Selections from Poems for a Mysterious Time (1976)

By Yoshioka Minoru (trans. Eric Selland)

Macrocosm

Though the building is made of stone eternal

It is not from the second floor on up

There are purple windows

You can see Venus’ ass

Being stroked

The peels in the pineapple salad in the cupboard

Support the spirit

High noon

When the laundry man brings dirty dress shirts

What is that painter and his dog all about

Living on the fourth floor

Below the stars and stripes painted white

A dog being beaten

I eat a hamburger

That should have its picture taken

A black man in a wash basin

From the rainy reed fields of our current situation

All the way to the hills of dawn

The Chinese girls go waving their sickles

The shore of the horse’s long penis

The hidden cotton weed

Bamboo rush

The Boddhisatva of masturbation

Today when the heart is cold and the earth is hot

Little by little they decrease

Dragonfly eggs in the water

How about a love that gnaws on the corkscrews

Of the hot lovers of August

Our bloated sisters

Give birth to twins

Is there a long cardboard tube

Our bloated children can roll around and play with

Gradually they’re picked from the field

Pink cannibals who eat

Sliced pineapple rings

Until I see a mouth that thinks

Our bloated brothers who gradually grow fatter

Place a red cloth

Over the dotted cross on top of the wood shavings

The doctor who is our father in a white coat in the midnight sun

Sits down in a chair

And begins the delivery of foreign matter

A Berkshire pig cries out

Did someone die tonight?

Below the seamless socks hung with bells

Give me an answer

About what people aren’t doing

Thinking people

All the things people are doing

Collective fantasies both good and evil

Ears that burn with ease

Mushrooms of summer

Let the blue canary sing

Imagine

A black arrow of the end

Flying in the sky

A tank that flushes

The many swans in the lake

A night that smells like iodine tincture

The brilliantly colored corpses that are printed

Gaze upon the cool scenery at dawn

Our fertile meadows / creeping vines withering

The macrocosm like a slime mold

Looking back on the multitude of colors of Takachiho Peak

Reflecting on the world of goosebumps

When the pole vault athlete

Jumps over the bar

He feels the absurd iron maiden

From Summer to Fall

                   After a modern woodblock print by Masuo Ikeda

Little Miss Rain     with a yellow tongue

A lovely soprano bride

What is that

What to do with non-living things

Gardenia flowers

Below the wooden desk

To conceive

Summer

Death in the paradise of the sacred river

Lame summer

Blue inside the mirror

The bouncing blue ball

A turtle munching on flatsedge

Above the net of four hands

A trout shaped like the letter S

I don’t want to eat it

Dream in which I don’t want to have anything to do with the sisters

I am the question mark holding the cat

I don’t want to indulge in everything

Shave every wall

Shave blood

The love that wants to fall

The arrow that wants to bend

Water from water

The road ahead of the road

Rendezvous of eyes from one tear to the other

From shadow to the shadow beyond

Concrete things

Agreed!

Crossing the garden

A metaphysical milk delivery bicycle

Or a moth

Make sure and pee before you go little Miss Rain

In front of

People lying down and people staring

It’s embarrassing

Like a sewing machine

Occupying the bride’s territory

Vitamin blue sky

Mother mikan

Be careful and don’t spill it Miss Rain

Until the day

When she takes off her red sweater

The omelet making man

The man who makes something like an omelet

Making an embarrassing omelet

Someone in a hurry

In the darkness of fireflies

A monument with no meat

When fall comes the pampas grass waves

Little Miss Rain what are you polishing there

In nothing but your socks?

Is it a fleeting tortoise shell?

The dreaded bridal skirt on the suspended ceiling

The arrow advancing

In the direction of shrinking the circle

Go sink in the swamp

A group of old women with baby carriages

A rare purple-colored

Stop arrow

Can you see it at the same time as

The man fishing for electric eels?

The strings are hanging on both sides

Of the mysterious shoes

Solid Objects

Even in the afternoon of midsummer

They remain gentlemen

They do not pace inside the room

Dressed in frock coats

They stand erect

When the next door is opened

There will be an avalanche of dead rats

Make no mistake     that’s how it is today

They leave by a separate door

A fat gentleman

With a butterfly mustache

Turns the handle of the gramophone

In order to make the hot summer hotter

It makes a squeaking noise

Now you must remember!

Broken nails / the sound of childbirth

Because they are gentlemen

They remove their formal slacks

And repeatedly cast nets from the bay window

From the dark depths of the nets

That slowly spread

The future of an error

Sticking out both its breasts

The crimson cracks in the cross

Stopped in their tracks

They hold gramophones in their arms

Flowers made of brass

Consultation meditation

Without speaking without moving

Will their intentions call in the next wave?

Toward a world without communication

On the table

A fossilized bird flies around a fossilized apple

A fossilized mirror reflects a soft loaf of freshly baked bread

Does a fossilized arrow pierce the soft neck of a child?

A time like this passes

Their filthy eyes

The muddy lion they keep as a pet

Their filthy books

What is this plasticity?

The carpet path burns in the furnace of summer

Dripping with sweat

Their hearts remain cold

As they paint one large canvas

They draw a curved line the way the bride wants it

An arrow runs along the surface

And the burning color of orange

From the flowing center

Vertically and horizontally

They reveal the secret voice of joy

Make the flesh of inner vision shine!

Autumn of the spirit of the inner ear

Floating in the lake beyond

The rainy morning of the Korean morning glory comes

Because they are gentlemen

Dressed in their frock coats

In order to exist

In a collective fantasy

They hold up sweet goldfish bowls

Poem for a Mysterious Time

In the moving train

We see

Bustling in broad daylight

Numerous mannequins with heads painted white

Candy sticks being licked

With blue and red swirls rising

Ammonia

Esoteric art

But we mustn’t be delusional I suppose

Youths with both hands placed on the floor

A beast of a mother doing a handstand

The royal road

Of gradually drooping toilette paper

It can’t be seen at night

So it is led by the milk-colored arrow

Something like meat

Goes inside its shell

That is natural beauty

A melody remembered

Why is the Chinese pillow so long

Mysterious and moderately heavy

Laying on its side

The crescent moon

A group of old women

Maternity dresses fluttering

They move forward like the needle of a sewing machine

But where are they?

And where are they going?

Our self-conscious self-destruction

The desert darkness of the world

We should be ashamed of ourselves

The modern Arc de Triomphe

Quickly it becomes transparent

The cherry pink waning moon

Grows quietly

The beautiful married woman’s

Shiny limestone cave

Touch it earnestly

And look up at it admiringly

The various square pores containing metals

Twelve dubious transformations of a chrysalis take place there

That which decays and that which does not decay

That which changes and that which does not change

Grinding the coloring match

Will we find gold

In the crack in the embarrassing ellipse

A merchant of the salt of death

Is afraid of becoming fat

A peach-colored airplane

And a peach-colored shadow

Trachoma eye

Fornication

The clinging beauty

Putting on a wig of phosphorescent paint

Marilyn Monroe’s body has shrunk

A sudden swarm of peeping people

That which decays / that which changes

In our language

The hurt

In the eternal light and darkness

The constricted existence of hemorrhoids

A Venus for use in advertising

Dahlias

Soon it will be June

Legs swaying in the car

The stone lion in the park

Is this a commemorative photo?

A black man and a dinosaur

Slowly die

Holding a carrot

Is it a dream or an illusion?

The navy flag on a waistcloth in the crowd

A woman with a chain in her mouth

Artistic gastroptosis

How corny!

Today    on the surface of the raw egg yolk jelly

There was a poem printed!

The purple eyes of a premature baby

And a small metal box

Our tape runs along

Music comes forth

Buds come out on the trees

Ghosts appear

Waving ten-thousand feet of bloody tape

Sleeping youths capable of producing children

Young women entangled in suspicious orchids

The night watchman patrolling the nightscape

Its checkered pattern

Until the hot summer comes

The meandering ceremony

The peacock which should turn black

And the poster which should turn white

When will it turn red?

The holes in the macaroni in the frying pan

All of the meat is wrapped up in aluminum foil

Sewage flowing into the river

Various kinds of vegetables

So, is it finished yet?

A metal sign

The picture yet to arrive

And the time to come

Our guilty period

A contemplative Buddhist statue[1]

---

[1] Statue of a figure sitting contemplatively in the half lotus position, often Maitreya, the buddha of the future.　

Four Poems from Quiet House, by Minoru Yoshioka

(Translated by Eric Selland)

The poems in this collection act as little tales of the absurd. More than in most of Yoshioka’s work we see a focus on one theme or set of themes throughout the poem. Yet despite this the paratactic structure of the lines undermines the narrative form. As always, I attempt to retain the formal structure of the poem as well as the tonalities of Yoshioka’s High Modernist lyricism. However, as lines grow longer and content increasingly absurd, it becomes impossible to maintain composure, and the English begins to reveal some rough edges. Yoshioka’s poetry is notoriously difficult for the translator, but these poems are especially clumsy to handle in English.

An Attempt at Stage Directions for a Play

Until then everything is normal size

Then one day, on a certain night,

All of the household furnishings change for no reason

Moving to the rhythm, in the wind of a dark Monday

The music is humoresque

The visually large cup and the huge toothbrush

The chest of drawers that reaches up to the ceiling

The table that fills the room

The family of four is hidden by a tomato

Father’s clothes are so big and billowing

He can’t go to work

Older brother’s shoes are so enormous

They’re wound up in a spiral

Younger sister’s menstrual belt is immense

And glittery

Mother becomes exhausted and collapses

Carrying oversized containers

Father gets a phone call

A booming voice as if from a loudspeaker

Exposes his illegal activities

Older brother’s sin of getting a girl pregnant

Is revealed

The darkness of the telephone

Older sister balances on the edge of the toilet

The size of a volcanic crater

And calls out the name of her lover

What has happened to mother       

She’s on sleeping pills

And what’s going on outside the house’s walls

Hidden by the laundry hung out to dry

Then one day, on a certain morning,

The sizes become progressively small

A small mirror and a small bed

A miniature loaf of bread like a mere concept

I’m starving says older sister

What was that     outside the window says older brother

              Not a fire or an earthquake      

but some other kind of event

              It’s not our fault

When evening comes

The technology of destruction is on the horizon

A tilting lantern

The chimney at an incline

And the toppling house

Inside the chest of drawers,

The corpses of mother and father are spinning around

Brother and sister sit on top of the bricks

It is raining

An expanding sponge-like world

There must be someplace where we won’t get wet,

Says older brother

Brother and sister stand up in the shape of the future

Can you hear it?

