Dokuro-hai, Nemure Paris & Nishi-higashi
What Kaneko Mitsuharu Saw Over The World

Date：14, Mar, 2017
Investigated and Written by Misaka Youhei
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Kaneko Mitsuharu is a Japanese popular poet alive from the Meiji to the Showa era. It's also well-known that he'd written his autobiographies many times. Today let me pick up the last trilogy of his biographies, "Dokuro-hai," "Nemure Paris" & "Nishi-higashi."

The three are talking about the years he spent overseas like Europe and Southeast Asia. Kaneko tried to live with his wife there but many accidents happened to them. Reading them brings us to his true life which seems not so comfortable...

On "Dokuro-hai," Kaneko says it was found his wife was seeing another younger man, which made Kaneko take his wife to China together. However, an uninhabited area was that China at the time. Like this, it describes the blue beginning of their haphazard life.

The second is "Nemure Paris." A couple of Japanese poets went to Paris in order to get out from China like the hell. However, there was another hell in Paris waiting for Kaneko. Their blueness made the peak at the volume 2. That's just like the deep sea where you can see nothing things.

"Nishi-higashi" is the last of his unhappy travel. However, it cannot give you an easy happy ending naturally. Where is he going to finally? Suppose he wrote the trilogy for reviewing his own life. The great poet showed us what it truly was using all his beautiful words and technique. So there's no ornateness talking about his life within the trilogy. You can easily trip to another life with these three autobiographies.

It's only an aside but there's a song named "Nishi-higashi" written and performed by Inaba / Salas, a solo project by the vocal of B'z. Wonder if they were inspired by Kaneko Mitsuharu along making that pop song featuring traveling feelings?