He was born in the village of Kanakame in Yamagata Prefecture, the third son of a farming family. The family could not afford to send him on to higher schooling, and it is said that as a boy he once thought of becoming a painter or entering a temple as a disciple. Later, the mountains and rivers of his home and the figure of his mother became important subjects of his poems.
Invited by Saitō Kiichi, a doctor from his home region who ran a clinic in Asakusa, Tokyo, he went up to Tokyo aiming to become a doctor, lodged with the Saitō family and entered middle school. It is said that at an inn on the way he ate the sweet monaka for the first time and was amazed, and at Ueno Station at night he marveled at the brightness. Life in a new world had begun.
He read "Takenosato Uta," the posthumous poetry collection of Masaoka Shiki, and felt he had found his master in poetry. Since middle school, spurred by classmates, he had composed poems and loved reading the works of Kōda Rohan and others. That year he graduated from the First Higher School, entered the medical school of Tokyo Imperial University, and was registered as the adopted son-in-law of the Saitō family.
He became a disciple of the poet Itō Sachio, who had been a pupil of Shiki. Under Sachio he learned to compose poems in Shiki's tradition of looking at things as they are, and came to know companions on the same path such as Koizumi Chikashi. While still a medical student, his path as a poet truly began here.
After graduating, he studied psychiatry and began treating patients at Sugamo Hospital in Tokyo. He had been publishing poems in the tanka magazine "Araragi," founded a few years earlier, and from this year he also took charge of editing it. He also met Shimaki Akahiko, a fellow Araragi poet who later became a comrade in supporting the magazine.
His mother at home died, and he expressed his feelings at her deathbed in the poem sequence "My Mother Dying." That same year his master Itō Sachio also passed away. When he published his first collection, "Shakkō," in autumn, it caused a great stir not only among poets but throughout the literary world, and he suddenly became famous.
He married Teruko, daughter of his adoptive father Saitō Kiichi. Kiichi had early recognized his talent and is said to have told his daughter, "He is odd, but he will surely become great." Two years later his eldest son Shigeta was born. A second son was born later, who would become the writer Kita Morio.
He resigned all his university and hospital posts and became professor of psychiatry at the Nagasaki Medical College. In Nagasaki he published a book setting out his theory of poetry and came to know the writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who visited on a trip, becoming close friends. But he also fell ill, coughing up blood, and for a time moved around Kyushu to recuperate.
He went to Europe to study psychiatry and, after studying at a university institute in Vienna, moved this year to a university in Munich. He spent patient days of research examining and drawing animal brains under the microscope. In Munich he also came upon an uprising staged by Hitler, the future German dictator, and others, and wrote poems about the scene.
Having obtained a doctorate in medicine, he set out for home, but on the ship he received a telegram saying that the Saitō family's Aoyama Brain Hospital had burned down. When he returned early the next year, the many books he had bought in Europe and sent home had also been burned. Holding back his grief, he rushed about to rebuild the hospital.
When his adoptive father Kiichi retired, he succeeded as director of Aoyama Brain Hospital. That summer his close friend Akutagawa Ryūnosuke died, which came as a great shock. After Kiichi died the next year, the running of the hospital rested entirely on his shoulders. While supporting the hospital as a doctor, he kept composing poems as the central figure of Araragi.
His long-pursued study of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, a poet of the Man'yōshū, was recognized with the Imperial Academy Prize. For the research he had repeatedly traveled in person to San'in, Shikoku, Yamato and elsewhere, finally completing a massive work. He was highly valued not only as a poet but also as a scholar of the classics.
As the war worsened and running the hospital became difficult, he handed the hospital over to Tokyo and resigned as director. In spring he evacuated to his home village of Kanakame, and afterward his hospital and home in Tokyo were burned in air raids. From the next year he lived in Ōishida, Yamagata, and the poems he composed beside the great Mogami River were later collected in "White Mountain."
After returning to Tokyo, he published new poetry collections one after another and served as a judge for newspaper poetry columns. For these long years of achievement he received the Order of Culture. He composed a vast number of poems over his life, from his youthful works to his postwar ones, and had come to be widely recognized as a representative poet of modern tanka.
In his last years, as his body weakened, his power to compose poems also faded, and he died of heart disease at his home in Tokyo. It is said that his posthumous Buddhist name was one he had prepared himself. From the household of this poet and psychiatrist came his eldest son Shigeta, who became an essayist, and his second son Kita Morio, who became a novelist, both widely loved.
Masaoka ShikiKōda RohanAkutagawa Ryūnosuke
Nagai KafūKawakami HajimeNoguchi UjōSuzuki MiekichiShiga NaoyaTakehisa YumejiKitahara HakushūMushanokōji Saneatsu
People of the Taishō period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.