The chirping of swallows in love

Not Guilty / Guilty

The judge occasionally takes a walk

In the thick undergrowth of the labyrinth of tragedy

Of the heart of the man he has judged

The early summer moon is telescopic

The suspicious behavior of a large crab in a basket

It tears the heavy blanket

Fragrant orgasm of blood

The bodies of a boy and girl, a lover’s suicide, ignite

Each moment

A beautiful electric current is born

A magic lantern painting of a Buddha’s hand citron

A fetus would remove its gloves

*

The judge enters an underpass

His gentle wife and child attend an opera at the theater

Until the murder weapon is found

The judge spends many long months caressing the lonely wall

Repeating a memory of deformity

The wet body of the tearful wife is now the color of brick

He has the insight of a mole

The bifurcated torso of a beautiful naked girl

As the eyes grow closer it’s the murder weapon

A thin wire

Forming a circle

The judge emerges from the foggy secret room

The origin of the crime

Is in the fireworks of the cells of the human heart

A murder weapon may be unnecessary for a true crime

*

Within his framework of flesh

The incompetent suspect opens one eye

The other eye dreams of caressing smooth cherries

The closed delirious abyss

The idle spinning of a bicycle running aimlessly

From a meal to intent to kill

From anxiety a curse on a satiated child

Escape’s defecation

Love’s attempt at urination

The bicycle spinning around

From the window to the neighborhood

From light to darkness

The kaleidoscope-person is transmitted

At the end of the field the suspect

Who has been found not guilty

Closes both of his eyes

The whole child is destroyed

He hears a gun salute

*

Stop

Eternally

For the sculpted man and woman

If possible

Neither guilt nor innocence

Coffee

I am there to make discoveries

And answer questions

I’m good at what I do      

In the thick growth of pampas grass

Rather than listening I look

From the sleeve of a sickly girl’s Chinese dress

The radiance of bloodstone appears

I touch it and call to it

A cup of hot coffee

A man climbs high up onto an anti-aircraft gun

I answer that I am the only one

Quiet House

The swollen shape

Of the green leaves of parsley

We’re so happy we have wives

Shout the men

That doesn’t mean they’re in clothes

Even more so seeking acidity

The plant-like man

Looks like he’s drowning in

The opaque gold dust of the black swallowtail

Flying over the nodes of the tall trunks of green bamboo

But what is a wife?

On top of the shelf where they’re eating

In the center of the marmalade

<Here is where the desert begins> for each of the husbands

The meal begins

Another jar put inside the jar that is getting clogged up

And now it is dusk

You can see from the crimson tongue

On the breath

The tongue of the bell on the descending slope

Is rounded in the medieval style

They follow a cross to go down it

So what kind of place

Is cinnamon brought in from?

Everything from loving lips

To Victoria’s frog is wettened in the rain

They’re coming

With two children in front

A spring storm!

Is this true lyricism?

Mother’s inner pillar

The indescribable six beats of that hair

Assimilated into the forest

The anguish of the tarsal joints

Of the birds that gather there

Black, fragmented and facing upward

When it comes right down to it

Is a wife someone capable of gushing with enthusiasm

Over Baroque floral decorations?

Can you see the ivy that’s grown back

In front of the building?

If it’s possible to permanently preserve

Religious stained glass

Then open up to the dazzling brightness

In all that is scattered

We must accept

Seeds of barley

The husbands are making prints

Little pictures of spilled paint and torn silk

Beyond the cedar trees

The silent world

Of horses and soldiers flowing downriver

One of the maids comes back

Three Poems by Minoru Yoshioka

from Spindle Form, 1959-1962

Ode to an Old man

The old man brings along

A lonely, naked child and a pelican

For the moment when he dies as king of the sick

He confirms the virtue of flesh and the isolation of the heart

And cuts down all the trees in the forest with a saw

As slowly as possible

He assembles a spirit boat

Visible beneath his nightwear

All that it carries is broken teeth

The old man ventures out

From his homeland of hemorrhoids and lung disease

He rides the swell of deep waves that continue from under the skin

He lays his hairy wife down on her stomach

And with the poison from her black breasts

The hearts of the people fall tumultuously into disorder

The bodies of jellyfish also become cloudy

And the old man laughs without reserve

Banzai!

Banzai!

Because dying once is also a new experience

At night crossing the border whose hinges have fallen off

The belly of a fish that can’t be broken open constantly emits light

And constantly contracts

On top of that, applying terrifying pressure

Is erotic

And does not put the polite old man to sleep

In the smoothness of the gauze moon

The old man remembers

Or to be precise, he makes things up

For his stomach and bladder

Unchanging desert nights

The cries of hyenas and vultures

Cities filled equally with stars and sand

Then sitting in the center of a burning hut

With the vessel of the king’s heart

He tries to boil the magnificent blood

Existence is like a bamboo basket

Left meaninglessly upside down

No superbly nude dancers appear

In an anxious world of hair

The owner of the barbershop flashes his razor

And shaves the large head of the old man

Cold as alabaster

Then as a beautiful corpse

As the protector god of the child and the pelican

He is transferred to a place where he won’t get in people’s way

from Paul Klee’s Table, 1959-1980

Paul Klee’s Table

Things familiar to the lonely heart

At one time all unravel the solid shape of light

And enter a dark house where no one lives

Creating vibrant images

In the arrogant shadows of metal

And quietly gather there

At the far end of the modest interior

Forks grow like withered grass

And glasses forever parted from lips

Hang suspended in air

Bitter wine flows

Sausage skins and a fish now nothing but bones sink

In a town of water lacking a commanding view

A sheer cliff made of leftover cloth

A cat looks furtively up

And with a weight which carries the dark rays of light

An empty bottle stands

Having taken up residence alone on the table

Anyone would feel lonely standing there

It naturally develops a slender neck

But no-one is invited, so

The umbrellas are left closed and dripping

In the corner of the doorway from morning till night

And the chairs are drawn near to the table

Plates and various receptacles are gathered there

Amongst them some that have been devoured in vain

But even more sad are the plates which never become dirty

All piled up on the shelf

They lay there at night with no echoes beneath the butter

The soothing feast is nearing its end

And from inside a jar of salt

Its belly swollen like a mother

A voice emerges

There is no response so it returns from whence it came

A table where no-one ever appears to wipe up

Just now the white walls surrounding it

On four sides

Fall silent

As if they had swallowed the sea

Circus

In a small town there is a small fire

And there is a place where they put barrels and wind

This is where Master Gali shrewdly

Opens a circus

The first steel poles are thrust

Into the middle of a large earthen-colored heart

Even the cold blood and skin of Master Gali are moved

Here they raise the brilliantly colored tent

Where viscera and bladders

Are suddenly brought to light

The sad trumpet       and the clarinets

The slender arms and legs of Master Gali

Are those of a monkey skilled at skipping rope

While next to him the lower half of a sleeping woman

Passes through a ring of fire

The shining horses

Only the promoter’s daughter

Gives it her all

Then the balancing act on a rolling ball the shape of a flower

That should make the audience roll its eyes

It should make the cat’s eyes shine also

The serious and obscene circus of Master Gali and his band

It is poison to the eyes of the children

Huddled between their parents they are put to sleep

It is time to raise the curtain

But no onlookers arrive

Nor do the well-dressed men and women come

Dried leaves and bones are all that gathers

One after the other they climb up to the dark gallery

Even the trumpeter runs out of breath

In the circus of the gloomy tent

The drum is like an operation to remove an appendix

The drummer’s hand slips

The ends of a few hairs stuck to a bone

Let out a giggle

Before anything can start its all over

Suck me up into the cold stars outside the tent

Master Gali is blue in the face

He leans against the heart of the steel pole

The girl in the balancing act with the ball runs off with the ticket-taker

A woman turns completely into a horse

And collapses on a bed of straw

This is the final act!

The collapsed tent is dragged away

He’s had it now

Master Gali is left alone

The only clown in the rain

Anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry

Note: This is the original introduction to the anthology of 20^th century Japanese poetry before more recent changes (originally it was to have been two volumes covering all genres including haiku and tanka). It was written over ten years ago. There are some little things here and there that I might do differently today, but I still, essentially, stand by what I wrote then. Perhaps some of the more philosophical content might be considered tangential to the subject – the piece is as much an essay in the philosophy of history as it is about Japan and its poetry in particular – but I still see some value in making it public as a kind of archive or record, if you will.

Introduction:

Japan’s modernity, from its onset at the end of the nineteenth century all the way to the present time, has been a process of constant invention and reinvention of the Japanese self and identity. This is especially evident in the dynamic tradition of poetic Modernism first arising around 1913, and the series of avant-garde movements which followed, ending only in 1938 when total government control of all cultural activities prevented further activity until after 1945. What I would like to suggest, and I believe the works presented here demonstrate as much, is that Japan’s true tradition is and has always been one of adaptation and invention, always embracing the new in each era, and that its result is the production of what we would now call a hybrid culture. Moreover, I wish to state that this modern hybrid is by no means new or unique to recent times, but merely the repetition of a process which has occurred with regularity across the entire breadth of the history of those islands known since the mid-nineteenth century as Japan.

