Yone Noguchi (1875-1947)

“I myself was born as the fourth boy of the family, and never received even one suggestion on what life I had to create; but I was often told by my mother to make obedience to my father the first law of life. If I am asked what is the Japanese parents' greatest desire for their boys, I will reply on the spot that it is nothing but to have obedient sons.” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

Image by kind permission of Mr. Toshio Arita.

“It is, in truth, one of the wonderful sights of the world, this Lantern Carnival, when six festival cars, each capped by a semicircle of a thousand brilliantly lighted lanterns, make an all-night revel... I used to play a flute, with the other children, for our car, which belonged to our street-that is, Nakajima Cho. The six cars are all decorated differently for the day Carnival on July 16, with wax figures from the "No" drama ... on top, under a wooden frame, with a special roof, the bodies of the cars being covered by gorgeous draperies.” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

“When my weakness in mathematics made me think it quite difficult to pass the Government's examination, I left the school in a sort of preparatory system for Keio Gijuku founded by Fukusawa, the greatest educator modern Japan ever produced... At this Keio I was put to learn somebody's economy and history; and you will wonder to know that I learned also Spencer's Education (why Education for a small boy to be educated?), to which I clung as if, in an old story, a blind man to a huge elephant.” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

“One led me into a wooden house at the back of O'Farrell St., leaving the "Belgic." The "Belgic" was our steamer, sir. The house was on the verge of tumbling down. It was evening. Instantly I smelled fishes, the enthusiastic fragrance of Japanese saké unfurled through the dusky air, the clapping sound of hands ensued. To my amazement about twenty Japanese who thronged into one room suddenly looked upon me and hailed my arrival. I presented my introduction to one who ended his speech, an office boy to a certain doctor at that day, a member of Parliament to-day. Speech? He was advocating that we help the Hawaiian Kingdom. Look! There at one corner sat a Kanaka gentleman by the name of Mr. Wilcox. Had I not often read in the paper of Wilcox as a patriot of the Sandwich Island? Yes, it was he!” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

“Joaquin Miller, who at once reminded me of my imaginary picture of childhood days for a certain Tengu or Mountain Elf with red long nose, whose supernatural power made Yoshitsune Minamoto a great swordsman in Japanese legend, stretched out his hand from the bed (he lived practically in a cottage of one room) when he saw me entering. I thought how romantically impressive he looked. It was his habit, as I soon found out, to "loaf and invite his own soul" lying in bed the whole forenoon; a silken skullcap which he wore gave him the most interesting touch of an older age. When I told him of my desire in climbing up the hill, he exclaimed "Welcome! Welcome!" ” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

“The young Japanese exile had been for some time a protege of Joaquin Miller, with whom he lived not far from San Francisco. One day, with no other introduction than a sheaf of manuscript poems, he presented himself at the office of the Lark. I happened to come in while he was there, and found Mr. Burgess in something of an excited quandary. He had been reading Noguchi's poems and had discovered or, rather, had sensed, under their strangeness, something challenging, alluring, baffling. He wanted to know what I thought of them. We agreed, I remember, that there was "something there," and after Noguchi's departure we examined the poems with care and with an increasing enthusiasm.” —Porter Garnett

“I was hoeing round and watering the flowers in the plum orchard at the "Heights," when I received a letter from Gelett Burgess, then the editor of the Lark, the now famous, though short-lived, California magazine, saying: "I have several notices of your poems from the Eastern papers, and your work has been very well received." The July of 1896, when my five English poems (let me call them poems) were first printed by Mr. Burgess in the Lark, was certainly the dawn of my new page of American life; with his letter my heart jumped high in joy.” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

“And the poem beginning, "Mystic spring of vapour," which was published in the Philistine in September, was bitterly attacked by a certain Mr. Hudson, of Oakland, as a plagiarism from Poe. I was a devout reader of Poe's poems; it was the only book, beside the work of our famous hokku poet, Basho Matsuo, and a book on Zen Buddhism by Kochi, that I brought to the "Heights." My name began to be known; newspaper men of San Francisco came up the hill to interview me.” —The Story of Yone Noguchi

