“The Nighthawk Star”

Kenji Miyazawa

            Kenji Miyazawa’s “The Nighthawk Star,” is arguably a tale or myth of rebirth. As the nighthawk goes up to the sky, he is reborn both times and seems to be born on earth and then reborn as a star. According to Jung, “the idea of a second birth is found at all times and in all places. In the earliest beginnings of medicine, it was a magical means of healing; in many religions it is the central mystical experience; it is the key idea in medieval, occult philosophy, and, last but not least, it is an infantile fantasy occurring in numberless children, large and small, who believe that their parents are not their real parents but merely foster-parents to whom they were handed over.”

            The nighthawk star is not only going to where he was truly born because fate had it in him to become a star and that was his fate. It was his way of healing from all the abuses and the bullying of the hawk who saw him as something other. He may have believed that he was not derived as a hawk but as something else, so the nighthawk goes to a place where he will finally belong and becomes a star in the end. This motif is called the dual-mother.

            The dual-mother essentially, “suggests the idea of a dual birth. One of the mothers is the real, human mother, the other is the symbolical mother; in other words, she is distinguished as being divine, supernatural, or in some way extraordinary. She can also be represented theriomorphically. In certain cases, she has more human proportions, and here we are dealing with projections of archetypal ideas upon persons in the immediate environment, which generally brings about complications.”

            In this case, of the nighthawk, his own mother represents the derivation of the hawk and the symbolical mother represents space in the symbolic order of death and dying which may represent that Thanatos is the true mother of life because from then on, we return spiritually to the vast wide expanse which is probably the starry sky and the earth which means that death is our true mother because she as Thanatos represents is the inevitable and unforeseen path of mortality. The nighthawk has a death drive and that itself is Thanatos. We are inevitably owed to the fact that death is as our mother and the dual mother represents not only earth but the egg and death which is the foster mother.

                                                          

  Works Cited

            Segal, Robert A. “Jung on mythology.” (1998).