Indeed, what we know as Japan is itself an invention in the sense that the project of nation-building and the development of national identity had to be consciously pursued in a top-down manner since the coup which produced the Meiji state in 1868. Amongst those decisions leading to the creation of a constitutional monarchy based on the Prussian model was one in which it was felt that Japan should become, for all intents and purposes, a European nation in Asia, and that it would have to become an empire in its own right as a means of defense against the European powers which at that time were busily devouring China piece by piece.

Japan was completely modernized by early in the 20^th century and had an economy based on heavy industry by the WWI era. Scholars now view Japan’s modernity as having been “coeval” with that of the West, rather than less advanced or less complete and attempting to catch up. Japanese poets during the Modernist period engaged in intensive correspondence with European intellectuals such as Breton, Marinetti, and Ezra Pound, and initiated their own local versions and interpretations (not imitations) of all of the contemporary avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In the high-paced urban environment of 1920s Japan, you could listen to Jazz at places like the Zebra club in Kobe or the Blackbird in Tokyo. A newly affluent middle class dressed in the latest fashions and engaged in “Ginbura” (strolling along the Ginza) purchasing imported luxury products. There were flourishing avant-garde art movements such as MAVO, and active revolutionary Marxist and anarchist movements. By the 1930s Kitasono Katue was developing what he referred to as “abstract poetry” which would lead to his later “plastic poems.” Nishiwaki Junzaburo, one of the founders of the Modernist magazine Poetry and Poetics (Shi to Shiron), was developing a poetics of translation, appropriation and allusion which rejected the idea that poetry should have anything to do with “communication.” His theories still resonate with more recent experimental movements in both Japan and the United States. Japanese poets during the Modernist period, nearly all of whom were translators and theorists, formed an intensely cosmopolitan society familiar with all the latest intellectual trends in Europe, a society which included intellectual women such as Sagawa Chika, surrealist poet and translator of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who bore little resemblance to Western stereotypes.

Japanese identity comes to us via the prism of a complex history of borrowings and invented traditions. Cultural history in this sense is a form of exchange. Identity is performance, as in a Noh play in which we learn, through a costume change and the shifting of masks, the truth behind the veil brought to us in the archetypal event of the dance. At the end of the performance, we are left only with silence and the empty stage. For below the mask is always another mask, and below that, the originary emptiness of identity (Heidegger’s groundless ground of Being). My understanding of Japan’s dramatic history of modernization and cultural transformation is, to borrow the words of historian Prasenjit Duara, author of Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchuria and The East Asian Modern, one of complexity and paradox.

Japanese writers and intellectuals in the interwar period negotiated a complex terrain of rapid social, political, and technological change while engaging in important formal and linguistic experiments that would literally redefine the very nature of Japanese literature. Accused of shallow imitation and intellectual vacuity by postwar critics in Japan and the U.S. alike, it is the intent of this anthology to demonstrate the centrality of Japan’s Modernist and avant-garde poetry, not only to Japanese poetry as we understand it today, but to the very sense of Japanese self-identity in the contemporary world. All of the poets here produced essays, criticism, and translations, making important contributions to the thinking of the times, while engendering cultural transformation through active engagement with European ideas and poetic form. This process was far from that of imitation. Rather, it was one of cultural and intellectual negotiation, involving translation, interpretation, creative thinking and writing, as well as argument and discussion with fellow writers and thinkers. The final end of the process is one of transformation as is all poetry.

“Our art is the foundation of a new culture.” – Miyazawa Kenji

The serious study of Japanese Modernism as a significant moment in Japan’s literary history, and as the very source of contemporary Japanese literary identity, is now just gaining momentum. As has been observed by others (most significantly Tyler in Modanizumu, Hawaii 2009), a variety of factors served to obscure the importance of Japan’s Modernist and Avant-garde poetry until the 1990s, including the attitudes of both Japanese and American academics, as well as the survival of European Orientalism as the primary lens through which Japan’s poetic tradition was seen by American poets throughout the 20^th Century. Suffice it to say, Ezra Pound literally “invented” Japanese and Chinese poetry for English language readers, and made his reading/misreading of that tradition a cornerstone of American Modernist poetry. This may be the reason assumptions about Japanese poetry have been so hard to let go of for the American poetry community. These assumptions include a variety of ideas, many of them inaccurate or incorrect, regarding Zen and its relationship to Japanese poetry, an offshoot of the Modernist interest in directness of perception and brevity of form. American Zen, in actual fact, has a profound relationship with Romantic thought, and later with European interwar interests in authenticity as found in Martin Heidegger’s existentialism and in a higher form of individuation or self-actualization. It is this same thought which was taken up by Japanese neo-Kantian philosophers in the 1930s, who also likely obtained their interest in Zen from European thinkers during their studies there. Japan’s new Neo-Kantian Zen (a project with an intimate relationship with Japan’s ethnic-nationalism and Fascism of the 1930s) was later re-imported to the U.S. by the Kantian trained D.T. Suzuki. Zen “nothingness,” in Suzuki’s teachings, is essentially the ideal Kantian space.

Literature has been essential to the development of Japan’s national identity during the modern period. Hence the tendency for certain works or writers to fall by the wayside in the canonization process. These works tend to be those difficult to categorize, where questions of ethnic and national identity are ambiguous. Often works with no relation to any sense of ethnic or national identity are reinterpreted in a way that will make them appear quintessentially Japanese. We see this process with Yoshioka Minoru, whose intensely difficult works making use of surreal imagery, as well as quotation and collage, actually place identity and culture into question, bringing imagery or quotation from classical sources into the poem in such a way that the traditional teeters close to collapse. Hence, Yoshioka’s acceptance into the canon has been contingent on the ability to interpret his work, especially his extremely difficult and impossible to interpret later work, as being uniquely Japanese, and in fact, more “Japanese” than work performed by others of his generation. This is done by focusing only on his interest in kotodama, his use of difficult kanji, as well as his extreme sensitivity to the sound quality of the Japanese language. What is in fact happening in Kusudama, however, is the production of a hybrid – quotes from the Nihon Shoki are immediately put into question by lines which follow; traditional material is collaged in with quotes from Western sources such as The Golden Bough, etc.

My understanding of history, and what this project itself entails, has been profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s concept of redemptive history, in which one reconstructs a forgotten or repressed past, thus “constructing” a history out of the present, which allows the nameless to speak.

“The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” – Walter Benjamin

I remain aware that, even in claiming a more up-to-date, and hence “truer,” version of Japan’s history and especially its modernity, I too can be accused of the same kind of bias as historians of the past. Always, to a certain extent, when we carry out a study of a culture or literature which lays claim to some all-embracing theory, or which purports to be a more accurate representation than those of the past, we are in fact “imagining” the object of our discussion. The fact that it is a representation at all means that it is in a certain sense “constructed.” Finally, it is impossible to escape our own current situation, just as it is impossible to escape the question of language. In that we are viewing Japanese poetry of the 20^th century from a particular perspective, while relying on the English language with its own particularities and restricted grammar and syntax, we are in fact generating an interpretation. A new interpretation, and I should hope, a novel one, but indeed, an interpretation amongst interpretations. Here I can only defend myself by relying on the thought of Gershom Scholem in his studies on Kabbalah in which he states that the life of the culture, and its literature, remain healthy only because of constant interpretation and reinterpretation from one generation to the next. In fact, this process of reinterpretation is itself the definition and the function of tradition.

Perhaps what this poetic search for identity throughout the various stylistic experiments of the 20^th century has to teach us is as much about the essential searching nature of poetry itself in all its forms as anything held to be particular to Japan alone. In the end, Japan’s poets were poets before they were Japanese – it is our perspective on what it means to be Japanese that continually changes and has changed especially upon entry into the current century. What the story of Japan’s Modernist period and its poetry truly has to teach us is something about what it means to be human.

In a letter to me, circa 1983, poet and independent filmmaker Joey Simas described American poetry as a constant reinventing of the self and identity, but we see now, based on a contemporary understanding of Japan’s 20^th century Modernism, that this being in the state of reinvention, this condition of never being quite complete, is precisely what it means to be modern, and the entire history of Japanese poetry during the last century most certainly points to this same process of discovery and reinvention – what I call “the landscape of identity.”

Kusudama, by Yoshioka Minoru, Finds New Home

I am happy to announce that my translation of Yoshioka Minoru’s Kusudama, which I originally translated while I was living in Tokyo during the 1980s, has been reissued by Isobar Press (London/Tokyo). Announcement from the press is shown below. Spread the word!

Eric Selland

Tokyo

The fourth 2021 publication by Isobar Press has just come out: a revised edition of Eric Selland‘s remarkable translation of Kusudama, the magnum opus of Yoshioka Minoru.

Kusudama was published in Japanese in 1984 when the young Eric Selland was living in Tokyo and spending his Saturday afternoons at the Top Café in Shibuya, where Yoshioka regularly met with younger poets. While working on his translation Eric received much help and encouragement, and many answers to specific questions about the text from the author himself. The result was the first edition of his translation published by Steven Forth‘s Leech Books in Vancouver in 1991 – which Yoshioka, sadly, did not live to see.

Now Eric Selland has revisited his translation for this second edition, lightly revising the text on occasions, using a wider page and adjusting the layout so that it more closely follows Yoshioka’s original lineation, and adding some helpful notes. The result brings back into English-language circulation the most important work of one of Japan’s leading late-twentieth-century modernist poets.

On the page for Kusudama on the Isobar Press website, there’s a link to a downloadable PDF sample from the book. There are also links to various Amazons.

Kusudama

But if you’re in Tokyo, Kusudama will shortly be in stock at Books Kinokuniya Tokyo.

https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/c/store/Books-Kinokuniya-Tokyo

Thank you, as always, for your support of Isobar Press!