“I would have you think of him as I know him, a youth of twenty years, exiled and alone, separated from the mother, far away, abandoned by his native land and Time, a recluse and a dreamer, in love with sadness, waiting for the time to come to do his part in recalling the ancient glory of the great poets and philosophers of his land; watching, calm-eyed and serious, the writers of this new world, to see if the old words can live in the Western civilization; and if the sheeted memories of the Past may be re-embodied in our English tongue.” —Gelett Burgess

“My dear friend, I was writing some long piece. When I finished it last December, I found it unsatisfactory. Just think, Charlie, I destroyed two hundred pages (such a task and * * !) in my fireplace!
    “And I began to re-write it last February. My dear God, my second attempt was done within four months.
    “And how I did find it? (I smiled seeing it. Good satisfaction!)
    “I sent it to the editor of Leslie's Monthly. I don't admire much that magazine, but the editor was kind enough asking something from my pen. So, my friend, my long prose writing was set on that editor's desk.
    “It was accepted.
    “My two hundred pages was accepted.
    “They are an American diary of certain Japanese girl. Think how charming they must be!”—Noguchi to Charles Warren Stoddard, 23 July 1901

“A strange little pamphlet, printed entirely on brown paper, has reached us from a Japanese poet who appears to be living in London, and who writes in English. The English is a very Eastern English, the verse is no more than rhythmical prose, but there is genuine poetic feeling struggling through, and occasionally, for a few lines together, expressing itself in a new, personal way, which seems to bring some actual message or fragrance to us from the East. "The woman whispered in the voice that roses have lost" is like a line of Mallarmé; "The lamp-lights of web-like streets bathed in opiate fogs" has all the precision of a French impressionist; both have come straight from Japan.” —Arthur Symons, The Outlook

“The diction of these prose poems is quaintly simple and direct, and its dainty, ethereal effects are perhaps only possible to Mr. Noguchi because, not being an Englishman, he has the courage to use our words as if they were coloured scraps of mosaic fresh put into his hand. Knowing enough of our tongue to use words in their own meanings, he is not so accustomed to it as to be able to use them only with the associations that others have made usual for them. The result is alive with surprise and charm, and supplies the best argument we know for writing in a language other than our own, or other than that of ordinary conversation. For, when we do so, every word is a new thing to us, a fresh clear note of music, a note of colour personal to itself.” —The Academy

“Our literature (how little it is known to the world!) would be a grey waste as far as comedy is concerned, if the 'Kiogen,' (farce, the word meaning crazy language) did not rescue us. It developed fully in the Middle Age simultaneously with the growth of 'No' (operatic performance) which was based invariably on Tragedy. The number of Kiogen on record is said to be over two hundred. Alas! their authors are not known. The themes were freely taken from folk-lore and old stories. The dramatic characters are an ignorant lord, forgetful servants, boorish farmers, a coward, fakirs, or such like. Their aim was laughter. The Kiogen may be regarded as a comical outburst of the national temperament. Many a humorist of later centuries adapted them completely losing, however, the innocent irresistibleness of the original.”

“One day early in December, 1913, my morning post contained a mysterious little package of unmistakable Japanese origin, but postmarked Marseilles. It was an advance copy of "Through the Torii" and a letter saying that on the 14th, if I would be at home, he would come and see me. And so on a bright December morning he came, looking more like a poet in his Japanese garments than I believed it possible for any human being to look in these modern times. We talked of books and art through the morning and afternoon, and I made the much desired and long anticipated photographs.” —Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Bookman (London)

Image: More Men of Mark (1922).

“One other contemporary poet should surely be mentioned in connection with California, though he is writing today in Tokyo. Joaquin Miller discovered long since, in California, a Japanese lad, Yone Noguchi, and encouraged him as a poet. Later Gelett Burgess and Porter Garnett assisted Noguchi, still a boy, in putting together and publishing in San Francisco a first volume of work containing then, as his maturer books do now, lovely lilts and flashes.” —Witter Bynner, The Bookman

From left: Arthur Davison Ficke, Matsuko Noguchi, Witter Bynner, Yone Noguchi, Hifumi Noguchi, Evelyn Blunt Ficke, April 1917. Beinecke Library, Yale.

