The Cartoonist & the Poet:

How a comic strip’s poetry linked cultural icons of two nations
Colleen Shiels, from KJ #62

Shuntaro was about to graduate high school in 1949 when he surprised his parents by announcing that he did not intend to continue on to university. The truth was, he had hated high school. And perhaps his father, a well-known philosopher, had something to do with this. Tanikawa Tetsuzo's loyalty to academia had long eclipsed his role in the lives of his wife and only son. The boy did not point the finger, yet when questioned about his plans he knew that an answer of some sort was needed.

The boy was good with his hands, and although assembling radios sounded to him like a solid vocation, he could not share this humble goal with the man before him. Lacking a clear spoken answer, he used another currency instead — one he wagered his father would accept. Shuntaro stuffed a worn school notebook into his father’s hands. The old man took the bait; he opened the jacket and read.

The young Tanikawa had never once seriously considered writing. Only as a favor to a classmate who was putting together a casual literary magazine did he sit down and write his first poem. Yet the exercise intrigued him enough to continue, and eventually he took to the task with the same self-indulgent fury that many young egos channel into personal journals. Soon an entire notebook was full, and then another.

In those early poems, Shuntaro found himself drawn to existential themes and to the questioning of his place in the universe — perhaps a nod to his absentee philosopher-father after all. In post-war Tokyo, many parents would at best have laughed at the audacity of an adolescent offering poetic ruminations as a reply to the grounded question of one's life direction. But while reading his son's verse, something stirred in Tanikawa Tetsuzo. With the eye of a critic, and perhaps the heart of a man who knew he had failed as a father, he told Shuntaro that his poems were good. The former university president backed this up by showing Shuntaro's work to his good friend Miyoshi Tatsuji — one of the greatest Japanese poets of the day.

Equally impressed with Shuntaro's writing, Miyoshi in turn showed the poems to an editor he knew. And that is how Tanikawa Shuntaro, at the tender age of eighteen, leapfrogged over a hierarchy of struggling poets to land, much to the awe and dismay of those hungry climbers, right at the top: published in Japan’s leading literary journal, Bungakukai.

***

The following year, a young man in St. Paul, Minnesota, whom everyone called Sparky, also received the good news that his art would appear in print nationwide. The letter to his home came all the way from New York and the offices of United Feature Syndicate. Soon, the 27-year-old was on his way there to sign a contract for a new national comic strip.

On some level Sparky had always known that cartoon drawing was his calling. Even as a boy, his dedication to the craft was startling. Every day after school he had followed the same routine: push back the cloth on the dining room table, lay down pages of newsprint, and draw. His love for his art possessed him, even if some saw it merely as doodling.

While most of America wilted in the Depression of the 1930s, the canopy of a happy home kept Sparky safely sheltered. Many years later he would find out that his father at one point had been seven months behind on the rent for his three-chair barber shop. Yet there was never a hint of the stress of unpaid bills when Carl Schulz sat down each week to read the Sunday funnies with his son Charles.

Simply put, the boy had loving, supportive parents. His mother Dena, his earliest cheerleader, was a homemaker who watched her son's diligence with an intent eye. In his last year of high school, she showed him a newspaper clipping that offered a free drawing test. Three weeks after they had mailed his submission, a salesman showed up at their doorstep, and the family signed Sparky up for a correspondence course in cartoon art.

Although he finished the entire course — Sparky would always prove his dedication to his craft with hard work — success did not come easily or fast. In his senior year, staff at his high-school yearbook rejected his drawings. After struggling socially and hating high school, Sparky graduated on this sour note. Not to be deterred, he took some odd jobs and kept on drawing.

At age twenty in 1943, he was drafted to fight in the war and sent to Europe. Wars cut short the innocence of young men, and Sparky’s service as a machine-gun squad leader brought him raw emotional wounds. Yet even more than the devastation of war, it was a loss he underwent only a few days into boot camp that would scar him the deepest: the death of his mother to cancer.

Discharged two years later, the war ended, he returned to live with his father in St. Paul and took on a number of jobs, including a post at the art correspondence school and a part-time position lettering a Catholic comic magazine in multiple languages. He began drawing again and submitted his cartoons to publications, but rejection slips made regular visits to his mailbox. Still, he persevered. As he would later write, “The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness.”

Finally, in 1947 the St Paul Pioneer Press began publishing his montage-style strip about a group of cheeky children called Li'l Folks. He continued to submit to other publications, and in 1948 his first big break found a drawing of his on the pages of an illustrious national weekly: The Saturday Evening Post. With this major sale he had leapt to the top, but it would take two more years of sending in ten drawings a week before Sparky would find his groove again.

By 1950 Sparky had at last gathered enough clips to mail his best to United Feature Syndicate. After a long wait in which he feared the package had been lost, he got the news that they were picking up Li’l Folks. When Sparky arrived in New York to accept their offer, he was told the strip had been given a new name: Peanuts.

***

In an interview years later for Southerly journal, Tanikawa confessed that the typical pangs of adolescence had, for the most part, eluded him: “Because I had an extremely comfortable upbringing, I was confident the world did love me. Normally young people are supposed to feel a sense of alienation but in my case this wasn’t so.”