Best wishes,

Paul

Paul Rossiter
Isobar Press
English Writing from Japan
https://isobarpress.com

The Japanese Modernist Reading List (Update)

Books on Japanese Modernism and Related Subjects

Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s, by William O. Gardner, Harvard University Asia Center, 2006

Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913-1938, edited by William J. Tyler, University of Hawai’i Press, 2008

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg, University of California Press, 2006

Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, Stanford University Press, 2001

John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978), Harvard University Asia Center, 1999

Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Princeton University Press, 1993

Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics, University of California Press, 1996

Leith Morton, Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry, University of Hawaii Press, 2004

Leith Morton, An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, Garland Publishing, 1993

Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1983

Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, Columbia University Press, 2002

 

Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, Vol. II Poetry, Drama, Criticism , Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984

 

Dennis Keene, The Modern Japanese Prose Poem , Princeton Univ. Press, 1980

 

Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton University Press (2000)

 

Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life, Columbia University Press (2000)

 

Robert N. Bellah, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition And Its Modern Interpretation, University of California Press (2003)

 

Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2009)

 

America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy, by Naoko Shibusawa, Harvard  University Press, 2006

Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, by Christina Klein, University of California Press, 2003

Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, by Zhaoming Qian, Duke University Press, 1995

Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets, by Ko Won, New York University Press (1977)

Contemporary Korean Poetry, by Ko Won, University of Iowa Press (1970)

Shijin: Autobiography of the Poet Kaneko Mitsuharu 1895-1975, tr. AR Davis, The University of Sydney East Asia Series (1988)

Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2002

Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde 1905-1931, by Gennifer Weisenfeld, University of California Press (2002)

Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism, by Thomas R.H. Havens, University of Hawaii Press (2006)

Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, by E. Taylor Atkins, Duke University Press (2001)

Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, University of Hawaii Press (2008)

The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, by Stephane Moses, Standford University Press (2009)

Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West, by Richard F. Calichman, Cornell East Asia Series (2004)

What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, by Takeuchi Yoshimi, Columbia University Press (2005)

Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited by Richard F. Calichman,

Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchuria And The East Asian Modern, by Prasenjit Duara, Rowman & Littlefield (2003)

The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, by Alan Tansman, University of California Press (2009)

The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman, Duke University Press (2009)

The Search for A New Order: Intellectuals And Fascism In Prewar Japan, by Miles Fletcher, University of North Carolina Press (1982)

Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945, by W.G. Beasley, Oxford University Press (1987)

War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, by John W. Dower, Pantheon Books (1986)

Translation And The Languages of Modernism, by Steven G. Yao, Palgrave Macmillan (2002)

Transpacific Displacement: Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, by Yunte Huang, University of California Press (2002)

Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan, by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, University Hawai’i Press (2005)

Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, by John Whittier Treat, University of Chicago Press (1995)

Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, by Yoshikuni Igarashi

Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, by Maeda Ai

Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return, by Miryam Sas, Harvard University Asia Center (2011)

Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War, by James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker, Lexington Books (2010)

Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods, by David G Goodman, An East Gate Book, M.E. Sharp, Inc. (1988)

Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, by Kevin Michael Doak, University of California Press (1994)

Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Edited by Stephen Vlastos, University of California Press (1998)

Coffee Life in Japan, by Merry White, University of California Press (2012)

Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20^th Century Master, Edited by Takako Lento & Wayne Miller, Pleiades Press (2011)

Modernism and Japanese Culture, by Roy Starrs, Palgrave Macmillan (2011)

History and Repetition, by Kojin Karatani, Columbia University Press (2012)

Translation in Modern Japan, edited by Indra Levy, Routledge (2011)

Japan’s Frames of Meaning: A Hermeneutics Reader, by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press (2011)

Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, by James W. Heisig, University of Hawai’i Press (2001)

Tumultuous Decade: Empire, Society, and Diplomacy in 1930s Japan, Edited by Masato Kimura and Tosh Minohara, University of Toronto Press (2013)

Modern Japanese Thought, Edited by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Cambridge University Press (1998)

Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years, Edited by J. Thomas Rimer, Princeton University Press (1990)

Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, by Tomi Suzuki, Stanford University Press (1996)

Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature, by Stephen Dodd, Harvard University Asia Center (2004)

The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio, by Melek Ortabasi, Harvard University Asia Center (2014)

Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World, by John W. Dower, The New Press (New York 2012)

Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945, by Edward J. Drea, University Press of Kansas (2009)

Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value, by Edward Mack, Duke University Press (2010)

Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, by Stefan Tanaka, University of California Press (1993)

Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: 5 Japanese Women, by Phyllis Birnbaum, Columbia University Press (1999)

So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers, translated with commentary by Donald Keene, Columbia University Press (2010)

Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, Samuel Hideo Yamashita, University of Hawai’i Press (2005)

A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Princeton University Press (1980)

A Sheep’s Song, by Katō Shūichi, translated by Chia-ning Chang, University of California Press (1999)

Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer, Johns Hopkins University Press (1991)

Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity, by Brian J. McVeigh, Rowman & Littlefield (2006)

Japan’s Total Empire, by Louise Young, University of California Press (1998)

Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media, by David C. Earhart, M.E. Sharpe (An Eastgate Book, 2009)

The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan, by Akiko Hashimoto, Oxford University press (2015)

The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature, by Earl Miner, Princeton University Press (1958)

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Edited by Mark Wollaeger, Oxford University press (2012)

Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, by Kevin Michael Doak, University of California Press (1994)

Modernism in the Global Context, by Peter Kalliney, Bloomsbury Publishing (2016)

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, by Sean Latham & Gayle Rogers, Bloomsbury Publishing (2016)

Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context, edited by Nana Sato-Rossberg & Judy Wakabayashi

The Modernist Papers, by Fredric Jameson, Verso (2007)

A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, by Fredric Jameson, Verso (2002)

The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, by Douglas N. Slaymaker, Routledge (2004)

Nagai Kafū’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self, by Rachael Hutchinson, Suny Press (2011)

Intimate Empire: Collaboration & Colonial Modernity in Korea & Japan, by Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Duke University Press (2015)

Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers, by Yoshikuni Igarashi, Columbia University Press (2016)

Japan at War, an Oral History, by Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook, The New Press (1992)

Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita, University Press of Kansas (2015)

Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Columbia University Press (2015)

 

Books in Japanese:

Senso Shiron 1910-1945, by Seo Ikuo, Heibonsha (2006)

Senchuu Sengou Shiteki Jidai no Shougen 1935-1955, by Hirabayashi Toshihiko, Shichousha (2009)

Shuuroku Toshite no Modanizumu: Nihon Gendaishi no Teiryuu, by Fujimoto Toshihiko, Soubunsha (2009)

Zen’eishi Undoushi no Kenkyuu: Modanizumushi no Keifu, by Nakano, Okisekii (2003)

Modanizumu Shishuu, ed. Tsuruoka, Shichousha (2003)

Kindaishi kara Gendaishi e, by Ayukawa Nobuo, Shichousha (2005)

Sengoushi o Horobosu Tameni, by Kido Shuri, Shichousha (2008)

Kobayashi Hideo Zensakuhin, by Kobayashi Hideo, Shinchousha (2003)

Ueda Tamotsu Chousakushuu, by Ueda Tamotsu, published by Ueda Shizue (1975)

Korekushon Takiguchi Shuuzou, by Takiguchi Shuuzou, Misuzu Shobou (1992)

Shururearisumu no Hako: Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Bungakukan No. 11, by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Chikumashobou (1991)

Moderunite 3×3, Kobayashi Yasuo, Matsuura Hisaki, and Matsuura Hisao, Shichousha (1998)

Kindai Nihon no Jigazou, by Teraoka Hiroshi, Shinzansha (2009)

Setsuzoku Suru Chuuya, by Hikita Masaaki, Kasama Shoin (2007)

Tensai Sagawa Chika: Ekoda Bungaku No. 63, ed. Nakamura Fumiaki, Nihon Daigaku Geijutsu Gakubu (2007)

Kido Shuri & Nomura Kiwao, Tougi Sengoushi: Shi no Runessansu e, Shichousha, 1997

Gendaishi Tokuhon: Yoshioka Minoru, Hiraide Takashi (ed.), Shichousha, 1991

Shi no Utage: Waga Jinsei, Ema Shouko , Kage Shobou, 1995

Gengo Kuukan no Tanken, Ohka Makoto (ed.), Gakugei Shorin, 1969

Modaniti no Sozoryoku: Bungaku to Shikakusei, by Nakagawa Shigemi, Shichousha (2009)

Yojou no Shukumei/Shi no Kanata: Sakutaro, Kenji, Chuuya, by Yamada Kenji, Shichousha (2006)

Hagiwara Sakutaro, by Iijima Koichi, Misuzu Shobo (2004)

Umibe no Aporia, by Yasui Kouji, Yuu Shorin (2009)

Shigaku Josetsu, by Yoshimoto Takaaki, Shichousha (2006)

Shi no Gaia o Motomete, by Nomura Kiwao, Shichousha (2009)

Showa Shishi, by Ohka Makoto, Shinomori Bunko (2005)

 

Nihon no Autosaidaa, by Kawakami Tetsutaro, Chuokoron Shinsha (1978)

 

Watashi no Shi to Shinjitsu, by Kawakami Tetsutaro, Kodansha Bungei Bunko (2007)

 

Shiteki Modaniti no Butai, by Suga Hidemi (2008)

 

Sengou 60-Nen Shi to Hihyou Soutenbou, Gendaishi Techo Tokushu (2005)

 

Shijintachi no Seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburo to Ezura Paundo, by Niikura Toshikazu, Misuzu Shobo (2003)

 

Yoshimoto Takaaki Daihyou Shisen, edited by Takahashi Gen’ichirou, Seo Ikuo, and Miura Masashi, Shichousha (2004)

 

Katoh Ikuya-Ron, by Nihira Masaru, Chuussekisha (2004)

 

Modanizumu to Sengo Josei-Shi no Tenkai, by Mizuta Noriko, Shichousha (2012)

 

Katoh Shuichi Sengo wo Kataru, by Katoh Shuichi, Kamogawa Shuppan (2009)

 

Nihon Bunka ni Okeru Jikan to Kuukan, by Katoh Shuichi, Iwanami Shoten (2007)

