アメリカのレキシントン・ブックスから刊行されているエコクリティシズム論集Reading Cats and Dogs（2020）に、谷川俊太郎の「犬」をめぐる拙論が収録されています。Kindle版もありますので、機会がありましたら、ぜひ！
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Chapter 9
Let the Sleeping Dogs Tell Lies: Companionship and Solitude in Shuntarō Tanikawa’s Dog Poems
Keita Hatooka
“If dogs could talk / They would tell lies like me,” writes Shuntarō Tanikawa, one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary poets, in his poem “A Lie” (Naked; my trans.). Since his impressive debut with five poems published in a literary magazine in 1950 and the collection of free verse Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude (1952), he has not only published almost a 100 collections of poetry but has also become well-known throughout Japan through his simple and, at times, humorous poems. This includes his lyrics for the theme song to Astro Boy (1963), the first TV cartoon broadcast in Japan. His popularity is due to his humanistic messages and simple, heartfelt language. However, Tanikawa states forthrightly that he doubts language can truly be useful when communicating with his loved ones, as shown in the opening lines of “A Lie.” A little boy, the narrator of this poem, is confused by his mother who tells him not to lie, because he thinks he probably cannot help telling lies. He guesses that she has also lied before and been hurt, justifying the lying by supposing that even dogs would do so if they could speak. The poem’s subject implies that a lie can be placed even at the center of mother–child communication; the feelings of life are always translated falsely and misrepresented through human language.
As a poet for children, Tanikawa has little difficulty making dogs talk. He has anthropomorphized the dog by adapting Aesop’s Fables. As a translator, he introduced the thoughts of Snoopy, the beagle of Peanuts, to Japanese readers. Moreover, he revived mysterious old rhymes as brand-new Japanese poems in Mother Goose Rhymes. However, as a modern poet, he carefully walks around language with his imaginary dog. In the poem “Sidewalk Shop,” Tanikawa metaphorically describes the language, and its meaning would be a casing and filling tube of sausage, saying “[if you] hang the sausages in the window of the shop, / Hungry dogs will come irresistibly” (Floating the River in Melancholy; my trans.).
Sometimes Tanikawa’s dog unintentionally steps on a collection of poems dismissed on the street. The collection is one of the books that nobody would read and whose lines, words, and verses are becoming meaningless and return to the air. In such a miserable scene, Tanikawa’s dog happens to walk alone on the street. “Just after treading on the collection of poems soaked in the rain,” writes the poet, “The dog suddenly returns and sniffs it, / And then wags its tail” (Shi Ni Tsuite; my trans.; 84–85). Within the context of the poem’s metaphor, the dog seems to take a great interest in human language. The poet captures the dog’s interest, not through words but by turning those words into the very air, allowing the dog to sniff the air.