After his startling debut in Bungakukai, he spent the next three years in Tokyo diligently reading, studying and writing poetry. He followed up his teenage success with his first book of poems at age 21. The year was 1952, and Twenty Billion Light Years of Loneliness rattled literary Japan. Tanikawa offered something fresh, approachable, and modern to Japanese poetry. Not only was his voice unique; so was his fluid form. Academics applauded him and the public embraced him — even if some of his contemporaries resented his success. From his very first book he became a rare breed: a poet able to make a living from poetry.

Tanikawa would later describe his career as an arranged marriage. While he had never envisioned poetry as his calling, when he recognized his own talent and realized that a viable living was possible, he wed himself for life, and the love grew from there. Time would prove him one of the most dedicated partners around.

Now age 74, Tanikawa is a prolific author who has published over 60 books of poetry and been involved in hundreds of additional titles. He has gained a level of fame in Japan that few living poets anywhere ever experience. He is called innovative, inventive, contemporary and always tireless. While he has provided the public with a near non-stop output of poetry since first picking up his pen in 1949, he has also worked successfully in music, theatre, television, advertising and educational curricula.

For a boy who hated high school, Tanikawa’s work ethic has been nothing short of phenomenal, and it has assured his place in both the hearts of his nation’s people and the annals of literary history.

***

Success did not come as sweetly to Sparky. When he heard his strip’s name had been changed to Peanuts, he was nothing less than enraged. The new title lacked dignity; it was as insulting as it was insignificant. On top of that, the syndicate had shortened the format to a space-saver strip of four equal-sized panels. Again, he felt cheated. But the strip would run nationally, something he had wanted all his life. There was no going back. He signed on the dotted line.

The name he signed, Charles M. Schulz, would never be what his close friends or family called him, but it was what the world would come to know him by — a name on which he would build a commercial empire of theme parks, skating rinks, toy stores, and TV shows. And the names he coined, like Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and Peppermint Patty — his gang of little folks — would propel him to the status of cultural icon.

From the first printing of Peanuts in October 1950 until the day preceding his death fifty years later, Charles Schulz would draw and publish his strip daily. He continued to work as hard in success as when struggling as a young man. Born of love and loyalty, his labor was wrapped in the passion of a man who only ever wanted to be one thing. The world would return this cartoonist’s love for his craft with a love for the characters he created. Peanuts would eventually reach an audience of more than 350 million people in 75 countries, in 40 languages worldwide.

In one of those countries, a man with a similar dedication to productivity would take on the role of Schulz’s translator. While it may have seemed an unusual job for someone already established as a great artist and cultural celebrity, Tanikawa Shuntaro began translating Peanuts into Japanese in 1967. If his poetry was an arranged marriage, Peanuts would, for the next several decades, become his ongoing affair.

***

“Japanese poets and readers prefer emotional richness, developed in simple or in complex ways, to all other possible poetic achievements.” So wrote William I. Elliott, who together with Kawamura Kazuo has translated more than 43 of Tanikawa’s collections, in the introduction to one such volume. And indeed, with the restricted lines and specified syllable count of the traditional haiku and tanka forms, Japanese poetry has historically avoided the verbose. Although Tanikawa is clearly a modern poet, it is still easy to see how a comic strip as bareboned and often emotionally raw as Peanuts, written almost exclusively in four frames, would appeal to him. While Tanikawa has tirelessly continued to alter his own form and style, in the end he has always delivered the same raw exposure of life that Schulz did.

In Peanuts, children sighed; children lashed out at life’s hiccups; children suffered embarrassing defeats. Schulz brought a weightiness to the mouths of babes, a pregnancy to their silences, a sense of needless tragedy to their carefree lives.
Peanuts was never really a comic strip for children. Instead, Schulz used children as his mouthpiece, to render with simplicity the complexity of adult life. His basic brushstrokes and thick lines suited the starkness of his writing — and the impact of both his words and images withstood the test of generations.

In Japan, Tanikawa’s writing has had equal impact, which is why he has also garnered such love from the public. Over the years he has experimented with a range of voices in his poetry, including the sing-song rhythm of the child. Especially in his early years, when he was barely a legal adult but already an acclaimed poet, a sense of wonder stayed with him. In 1952 he wrote Nero (for a much loved little dog), in which the topics of languid summer days, passing time and coming of age are punctuated by a celebratory memorial to a boyhood dog. It begins:

Nero!
Summer’s almost here again.
Your tongue,
your eyes,
your napping —
It all comes back so clearly.

Oceans away, Schulz’s pen shared similar tales of summers filled with the silly games of childhood. A boy and his dog were also at the center of Schulz’s story, but with a slightly more complex relationship. As early as 1952 Snoopy, outraged at being a pet, bemoaned: “Why do I have to suffer such indignities?” Yet it was also Schulz, remembering his own loyal childhood dog Spike, who coined the well-loved and oft-repeated sentiment that a young Tanikawa seemed to be channeling in Nero: “Happiness is a warm puppy.”