東京大空襲：昭和２０年３月１０日の記録、早乙女勝元著、岩波新書（１９７１）(Tokyo Daikuushuu: Showa Nijuunen Sangatsu Touka no Kiroku, Saotome Katsumoto, Iwanami Shoten)

東京空襲下の生活記録、早乙女勝元著、東京新聞（２０１３） (Tokyo Kuushuu Shita no Seikatsu Kiroku, Saotome Katsumoto, Tokyo Shimbun)

都市空間のなかの文学、前田愛、ちくま学芸文庫（１９９２）(Toshi Kuukan no Naka no Bungaku, Maeda Ai, Chikuma Bungeibunko)

幻景の街：文学の都市を歩く、前田愛、岩波書店（２００６） (Gen’ei no Machi: Bungaku no Toshi wo Aruku, Maeda Ai, Iwanami Shoten)

カストリ時代：レンズで見た昭和２０年代・東京、林忠彦、朝日文庫（１９８７） (Kasutori Jidai: Renzu de Mita Showa Nijuu Nendai, Tokyo, Hayashi Katsumoto, Asahi Bunko)

羊の歌：わが回想、加藤周一著、岩波新書（１９６８） (Hitsuji no Uta: Waga Kaisou, Katoh Shuuichi, Iwanami Shinsho)

翻訳と日本の近代：丸山真男・加藤周一、岩波新書（１９９８） (Honyaku to Nihon no Kindai: Maruyama Masao, Katoh Shuuichi, Iwanami Shinsho)

萩原朔太郎、著者：野村喜和男、中央公論新社（2011）

(Hagiwara Sakutarō, by Kiwao Nomura, Chuo Koronshinsha (2011)

日本の翻訳論：アンソロジーと解題、柳父章編

翻訳語成立事情、柳父章

明治大正翻訳ワンダーランド、鴻巣友季子

日本モダニズムの未帰還状態、矢野静明、書肆山田

ことばで織られた都市：近代詩と詩人たち、君野隆久、三元社

Minoru Yoshioka: Poems from Monks (1958)

Translation and commentary by Eric Selland:

The Dead Child

I

On top of a large bib lies the dead child

Enemy to no one

Nor ally

The dead child is spirit

Inheritor of an immortal lineage

If there is a humanity

This is the crown of thorns

Of its cursed memory

Eternal heart and stench of flesh

Once marked with the seal

Of its mother’s mirror and womb

The fruit of the sweat of its beautiful soul

Cannot be taken away

Wrapped in straw, he goes out to work

With his father

New teeth in earth’s roundness

Firm backside and reliable weight

But starting today

Neither his father’s artificial eye

Nor his mother’s pet tiger

Nor even his siblings

But a new personality

This frozen century has summoned

To a temple of spherical bacteria

With the ring of a bell

A tribute of pure fear

He who judges / He who is judged /

He who sees

An amazing film of identity rotates

The dead child is not to be found

In the flames of a casket

Nor in a muddy grave below the stars

But on the side of the living

Where he keeps watch

 

II

In a strange land covered with withered trees

Mother washes the body of the dead child

It is the command of a cruel, medieval king

His palace is made all of bones

End of flame’s causation

A flock of dead children leaves

The land where mother’s tears were cultivated

Shut away inside a horse’s hooves

Noon is the time for torture

Which the retainer delights in

A mother is assigned to each tree

For every withered tree that grows

A mother is suspended from there

A million dried trees sway

And a million mothers are torn asunder

In the August sky the womb’s precipice

The intense eyes of the world’s mothers

Watch a forest fire

 

And at the same time hear

The approaching flood waters coming to put it out

 

III

By chance the dead child finds

All the beds throughout the world

Have elderly people placed on them

Causing the beds to creak

Then from multiple leaky faucets

Roundworms give up

On the elderly and death

And in the direction in which

They begin to crawl

Vegetables and meat are wrapped up

So that the working stomach

Becomes transparent

Sometimes the barrel of a gun

Is pointed at them

And so we pray for the beatitude of the elderly

Whose screams can be heard

Slowly their blood is carried up the mountain

And poured out at its peak

Lovers of tradition / The marriage bed

The dead child weeps for one reason alone

He does not possess sex

So like the roundworm he is ashamed

It is the dawn of a new friendship

A bed of soft silk

He cannot live in the cool shade

Of a wheat field

In the darkness of his mother’s mourning dress

The dead child repeatedly engages

In a lonely debauchery

He studies the germination of rough stone

Growth of the forbidden

Honor of sterilization

And he studies the knowledge

Of extinction

Now is the season of the forest trampled

In green satin shoes

The fountain of castration glitters

The flowering of the pumpkin

The dead child shares a bed

With the aged dead

Throughout the world

 

IV

As for the dead child’s growth

And his disease

All of the doctors fell silent

A beast running rampant

Exhausting the source of nectar

And sea sponge

The mother’s breast is not to be found

Not even on the horizon

Hidden by an impure climate

And the violence of the brassiere

If one makes an unreasonable effort

To sneak a peek

One may find a young crystalline body

Of sulfur

That is why our time wanders

Below the magical rocks

The merchant who hauled

Too much autumn fruit to the river

The sly old fox’s arithmetic

Produces disease

The dead child’s fingernails

Do not grow outward

But wind their way into an interior

Pregnant with dreams

The dead child’s disease

Has grown steadily worse

Because of malnutrition

And his father’s cowardice

In the end he disappears

In a fog of gun smoke

No records of the dead child

Were kept by the doctors

His story is told by the violets

Growing in the historian’s graveyard

 

V

Mother lifts the dead child onto her back

And leaves on a pilgrimage

To the waxing capital of the world

 

General of pulverized moles

Encampment of night

Around which the intestines

Of a headless horse are coiled

A burned roof displays

The slender thighs of a young woman

Who has committed adultery

The wedding of a soldier

And a dead fish

In the morning swamp

The battleship’s gun turrets

Covered in spider’s webs

It leans toward the ocean

Where the teeth and fingernails

Of the stoker are finely chopped

 

It is a landscape that pleases the dead child

But a mother’s love is quick

She takes the tragic toy

From the dead child’s hand

And disciplines him proper

If he resists he will be punished

Expose his private parts at a table

Of gentlemen and ladies in broad daylight

Let the dead child’s hair hang down

From a height where the crests of countries

With a liking for night warfare

Are ripped apart

Or expose his smooth shaven head

Humiliate him, put him to shame

Disgrace the dead father

The bodies of killed compatriots

Illuminate the melancholy rose of the soul

Till the dead child washes away

The filth of pain

Dead child of the yellow broom

Dead child of marble

Dead child of barbed wire

Dead child of the blonde forest,

Of plentiful sand

Then on the earth in trees filled

With summer cicadas

With a different energy

In a different voice

The wise and clever mother makes

History with that same anger

 

VI

Games the dead child likes to play

Get together in a huddle

Then toss some nets into the Coral Sea

Make resound the heavy testicles

Of the men who sank

Along with their artillery

The anus which sucks the sand

And darkness of the women

Is also colorfully adorned

If it’s for the dead

You can work with peace of mind

Remove the shackles from the salt

And the various metallic fixtures

Bundle up the body in durable glue

Fulfill your public service a second time

In the land of dead trees

You can gather bags full of fish scales

Of gold and silver

Ecstatic days of enmeshing shark teeth

The quiet bones whisper

Standing vigil over water is boring

The dead child overhears them

Let us spread the nets as widely as possible

Once more, from the moon

They’ll catch anything as long as it’s dead

Mother makes a face and refuses to help

You can’t barter the dead

She shouts in the shipwreck which is home

The dead child can’t argue

His voice is so small

He goes where his mother can’t see him

And frozen, lays down on his side

Nearby

That legendary trajectory the sea

 

VII

Once mother has fallen asleep

The dead child creeps and crawls

On the floor

Eventually he completely fills

The sea of spring storms

He gets started above the upturned faces

Of the dead

Then the dead child jumps

From one to the other

In search of his elder sister

Who has been raped

Called by the spirits of the waves

Not only of one sister but all sisters

He holds aloft the melancholy lotus flower

As he goes along his way

To the half breed sea

To purify his pillar-like thighs

Elder sister is pregnant

Festival of night

Of the innumerable dead children

Given birth by elder sister

Opening the way to the shining royal road

In the back-country of ancient times

The dead child looks at the partogram

Of the future

Lightening of mothers torn asunder

Then from the darkness of abundant blood

Dead children with white hair are born

One after the other

 

VIII

The mothers gather together

Holding the dead children

They come from a ruined city

A certain hemisphere

Dragging the bottoms of their

Uniform mourning kimonos

Though rare, they even bring along

The dogs of atonement

They enter the desert

Until it reaches capacity

Another group of chattering mothers

Migrates from the village to the sea

In search of silence

One after another the pious current

Of black obis passes by

In order to govern this transient world

They cradle the dead children

So they will not be reborn

How can they sing a chorus of songs

Of this decaying civilization

In flesh and blood

In repetitive lullabies and nightmares

Like rolling thunder

They twist and gyrate their abundant hips

And in the end half the widowed mothers

Line up on a glacier

To prove beyond a doubt that

Each holds at least one dead child

They slap their shiny bare bottoms

And when it makes the babies cry

Dawn breaks on this journey

A lengthy ordeal of retribution

In a world of mourning dress laid out

The tops of the pyramids

Are just barely visible

So many gather together here

That for the first time

A new sky emerges

In the curled hair of all the mothers

And dyes the zodiac of real numbers

 

Comments on the Poem

Yoshioka’s first collection, Still Life, self-published in 1955, was largely ignored by the poetry establishment, but many poets of his own generation were energized by his work, including Iijima Kōichi, who alerted the editor of Eureka magazine to this talented new poet. The magazine liked what Yoshioka was doing, and asked him to write about his war experience in Manchuria and North Korea. The product of this effort is the long poem sequence “The Dead Child.” But Yoshioka doesn’t write about particular themes. That is not his poetic. The poems in Still Life are essentially self-contained aesthetic objects. Yoshioka was the singular inheritor of Japanese Modernism during Japan’s postwar period, which during the early years just after the war was in the midst of a backlash against the Modernists who were seen as having been complicit with Japan’s Fascism. Yoshioka’s approach is what is often referred to as nonmimetic or non-representative. In other words, the poem does not refer to something outside the poem, but instead creates its own internal formal or linguistic space. Yoshioka writes in an autobiographical essay that he wanted to make something like a sculpture, something with a geometrical beauty. In fact, Yoshioka originally wanted to become a sculptor, and his early poems after the war were influenced by Rilke’s famous book-length essay on Rodin. This does not mean that there is no meaning, but meaning must be organically derived by the reader in an active approach to the reading. The poem does not directly refer to war, nor does it directly symbolize wartime violence, but the images are suggestive enough that Yoshioka’s editors and many other readers at the time were able to derive what they believed to be a symbolic or metaphoric relationship to Japan’s war experience. The long poem sequence “The Dead Child” takes its title from a work by Croatian painter Miljenko Stančić (1926 – 1977), the recurrence of central images provides the reader with plenty material with which to interpret the work. Though Yoshioka’s images are not completely developed allegories or symbols, they are extremely suggestive. There is a rougher edge to the language here than one finds in most of Yoshioka’s other work. Perhaps this too is a comment on the poet’s years in Manchuria.

