I just read about the SKK Light Novel and it seems that Rimbaud and Chuuya are like father-and-son-like before Rimbaud died. I am curious about RL!Rimbaud and RL!Chuuya relationship. I tried searching google but there isnt any specific info and just that Chuuya only met him because of Hideo.
^ Left: Nakahara Chuuya getting married to Ueno Takako in 1933Right: Rimbaud, aged 17, by Étienne Carjat, probably taken in December 1871
I always turn to an actual book for information like this. The internet just doesn’t seem to have much information about it in English, and it takes so long to sort through things to find new information. So here are a few things I found in The Poems of Nakahara Chuuya translated by Paul Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama that mention Rimbaud:
That autumn [in 1924], [Nakahara] met through one of his teachers the poet Tominaga Tarou (1901-25), who introduced him to the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. The example of French Symbolist poetry, at first in translation and later in the original, was to be another formative influence on Nakahara, who began to produce verse of extreme musicality a la Verlaine, featuring Symbolist staples such as pierrots.
…he became acquainted [in 1925] through Tominaga with Kobayashi Hideo (1902-83), at that time still a student at the elite Tokyo University, but soon to make his mark as Japan’s leading literary critic and an original thinker who was, according to the eminent Japanologist Edward Seidensticker, ‘a better writer than most of the novelists who have occupied the translators.’ Kobayashi, who wrote his 1928 graduation thesis on Rimbaud, was clearly congenial company for Nakahara…”
[Kawakami Tetsutarou], who first met Nakahara in 1927, left a vivid record of his impressions at this time: ‘Nakahara was walking with his hands in his jacket pockets, in an outfit exactly like Rimbaud’s in the portrait that Verlaine drew: black clothes and shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat, with hair hanging over the neck. His behavior was extraordinary. I listened to him, feeling a strange mixture of curiosity, fascination and disgust.’
In December 1933 Nakahara married Ueno Takako, a distant relative. In the same month, his volume of translations, Rimbaud: Poems of his School Days was published. Ooka Shouhei later wrote of these translations, ‘Nakahara’s translation may suffer some handicaps linguistically, but it is unparalleled where he captures the unity of the poetry as a whole. What’s more, he translates with care regarding the gaps in the vocabulary caused by Rimbaud’s haste. I would say this is most dramatic translation.’
In June 1936 a second volume of translations, Selected Poems of Rimbaud, was published. But in November of that year [Nakahara’s first son] Fumiya died of tubercular meningitis. Nakahara was shattered and suffered a nervous breakdown. The birth of his second son, Yoshimasa, in December did nothing to mitigate his grief. In January 1937 he was incarcerated in the Chiba Temple sanatorium. While in hospital, he wrote a record of his treatment, poems, tanka, essays, and letters. He quickly rallied, and was released in mid-February. Unable to live in the same house with his memories of Fumiya, he decamped with his wife and child to Kamakura, where Kobayashi and Ooka were living. That same month, his Collection of Poems of Rimbaud was published; he received 50 copies, in lieu of payment, which he gave away to family and friends.
(Introduction page xviii)
After that Chuuya went home to Yamaguchi defeated and later that year he fell ill, was hospitalized, and passed away on 22 October 1937 in the hospital from tubercular meningitis. His son died the next January. So there wasn’t anything else that he was able to do as far as translations or works inspired by Rimbaud.
I did find a sketch of Rimbaud by Verlaine where he is wearing his hat:
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