Mizuno Genzō and Miura Ayako

In September a commemorative exhibition of the life of Genzō Mizuno was held Ginza. Mizuno was a Christian poet who lost all physical functions except eyesight and hearing. An anthology of his work, Waga megumi nanji ni tareri (My grace is all you need, 2 Corinthians 12:9), was also published. Tatsue Morishita, the compiler of the anthology, is also a researcher at the Ayako Miura* Literature Museum. Morishita talked about Mizuno and Miura in a special lecture for the exhibition.

“Miura and Mizuno never met but read each other’s works. I think they have some characteristics in common,” Morishita said.

“First, they both encountered despair early in life.” Mizuno, at the age of 9, had dysentery with a high fever that caused his cerebral palsy. “Shinu (I will die),” was the only word he could say.

Miura was a patriotic elementary school teacher during World War 2 and accepted the militarism in education. Then after the war, when Miura was in deep depression that made her leave teaching, she suffered from tuberculosis. She scoffed at herself, “I deserve this punishment.”

“However, they were guided to the true light by their friends.” On a visit to Mizuno, Rev. Takakuni Miyao left him a Bible, which Mizuno read voraciously. A Christian friend, Tadashi Maekawa, believed Miura craved for something to fill her parched soul, and continued to write to her and visit her.

“They had families who always supported them.” When Mizuno created poems, Umeji, Mizuno’s mother picked out letters one-by-one from hiragana (Japanese alphabet) charts, as Mizuno indicated them by blinking. After Umeji passed away, Mizuno’s sister-in-law Akiko took over. When Miura couldn’t hold a pen any more, her husband Mitsuyo resigned from his job and wrote down what Miura dictated. He dedicated himself to taking care of his wife as she suffered from cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

At the end of the lecture, Morishita quoted some phrases from Mizuno’s poem “Kumo” (Spiders) in which he described his images of heaven and his hope for the second coming. “This is not only his hope, but the hope of us all.”

From Christian Shimbun, September 9, 2013
Excerpt translated by Tomoko Kato

* Ayako Miura was a Christian best-selling novelist who won the Asahi Shimbun’s Ten Million Yen Award in 1964. She wrote more than 80 works and lived in Asahikawa, Hokkaido all her life.