 

Hagiwara Sakutaro: Translations and Notes on Translation, by Eric Selland

The Diseased Face in the Depths of the Earth

From the depths of the earth a face appears,

The face of a lonely invalid.

In the darkness below the surface of the earth,

Everywhere fingers of grass burst forth like a stain,

Then nests of mice sprout up,

The nests entangled hopelessly

In countless hairs quivering as they emerge.

From the lonely diseased earth of midwinter,

Slender roots of green bamboo grow,

Grow and spread.

How absolutely miserable they look,

Like a thickening fog,

How horribly, horribly pitiful they look.

In the darkness below the surface of the earth,

The miserable face of a lonely invalid.

 

Stems of Grass

Behold the stems of grass

Enwrapped in fine, thin hairs

In the winter cold.

The stems, turning a deeper green, are lonely

Encased on one side in thin hairs

But behold! These stems of grass.

Far off in the sky preparing for snow

Stems of grass burst forth.

 

Bamboo

On the shining earth bamboo grows,

Green bamboo grows,

Beneath the earth its roots spread,

Growing thinner, and thinner,

From the tips of the roots emerge fine hairs,

Spreading imperceptibly like smoke,

Faintly trembling.

 

On the hard earth bamboo grows,

Grows straight up from the surface of the earth,

Bamboo grows restlessly,

Dignified the rigid joints,

Beneath the clear blue sky they grow,

Bamboo, bamboo, bamboo grows.

 

Turtle

There is a wood,

And there is a marsh,

And an azure sky,

Its weight felt on the human hand,

The turtle of pure gold sleeps quietly.

This shining

Sad nature’s pain endured,

It sinks into the hearts of the people,

The turtle sinks into the depths of the azure sky

 

Death

From below the ground upon which I gaze,

A queer row of hands emerges,

Feet emerge,

Then necks are thrust out.

Oh my people!

For God’s sake,

What kind of geese are these?

From below the ground upon which I gaze,

With stupid looks on their faces,

Hands emerge,

Feet emerge,

Then the necks are thrust out.

 

Tenderness

Doubtless with your pretty teeth

You’re a woman who’d bite right through the green of this grass,

Woman –

With the pigment from this pale blue grass

Paint your face, get all dolled up,

Inflame your feelings of desire

Let us play secretly in the overgrown thicket,

Look –

The bellflowers are shaking their heads

And over there, the late-flowering perennials are moving softly,

Now I hold your breasts firmly

And with all your strength you press yourself against me,

Then, in this desolate field,

Let us play like snakes,

Let me love you till it hurts,

Let me rub the oils from the blades of blue grass all over your beautiful skin

 

One Who Loves Love

I painted rouge upon my lips

And kissed the branch of a young birch tree.

Even if I were a more handsome man

I have no breasts like rubber balls upon my chest

And there is no scent of fine white powder on my skin

I’m just a shriveled up man with no luck

Ah, what a pathetic man am I

And so in a fragrant field of early summer

In a glistening grove

I fit my hands into pale blue gloves

And slipped a corset around my waist

Then I put white powder on my neck

And secretly put on coquettish airs

Like the young women

I leaned in with both heart and nipples

And kissed the branch of a young birch tree

With rose-colored rouge upon my lips

I embraced the tall white tree.

 

The Blue Cat

It’s good to love this beautiful city

Good to love the buildings of the metropolis

To woo all the sweet women

To pursue all that is exalted in life

It’s good to come to the capital and pass along its bustling streets

In the rows of cherry trees lining the boulevards

There too sing numberless sparrows.

Ah, but the only one who can sleep through these big city nights

Is the shadow of one blue cat

That shadowy cat who speaks of humanity’s sad history

The blue shadow of fortune I pursue ceaselessly.

Even on wintry days of sleet I love Tokyo and think of it

Seeking every kind of shadow

What kind of dreams do beggars like this one dream

Hanging cold to the walls of the back streets.

 

Early poems:

 

Poems of Love and compassion

 

The Midnight Train

Faint glow of dawn shows

Coldly on door’s glass

Mark of finger lingering there

Delicate the whitening of mountains far

Somber like quicksilver

The traveler’s sleep yet undisturbed by

Spent electric lamp whose numberless sighs

And smoke from an imported cigar

Whose smell makes one feel faint

In a midnight train where wearily despair

Kept in so long now speaks in tears –

For she is another man’s wife.

The train has yet to pass through Yamashina

So she loosens the cap on the air cushion

Gently heaving a sigh as from a woman’s heart

Then suddenly the two of them in sadness

Move their bodies closer and embrace

And as daybreak nears gaze out the window

At unknown mountain villages

Columbine blooming white all around.

 

Travelling

I think I’d like to go to France

But France is so far

I should at least buy a new suit

And wander, carefree, on a journey to nowhere.

When the train starts up a mountain incline

I’d lean out the window and stare at the clear blue sky

And think how pleasant it is to be alone here like this

On an early morning in May

The feel of young spring grass in my heart –

I’ll do what I please.

 

Death Poems:

 

Two Haiku (1942)

A pair of horns now appears

From out of the shadow

Of the black curtain

 

The procession ends

In a hell full of

Hungry ghosts

 

Notes on translating Hagiwara Sakutaro:

A poetry which is impossible to translate. That is, impossible to translate completely in a way which successfully brings across the entire effect, the entire experience. It seems one would have to be able to enter completely into the mind of the poet and reify his process, thereby repeating the poet’s own experience and rewriting it in one’s own language. Yet this is a process from which the translator recoils – for Hagiwara takes us to a place where we cannot follow. And even if it were possible, it would mean entering a region from which there is no return.

Modernism’s global zeitgeist

It is well-understood that poetry constitutes a performative utterance. However, Hagiwara Sakutarō’s famous sequence of bamboo poems is so much of a performative nature that translation ultimately robs it of all content. This is of course because its significance is in the event of the utterance itself. The poem has a rhythmical or musical value. Here translating meaning in the conventional sense completely misses the point. Even an approach toward meaning that accepts the need to try innovative translations rather than sticking wholly to the dictionary misses the mark. For Sakutarō’s bamboo poems have nothing at all to do with meaning [i.e. discursive meaning]. Not even a little bit.

Translation reveals the non-semantic nature of Sakutarō’s bamboo poems especially, and this indicates that a translation based on conventional meanings is not possible.

The mirror image in Sakutarō – ground as mirror (Nomura).

“The transition from the elegant literary language to the vernacular as the vehicle of poetry was by no means easy.” [Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburō: Modernism in Translation]

“The anxiety one senses in Hagiwara may be called the anxiety of translation, or the anxiety of the language of modernity. I suggest here that the anxiety of translation lies at the nucleus of modernism in Japan.” [ibid.]

(Hirata then quotes the early poem “Travelling” which I have also translated)

“In this conflation of origin and foreign, we must seek the beginning of Modernism, or even the essential constitution of Japanese Modernism.” [ibid.]

“Japanese modern poetry thus begins from an aporia, an impasse, or the anxiety of being unable to reach its origin…” [ibid.]

“It is the modern text itself which demands the author disappear.” [ibid.]

“It is the porous text. Many gaps are opened by the force of translation.” [ibid.]

We also must keep in mind in this comparison that translation both enhances and in certain ways diminishes or undermines our observations. Suffice it to say, therefore, that we must ultimately rely on the awareness that the problem of indeterminacy of meaning resides not only in the translated text, but in the so-called original as well.

Sakutarō’s bamboo sequence tends to make use of the suspended form of the verb. In other words, no verb, and therefore no action, is ever completed. The things described in the poem always remain in process, always active, dynamic, but never complete. The poem and its “meaning” remains completely open at all times. The suspended form of the Japanese verb unfortunately does not translate into English (the verb in English simply remains in present perfect tense) so this fact is not immediately recognizable. But on the level of grammar, this is one of the most important poetic techniques that Sakutarō uses in these poems.

The non-semantic nature of Sakutarō’s bamboo poem works on the level of sound and rhythm. There is ultimately very little provided to the reader in the way of meanings and meaning relationships (which normally would be thought elements communicate to the reader) by the poems in the bamboo sequence, but the reader is “fooled” into feeling that the poem provides a deep or meaningful experience because the rhythm created by meaningless repetition just “sounds right”.

Sakutarō uses rhythmical repetition of simple, fundamental words in the language (i.e. the colloquial language – this would not be possible if the poet were to use difficult kanji compounds with dense meanings).