“Now Mr. Noguchi speaks our language. He knows us, he knows us perhaps too well; for he asks whether we are "still faithful to the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln and Whitman." He knows Lincoln and Whitman, and he knows how little our life has fulfilled their promise. Mr. Noguchi has the "innocence of the eye," he has lived among us as one of those wanderers to whom the secrets of things are revealed; he sees this country as we ourselves have begun to see it—"floating comfortably on the ocean all by itself as if a well-fed seal or lazy iceberg," and his tolerant criticism of our provinciality, our materialism, our unreflecting emotionalism reinforces the beliefs we hold ourselves.” —Van Wyck Brooks, The Freeman

"Surely it is a beautiful thing Faggi has made of Yone Noguchi. I have the picture of it in Noguchi's book." —Robert Frost

Faggi made several castings of the head, which were acquired at various times by The Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and Addison Gallery Collections, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachussetts.

Image courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

“In addition to being useful to the judge of prints, Mr. Noguchi's recent book, The Ukiyoye Primitives,* is a synonym of uncommercial research and irrepressible fantasy. Skepticism of complacent attributions, and maintaining of obscurity for which conjecture would not be a good substitute, are praise which early art cannot well forego; yet essentially and conspicuously such a book as this belongs to poetry. The note is struck as by a bird and you are asked to let it vibrate.
     “Mr. Noguchi's Japanese-English is a renovated language of unimpaired connotation. Its diverting redundance curiously defies eastern conciseness and western notions of austerity, presenting as it were the counterpart of non-western format, in the serried pages like the lamellae of the mushroom, not meant to be cut—quadrangularly sewn—the book in its case; the case in a box.“ —Marianne Moore, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse

“Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, a Hyderabad poetess and an old friend of mine, invited me to tea one day in Bombay to meet her young Indian friends. All of them, men and women, I found, were handsomely dressed, with the world's culture and taste at their finger-tips. Looking at me with a smile, Madam Naidu asked me: How many different races are here, do you suppose? And counting on her fingers, she said: "Just seven!" I forgot to ask her then how many different languages were used in India. —"Indian Impressions," London Mercury

Yonejiro Noguchi was born in 1875 in Tsushima, near Nagoya, the fourth son of a merchant Dembei Noguchi and his wife Kuwa. 

While studying at Keio Gijuku, Yonejiro decided, with the encouragement of Keio founder Yukichi Fukuzawa, to travel to the United States.

Eleven Years Abroad

He arrived in San Francisco in 1893, and worked for a time for a Japanese-American newspaper and also as a "schoolboy" or domestic worker.  In 1895, he called on a famous California poet named Joaquin Miller, who lived in the hills of nearby Oakland, and was delighted when Miller invited him to live in a cabin on his estate, now known as Joaquin Miller Park.

Noguchi's desire to become an English poet was encouraged by Miller, and in 1896, he was able to publish the first of his poems in a small San Francisco magazine called The Lark, a project of a group of bohemian writers known as Les Jeunes, led by Gelett Burgess. Noguchi was hailed as "The Latest Thing in Poets," but his fame led to a backlash as he was accused of plagiarizing from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.  The following year The Lark's editors, Gelett Burgess and Porter Garnett, and publisher William Doxey published Noguchi's first book of poetry, Seen and Unseen, Or, Memoirs of a Homeless Snail to generally favorable reviews from Willa Cather, among others. Later the same year, Doxey published Noguchi's second book of poems, The Voice of the Valley, a collection of poems about a trip to Yosemite. Noguchi's admirer, the travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard, contributed a preface to the book.

During the next few years, Noguchi divided his time between Oakland and San Francisco, producing his own short-lived magazine called The Twilight and working on a novel about a Japanese girl traveling in America.  In 1900, he traveled to the East Coast, where, with the help of Léonie Gilmour, he completed the novel, published by Frederick Stokes in 1902 as The American Diary of a Japanese Girl.

At the end of 1902, Noguchi traveled to England.  With the help of his Japanese artist friend, Yoshio Markino, he self-published a sixteen-page pamphlet of verse, From the Eastern Sea, was remarkably successful.  Noguchi received support from a number of well-known writers, and was able to publish a longer edition of From the Eastern Sea with the Unicorn Press.