Schulz’s bittersweet mix of humor and desperation meant that his readers met characters and experiences they also found in everyday life: the unfortunate good-guy Charlie Brown, the overbearing know-it-all Lucy, the flighty, quirky Peppermint Patty, the wildly talented, under-appreciated Schroeder. Peanuts was a strip that caused people to do more than just giggle — it invited them to think.

Tanikawa’s poetry has had much the same effect. Offering multiple layers, it is also familiar enough for readers to approach without the bias, judgement, or fear of loftiness often associated with poetry. As Tanikawa explains, “My fundamental dictum was that the actual process of living was much more important than poetry.” At its base, Tanikawa’s light but meaningful verse encourages every individual to engage with the poetry of life. As a result, his poems are found in textbooks, in the mass media, and have become a part of popular culture in Japan. Tanikawa’s art is almost always found where direct access by the general populace is assured.

While Tanikawa and Schulz both performed for the masses, they also remained, at heart, solo artists. When one becomes an icon of a time and a culture, there must inevitably be some borderline drawn between public and private, where the person stands separate from the persona. Both men felt the weight of this heavily. And for each, comedy proved a useful tool to keep oneself linked to — and at arm’s length from — the adoring public. Tanikawa even addressed this point in writing:

I feel that I’d like being trapped forever
but the snare rejects me humourlessly,
pushing me back to the native milieu of people
where humour is the only refuge

In addition to translating Peanuts, Tanikawa has co-authored a number of books with psychologists which explore the nature of the comic strip’s characters. He has also written poems titled “in the manner of Charlie Brown” and “Four-frame Comics.” While Tanikawa has certainly engaged in other topics of Americana (notably John Coltrane and Coca-Cola), his fascination with Schulz’s work has been enduring, regardless of the reception — or lack thereof — from his otherwise loving public. The first Japanese publisher that released Tanikawa’s Peanuts in book form went insolvent as a result. Schulz’s characters did prove popular in Japan, but the profits were in goods. Toys sold while book sales soured. In a land saturated with epic cartoon novels, many of them brilliant, Schulz’s four panels were not enough to capture the readers’ purchasing power.

Somehow, it seems fitting that Charlie Brown would flub up his debut in Japan. Yet the Peanuts gang has been wildly popular in the country regardless. This is part of their enduring commercial strength. Every Japanese knows Snoopy, even if few know the lines his creator gave him. Strangely, the fate of Tanikawa’s fame is somewhat similar; while he is very much a people’s poet and almost all Japanese know his name, few can quote lines verbatim or even name his poems.
Tanikawa is certainly no Charlie Brown, but he is, in fact, a bit like the ever-evolving Snoopy — magically reinventive and masterfully imaginative. This may explain why many of Tanikawa’s Peanuts collections have focused specifically on the sprightly canine. In February 2005, in connection with the fifth memorial of Charles Schulz’s death (Schulz died in his sleep the night before his last strip ran), Tanikawa published a special series of Peanuts translations. One book, titled 133 Faces of Snoopy, is all beagle — a chronology of Snoopy’s attempts over the years to be anything but a dog. In the world of Peanuts, it often seemed Snoopy was, in truth, the only real child.

In a 1989 strip that Tanikawa translated, Charlie Brown and Snoopy are enjoying lunch under a tree. Charlie Brown quips, “Here we are… two old friends sitting together sharing a sandwich… I can tell you it just doesn’t get any better than this.” As Charlie Brown munches blissfully, Snoopy turns the warmhearted scene upside down with two simple words of contemplation in the final frame: “It doesn’t?” Beyond the clear humor in Schulz's words here is his edgy psychological play — the curt irony that has often found his strip compared to poetry.

For many readers, comic strips and poetry will forever remain at polar ends of the literary spectrum. Yet when Tanikawa decided to translate Schulz’s writing, it may very well have been that he recognized a kindred spirit in Schulz and found the poetry in Peanuts. Tanikawa once explained to his friend and translator Harold Wright, “You see, there is now more than one generation of readers that has grown up knowing my work.” For every adult who can remember reading Peanuts side by side with parents who themselves had read Peanuts alongside their own parents, the depth of legacy — of a country, an era, a people — is hard to ignore. And that is, in itself, poetry.

Twenty Billion Light Years of Loneliness

Mankind on a little globe
Sleeps, awakes, and works
Wishing at times to be friends with Mars.
Martians on a little globe
Are probably doing something; I don’t know what
(Maybe sleep-sleeping, wear-wearing, or fret-fretting)
While wishing at times to be friends with Earth
This is a fact I’m sure of.
This thing called universal gravitation
Is the power of loneliness pulling together.
The universe is distorted
So all join in desire.
The universe goes on expanding
So all feel uneasy.
At the loneliness of twenty billion light years
Without thinking, I sneezed.

Adult Time
A child in a week
becomes a week smarter.
A child in a week
learns fifty new words
A child in a week
can bring change to himself.
An adult in a week
is the same as before.
An adult in a week
turns over the same weekly.
An adult takes a week
merely to scold a child.

Translations from The Selected Poems of Shuntaro Tanikawa, translated by Harold Wright, North Point, 1983