As for the question of whether or not Hagiwara Sakutarō was a Modernist, it may help to offer a definition of Modernism. This is a term which has been notoriously difficult to define. Moreover, definitions have changed and developed over time. For our purposes here, the writings of Susan Stanford Friedman are most helpful. She argues that Modernism across the arts must be linked to modernity (much as I have suggested by the mentioning of socio-economic conditions contributing to the world of the poet in early 20^th century). Modernism, thus, can be seen as encompassing “any cultural response to accelerated societal change brought about by a combination of new technologies, knowledge revolutions, state formations, and expanding intercultural contacts that contribute to radical questions and dismantling of traditional ontologies, epistemologies, and institutional structures.”

Hirato Renkichi and Japanese Modernist Poetry

Note: This is the original, non-edited version of my afterward to Sho Sugita’s translation of Hirato Renkichi (Spiral Staircase, Ugly Duckling Presse). I am posting this earlier, and longer version because it relates to the development of Japanese Modernist and avant-garde poetry in general.

—————————————————————————–

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this book’s arrival, because for the first time ever, readers of poetry in the U.S. are given the chance to encounter the poetry of one of Japan’s pioneers of the Modernist avant-garde. It’s been awhile now since Japan’s own Modanizumu[1] became widely recognized by academics as one of the alternative or global modernisms, but it is still hard to find translations other than those tucked away in the appendices of academic studies. This publication therefore fills the gap in that a general readership can now get a taste of what was going on during the early years of Japan’s avant-garde just after WWI.

 

For poets practicing experimental poetics throughout the 20^th century, the basic assumption or belief has been that the process or act of breaking through the barriers of conventional form, meaning, and poetic language, is synonymous with the liberation of human consciousness.[2] Poets felt that they were unveiling an essential human truth by virtue of tearing down literary and social convention. The discovery of the new in an age of rapid change brought on by new technologies was no doubt part of it, but that was not all. The point I would like to make here, and what this publication impressively demonstrates, is that Japanese poets pursuing avant-garde methodologies felt the same way about their activities as did European poets and poets all over the world. This relationship to poetry as discovery or a kind of intellectual enlightenment is one that was largely ignored by scholars and critics in both Japan and the West until the 1990s. American scholars with a certain Neo-Orientalist bent tended to prefer the traditional, and Japan’s avant-garde was usually accused of being merely imitation, not the real thing as it was in the West. Moreover, according to the assessment of some of Japan’s most influential postwar poets and critics, Japan’s early experimental poems were immature, showing a lack of depth and development, as well as the all-important Japaneseness required for acceptance into the canon. Japan’s experimental poets were tainted by direct foreign influence. This stands in contrast to those few poets from the period who were accepted by academia – these poets were seen as having some kind of lyric sensitivity and essential Japaneseness which others did not have. But in order to reposition poets who had their beginnings in Dadaism and Surrealism as uniquely Japanese, their work had to be decontextualized and placed in an ahistorical vacuum, the greatness of their work associated with special personality traits, such as sensitivity and talent in making use of a Japanese language assumed to have a unique beauty and purity. This misinterpretation and refusal to understand the period is profound, but what is truly ironic is how Japanese critics relied on what are basically Neo-Orientalist and neo-colonialist attitudes (precisely the racist imperialist attitudes held by Westerners pooh-poohing Japan’s supposed imitation of the West) in order to prove their point in devaluing these poets.[3]

 

But just what were the historical and social forces in Japan at the beginning of the 20^th century that allowed for the appearance of Modernism? Intensive efforts towards modernization began with the advent of the Meiji era in 1868 when Japan first established itself as a nation state along the European model. At first the concern was mainly the import of European institutions and new technologies, but most importantly for literature, changes were made to the language as well. Standardization of the spoken language was gradually taking place through the new nationalized education system, but it was the complex writing system and its distance from how the language was actually spoken which demanded attention. Over time, Chinese characters (or kanji) as used in Japanese were simplified and new words were invented using kanji to express Western concepts and to ease the process of translating Western languages into Japanese. The genbun itchi movement was key in bringing the written and spoken languages closer to together and allowing for the expression of colloquial language in writing. This process of modernization and standardization of Japanese was complete by the end of the 19^th century.

 

Once the Meiji period rush to modernize was well underway, poets began to take part in their own way, feeling that it was also important to create a new, more cosmopolitan literary culture. Part of the concern was how to translate Western literary works. This required the invention of a new poetic language and forms which could mime those of European poetic forms. The Shintaishi poets (poetry in new form) then began applying this approach to writing poetry in a new European influenced form. Their poetry was for the most part Romantic and Symbolist in approach. There were three existing genres of poetry in Japan as of the end of the Edo Period – tanka, haiku, and kanshi. Tanka is the oldest form of poetry in Japan using a total of 31 syllables in sections of 5-7-5-7-7, while haiku has 17 syllables in sections of 5-7-5. Kanshi is poetry in classical Chinese forms, which was written and read by the Japanese with the help of a system of diacritical marks which allowed the reader to “translate” the Chinese into Japanese in his head as he read along. Shintaishi poets worked with what they already had available to them, and hence used various syllabic patterns of 5-7-5 and so on. The poetic language they used, though it was called “new”, tended to be classical or neo-classical in form. Hence for Renkichi and other poets of his generation who had available to them a whole new language which was closer to the actual language spoken, the poetry of the previous generation was already old-fashioned, overly formal and unwieldy.

 

Japan was completely modernized by early in the 20^th century and had an economy based on heavy industry by the WWI era. The quick pace of industrialization and urbanization, the sudden tearing away from the traditional lifestyle of the rural village to be thrown into the high-paced life of the big city, was an alienating experience for many poets, and is likely a factor behind the development of Japanese Modernism, including the angst-ridden work of poets such as Hagiwara Sakutarō.[4] But it was also a time of great excitement and intellectual discovery. Japanese poets during the Modernist period engaged in intensive correspondence with European intellectuals such as Breton, Marinetti, and Ezra Pound, and initiated their own local versions and interpretations of all of the contemporary avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In the high-paced urban environment of 1920s Japan, you could listen to Jazz at places like the Zebra Club in Kobe or the Blackbird in Tokyo. A newly affluent middle class dressed in the latest fashions and engaged in “Ginbura” (strolling along the Ginza). There were flourishing avant-garde art movements such as MAVO, and active revolutionary Marxist and anarchist movements.[5] Kitasono Katue was developing what he referred to as “abstract poetry” which would lead to his later “plastic poems.” Nishiwaki Junzaburo,[6] one of the founders of the Modernist magazine Poetry and Poetics (Shi to Shiron), was developing a poetics of translation, appropriation and allusion. Japanese poets during the Modernist period, nearly all of whom were translators and theorists, formed an intensely cosmopolitan society familiar with all the latest intellectual trends in Europe, a society which included intellectual women such as Sagawa Chika,[7] surrealist poet and translator of Ｊａｍｅｓ Joyce and Virginia Woolf. This is the milieu into which Hirato Renkichi leads us as he stands on that corner of Hibiya Park in 1921 distributing his Futurist Manifesto to passersby.

 

Japanese writers and intellectuals in the interwar period negotiated a complex terrain of rapid social, political, and technological change while engaging in important formal and linguistic experiments that would literally redefine the very nature of Japanese literature. This process was one of cultural and intellectual negotiation, involving translation, interpretation, creative thinking and writing, as well as argument and discussion with fellow writers and thinkers. The final end of the process is one of transformation as is all poetry.

 

[1] I use the term Modernism as it is commonly understood by poets and scholars in the U.S. In Japan, Modernism in poetry, or Modanizumu shi, usually refers only to that group of poets associated with the magazine Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics) who called themselves modernists. The magazine was published between 1928 and 1931 edited by Haruyama Yukio, with important input from Nishiwaki Junzaburo and Takiguchi Shūzō.

[2] I refer here to Jeremy Rothenberg’s introduction to the first volume of his anthology of the international avant-garde, Poetry for the Millennium, in which he outlines the qualities shared by avant-garde poetry movements worldwide.

[3] An excellent overview of this situation in Japanese literary studies is to be found in William J. Tyler’s introduction to his Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913-1938.

[4] See Howling at the Moon, by Hagiwara Sakutarō (trans. Hiroaki Sato) Sun & Moon (2002).

[5] See For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, Edited by Norma Field and Heather Bowen-Struyk (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

[6] See The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation, by Hosea Hirata (Studies of the East Asian Institute: Princeton Legacy Library)

[7] See The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, Trans. Sawako Nakayasu (Canarium Books, 2015)

Japanese Modernist Reading List: Update

Books on Japanese Modernism and Related Subjects
Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s, by William O. Gardner, Harvard University Asia Center, 2006
Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913-1938, edited by William J. Tyler, University of Hawai’i Press, 2008
Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg, University of California Press, 2006
Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, Stanford University Press, 2001
John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978), Harvard University Asia Center, 1999
Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Princeton University Press, 1993
Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics, University of California Press, 1996
Leith Morton, Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry, University of Hawaii Press, 2004
Leith Morton, An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, Garland Publishing, 1993
Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1983
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, Columbia University Press, 2002

Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, Vol. II Poetry, Drama, Criticism , Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984

Dennis Keene, The Modern Japanese Prose Poem , Princeton Univ. Press, 1980

Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton University Press (2000)

Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life, Columbia University Press (2000)

Robert N. Bellah, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition And Its Modern Interpretation, University of California Press (2003)

Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2009)