Returning to New York in 1903, Noguchi continued to encounter difficulties with American publishers, finding himself unable arrange American publication for From the Eastern Sea, or for The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid, the sequel to his first novel.  After the  onset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, however, he was able to publish numerous magazine and newspaper articles on subjects relating to Japan.  Among his articles of this period, "A Proposal to American Poets" (1904), which marks the beginning of the English haiku movement, is probably the most important.

Return to Japan

Noguchi returned to Japan in the fall of 1904.  His foreign success was much discussed among the Japanese literati upon his return.  Noguchi accepted a position as Professor of English Literature at Keio University the following year. 

In the Fall of 1903 Noguchi and Léonie Gilmour had briefly attempted a common-law marriage that ended in the early months of 1904.  Gilmour's belief that she might be pregnant proved accurate, and she joined her mother in Los Angeles where she gave birth to a boy in November, an event reported in the Los Angeles Herald's story, "Yone Noguchi's Babe Pride of Hospital."  Gilmour initially rebuffed Noguchi's proposal to join him in Japan, but finally did so in 1907. The attempt at reconciliation was not very successful, however, in part because Noguchi had in the interim become involved with a Japanese woman, Matsuko Takeda.  For several years, however, he managed to juggle the two relationships with the help of a third residence at the Engakuji Zen temple in Kamakura.

In spite of his domestic complications, Noguchi was extremely prolific during this period.  While the Russo-Japanese War continued, he contributed news articles and Japan-related features to American newspapers and magazines: "Sada Yacco" (New York Dramatic Mirror, 1906), "Marquis Oyama and His Wife" (National Magazine, 1907). In November 1906, he began writing a weekly English book review column for the Japan Times, which he continued until the beginning of 1908.  Among his Japan Times contributions, his seminal 1907 essay "Mr. Yeats and the No" was perhaps the most notable, although many others, such as the "Through a Japanese Screen" column introducing Tanka revisionist Naobumi Ochiai, are also of interest.  He also regularly contributed longer articles in English (and sometimes Japanese) to the bilingual Japanese magazine Taiyō (The Sun Trade Journal) on topics such as Onoto Watanna and her Japanese Work.  And there were numerous translations, notably Ten Kiogen in English (1907) and the first English translation of the popular tanka anthology, Hyakunin Isshu.

During this period, Noguchi began to view himself as a Japanese Lafcadio Hearn, writing poetry, criticism, essays, and translations, in both English and Japanese.  Although Hearn had died soon after Noguchi's return to Japan, Noguchi had attended his funeral and subsequently befriended Hearn's widow and a number of Hearn's former students, and arranged for Léonie to tutor Hearn's children.   His interest in Hearn led to the eventual publication of Lafcadio Hearn in Japan in 1910.

Lectures in England and America

In 1913, Noguchi was invited by poet-laureate Robert Bridges to lecture at Oxford.  The trip resulted in the publication of a number of books, including Through the Torii, The Story of Yone Noguchi, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, and The Spirit of Japanese Art.

In 1919 he returned to America for a transcontinental lecture tour, which led to the publication of Japanese Hokkus (1920), Japan and America (1921) and Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi (1921). 

The Japanese Poet

Beginning in 1921, he began writing poetry mainly in Japanese, and a thirty-five volume set of collected Japanese writings was published between 1925 and 1928.  His English book publications after 1921 were almost exclusively devoted to Japanese art.  Although he wrote some of his best English essays during this period, such as the amusing essay, "Hobby," American and British publishers and editors were often unreceptive to his work.  Although Noguchi continued to criticise Japan in essays like "Psychology of Modern Japan," his politics became increasingly nationalistic during the 1920s and 1930s.

A trip to India in 1935, described in his essays "Kinchinjanga" and "Indian Impressions," was the subject of his last volume of poems in English, The Ganges Calls Me (1938).

Noguchi became a staunch supporter of the Japanese role in the Pacific War, contributing a number of pro-war poems and songs to the war effort.  When his Tokyo home was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945, he took refuge in Toyooka-mura, where he spent the remaining two years of his life. He died there, of stomach cancer, on July 13, 1947.