The World Of Misuzu Kaneko’s Nursery Rhyme Poems

Misuzu Kaneko(real name,Kaneko Teru 1903-1930)was a Japanese poet of nursery rhyme who published poems between 1923 to 1928.Yaso Saijo praised her as "a giant star in young nursery rhymes poets".She committed suicide at the age of 26,and her poems were forgotten for decades.Under the efforts of Setsuo Yazaki,her poems were known to the world again in the 1980s,and led to a "Misuzu Boom" in Japan.Misuzu Kaneko admired Yaso Saijo and was strongly influenced by him.It can be considered that she composed poems under the same concept with Yaso Saijo which viewing nursery rhyme as the media of self-expression.Misuzu Kaneko expressed her original view of the world and things through her poems.Researchers of Misuzu Kaneko focused on the empathy for the small and the weak things,the perception of life,the sensibility to the nature and so on in her poems,and tried to decipher her spiritual world from the perspective of religious belief,longing for parents,admiration for death and so on.There are also scholars who Focused on the values of environmental protection revealed the non-anthropocentric environmentalism in Misuzu Kaneko’s poems.This paper analyzed Misuzu Kaneko’s nursery rhyme poems adopting a theoretical framework of environmental criticism according to Lawrence Buell’s opinions,and tried to make a thorough and systematical analysis from two micro perspectives:"environmental imagination" and "sense of place".Buell emphasized the importance of "environmental imagination" and "sense of place" in his trilogy of "environmental criticism".He said,environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imaging nature and humanity’s relation to it.He also argued that it should pay a central attention to "place" in anyone’s environmental imagination theory.Buell’s opinions provide a theoretical way for researching on Misuzu Kaneko’s nursery rhyme poems.The description of the world in literary works reflects the writers’ environmental imagination,which will affect the readers’ awareness of the environment and their attitude towards it.A writer is always associated with a specific place,and a reader’s environmental imagination also needs to implement to a specific place.Therefore,the "environmental imagination" and "sense of place" presented in literary works will affect the readers,which are worthy of researching.There are a deep ecological environmental imagination and a sense of place mainly expressed as the attachment to hometown in Misuzu Kaneko’s nursery rhyme poems.This paper analyzes the poems based on "holistic view of the world","biospherical egalitarianism" and "Self-realization" advocated by deep ecology to interpret the poet’s environmental imagination.And analyzes the poems based on the five-dimensional phenomenology of place-attachment adapted by Buell to interpret the poet’s sense of place.The main body of this paper consists of three chapters.The first chapter introduces the prosperity of Japanese nursery rhyme,the influence of Yaso Saijo on Misuzu Kaneko,the characteristics of Misuzu Kaneko’s poems,and summarizes the feasibility of analyzing Misuzu Kaneko’s poems from the perspective of environmental criticism.The second chapter explains the deep ecological environmental imagination of Misuzu Kaneko through analyzing her poems.The third chapter discusses the relationship between Misuzu Kaneko and her hometown from the spatial and temporal dimensions to interpret her sense of place through analyzing the poems.Analyzing the poems from the perspective of environmental criticism will show a new world of Misuzu Kaneko’s nursery rhyme poems,which will provide a new way to understand the poems and a new perspective to view the poet’s spiritual world.