between observer and observed. Seikan (靜観, still watching) — the practice of standing beside a thing until it moves on its own terms — is what Manyō-style tanka compresses into thirty-one syllables.
Mokichi does it in prose too. The post-war chaos of 1946 remains offstage. On the page there is only a river and its fish. That choice is not evasion; the closing waka makes it a deliberate aesthetic act.
One story to start, more to follow
More than forty-five prose and essay works by Saitō Mokichi are on Pagera's translation list — writings from the same Ōishida period, recollections of Araragi colleagues, nature observations from across his long career.
If there is a specific piece you would like to read in Korean first, you can request it on our translation request page. Start with "Carp" — and see where the current takes you.