America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy, by Naoko Shibusawa, Harvard University Press, 2006
Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, by Christina Klein, University of California Press, 2003
Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, by Zhaoming Qian, Duke University Press, 1995
Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets, by Ko Won, New York University Press (1977)
Contemporary Korean Poetry, by Ko Won, University of Iowa Press (1970)
Shijin: Autobiography of the Poet Kaneko Mitsuharu 1895-1975, tr. AR Davis, The University of Sydney East Asia Series (1988)
Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2002
Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde 1905-1931, by Gennifer Weisenfeld, University of California Press (2002)
Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism, by Thomas R.H. Havens, University of Hawaii Press (2006)
Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, by E. Taylor Atkins, Duke University Press (2001)
Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, University of Hawaii Press (2008)
The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, by Stephane Moses, Standford University Press (2009)
Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West, by Richard F. Calichman, Cornell East Asia Series (2004)
What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, by Takeuchi Yoshimi, Columbia University Press (2005)
Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited by Richard F. Calichman,
Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchuria And The East Asian Modern, by Prasenjit Duara, Rowman & Littlefield (2003)
The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, by Alan Tansman, University of California Press (2009)
The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman, Duke University Press (2009)
The Search for A New Order: Intellectuals And Fascism In Prewar Japan, by Miles Fletcher, University of North Carolina Press (1982)
Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945, by W.G. Beasley, Oxford University Press (1987)
War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, by John W. Dower, Pantheon Books (1986)
Translation And The Languages of Modernism, by Steven G. Yao, Palgrave Macmillan (2002)
Transpacific Displacement: Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, by Yunte Huang, University of California Press (2002)
Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan, by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, University Hawai’i Press (2005)
Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, by John Whittier Treat, University of Chicago Press (1995)
Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, by Yoshikuni Igarashi
Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, by Maeda Ai
Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return, by Miryam Sas, Harvard University Asia Center (2011)
Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War, by James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker, Lexington Books (2010)
Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods, by David G Goodman, An East Gate Book, M.E. Sharp, Inc. (1988)
Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, by Kevin Michael Doak, University of California Press (1994)
Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Edited by Stephen Vlastos, University of California Press (1998)
Coffee Life in Japan, by Merry White, University of California Press (2012)
Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, Edited by Takako Lento & Wayne Miller, Pleiades Press (2011)
Modernism and Japanese Culture, by Roy Starrs, Palgrave Macmillan (2011)
History and Repetition, by Kojin Karatani, Columbia University Press (2012)
Translation in Modern Japan, edited by Indra Levy, Routledge (2011)
Japan’s Frames of Meaning: A Hermeneutics Reader, by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press (2011)
Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, by James W. Heisig, University of Hawai’i Press (2001)
Tumultuous Decade: Empire, Society, and Diplomacy in 1930s Japan, Edited by Masato Kimura and Tosh Minohara, University of Toronto Press (2013)
Modern Japanese Thought, Edited by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Cambridge University Press (1998)
Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years, Edited by J. Thomas Rimer, Princeton University Press (1990)
Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, by Tomi Suzuki, Stanford University Press (1996)
Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature, by Stephen Dodd, Harvard University Asia Center (2004)
The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio, by Melek Ortabasi, Harvard University Asia Center (2014)
Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World, by John W. Dower, The New Press (New York 2012)
Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945, by Edward J. Drea, University Press of Kansas (2009)
Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value, by Edward Mack, Duke University Press (2010)
Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, by Stefan Tanaka, University of California Press (1993)
Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: 5 Japanese Women, by Phyllis Birnbaum, Columbia University Press (1999)
So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers, translated with commentary by Donald Keene, Columbia University Press (2010)
Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, Samuel Hideo Yamashita, University of Hawai’i Press (2005)
A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Princeton University Press (1980)
A Sheep’s Song, by Katō Shūichi, translated by Chia-ning Chang, University of California Press (1999)
Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer, Johns Hopkins University Press (1991)
Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity, by Brian J. McVeigh, Rowman & Littlefield (2006)
Japan’s Total Empire, by Louise Young, University of California Press (1998)
Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media, by David C. Earhart, M.E. Sharpe (An Eastgate Book, 2009)
The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan, by Akiko Hashimoto, Oxford University press (2015)
The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature, by Earl Miner, Princeton University Press (1958)
The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Edited by Mark Wollaeger, Oxford University press (2012)
Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, by Kevin Michael Doak, University of California Press (1994)
Modernism in the Global Context, by Peter Kalliney, Bloomsbury Publishing (2016)
Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, by Sean Latham & Gayle Rogers, Bloomsbury Publishing (2016)
Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context, edited by Nana Sato-Rossberg & Judy Wakabayashi
The Modernist Papers, by Fredric Jameson, Verso (2007)
A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, by Fredric Jameson, Verso (2002)

Books in Japanese:
Senso Shiron 1910-1945, by Seo Ikuo, Heibonsha (2006)
Senchuu Sengou Shiteki Jidai no Shougen 1935-1955, by Hirabayashi Toshihiko, Shichousha (2009)
Shuuroku Toshite no Modanizumu: Nihon Gendaishi no Teiryuu, by Fujimoto Toshihiko, Soubunsha (2009)
Zen’eishi Undoushi no Kenkyuu: Modanizumushi no Keifu, by Nakano, Okisekii (2003)
Modanizumu Shishuu, ed. Tsuruoka, Shichousha (2003)
Kindaishi kara Gendaishi e, by Ayukawa Nobuo, Shichousha (2005)
Sengoushi o Horobosu Tameni, by Kido Shuri, Shichousha (2008)
Kobayashi Hideo Zensakuhin, by Kobayashi Hideo, Shinchousha (2003)
Ueda Tamotsu Chousakushuu, by Ueda Tamotsu, published by Ueda Shizue (1975)
Korekushon Takiguchi Shuuzou, by Takiguchi Shuuzou, Misuzu Shobou (1992)
Shururearisumu no Hako: Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Bungakukan No. 11, by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Chikumashobou (1991)
Moderunite 3×3, Kobayashi Yasuo, Matsuura Hisaki, and Matsuura Hisao, Shichousha (1998)
Kindai Nihon no Jigazou, by Teraoka Hiroshi, Shinzansha (2009)
Setsuzoku Suru Chuuya, by Hikita Masaaki, Kasama Shoin (2007)
Tensai Sagawa Chika: Ekoda Bungaku No. 63, ed. Nakamura Fumiaki, Nihon Daigaku Geijutsu Gakubu (2007)
Kido Shuri & Nomura Kiwao, Tougi Sengoushi: Shi no Runessansu e, Shichousha, 1997
Gendaishi Tokuhon: Yoshioka Minoru, Hiraide Takashi (ed.), Shichousha, 1991
Shi no Utage: Waga Jinsei, Ema Shouko , Kage Shobou, 1995
Gengo Kuukan no Tanken, Ohka Makoto (ed.), Gakugei Shorin, 1969
Modaniti no Sozoryoku: Bungaku to Shikakusei, by Nakagawa Shigemi, Shichousha (2009)
Yojou no Shukumei/Shi no Kanata: Sakutaro, Kenji, Chuuya, by Yamada Kenji, Shichousha (2006)
Hagiwara Sakutaro, by Iijima Koichi, Misuzu Shobo (2004)
Umibe no Aporia, by Yasui Kouji, Yuu Shorin (2009)
Shigaku Josetsu, by Yoshimoto Takaaki, Shichousha (2006)
Shi no Gaia o Motomete, by Nomura Kiwao, Shichousha (2009)
Showa Shishi, by Ohka Makoto, Shinomori Bunko (2005)

Nihon no Autosaidaa, by Kawakami Tetsutaro, Chuokoron Shinsha (1978)

Watashi no Shi to Shinjitsu, by Kawakami Tetsutaro, Kodansha Bungei Bunko (2007)

Shiteki Modaniti no Butai, by Suga Hidemi (2008)

Sengou 60-Nen Shi to Hihyou Soutenbou, Gendaishi Techo Tokushu (2005)

Shijintachi no Seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburo to Ezura Paundo, by Niikura Toshikazu, Misuzu Shobo (2003)

Yoshimoto Takaaki Daihyou Shisen, edited by Takahashi Gen’ichirou, Seo Ikuo, and Miura Masashi, Shichousha (2004)

Katoh Ikuya-Ron, by Nihira Masaru, Chuussekisha (2004)

Modanizumu to Sengo Josei-Shi no Tenkai, by Mizuta Noriko, Shichousha (2012)

Katoh Shuichi Sengo wo Kataru, by Katoh Shuichi, Kamogawa Shuppan (2009)

Nihon Bunka ni Okeru Jikan to Kuukan, by Katoh Shuichi, Iwanami Shoten (2007)
東京大空襲：昭和２０年３月１０日の記録、早乙女勝元著、岩波新書（１９７１）(Tokyo Daikuushuu: Showa Nijuunen Sangatsu Touka no Kiroku, Saotome Katsumoto, Iwanami Shoten)
東京空襲下の生活記録、早乙女勝元著、東京新聞（２０１３） (Tokyo Kuushuu Shita no Seikatsu Kiroku, Saotome Katsumoto, Tokyo Shimbun)
都市空間のなかの文学、前田愛、ちくま学芸文庫（１９９２）(Toshi Kuukan no Naka no Bungaku, Maeda Ai, Chikuma Bungeibunko)
幻景の街：文学の都市を歩く、前田愛、岩波書店（２００６） (Gen’ei no Machi: Bungaku no Toshi wo Aruku, Maeda Ai, Iwanami Shoten)
カストリ時代：レンズで見た昭和２０年代・東京、林忠彦、朝日文庫（１９８７） (Kasutori Jidai: Renzu de Mita Showa Nijuu Nendai, Tokyo, Hayashi Katsumoto, Asahi Bunko)
羊の歌：わが回想、加藤周一著、岩波新書（１９６８） (Hitsuji no Uta: Waga Kaisou, Katoh Shuuichi, Iwanami Shinsho)
翻訳と日本の近代：丸山真男・加藤周一、岩波新書（１９９８） (Honyaku to Nihon no Kindai: Maruyama Masao, Katoh Shuuichi, Iwanami Shinsho)
萩原朔太郎、著者：野村喜和男、中央公論新社（2011）
(Hagiwara Sakutarō, by Kiwao Nomura, Chuo Koronshinsha (2011)
日本の翻訳論：アンソロジーと解題、柳父章編
翻訳語成立事情、柳父章
明治大正翻訳ワンダーランド、鴻巣友季子