A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems. --Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the death poem. Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life.

Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet's death, have been translated into English here, the vast majority of them for the first time. Compiler Yoel Hoffmann explores the attitudes and customs surrounding death in historical and present-day Japan and gives examples of how these have been reflected in the nation's literature in general. The development of writing jisei is then examined--from the longing poems of the early nobility and the more masculine verses of the samurai to the satirical death poems of later centuries.

Zen Buddhist ideas about death are also described as a preface to the collection of Chinese death poems by Zen monks that are also included. Finally, the last section contains three hundred twenty haiku, some of which have never been assembled before, in translated English and romanized Japanese.

The first book of poems by the great Japanese surrealist to be published in English

In 1923, Shuzo Takiguchi's first year at Tokyo's Keio University was cut short by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which nearly destroyed the Japanese capital. When he returned to school two years later, he was hit by a second earthquake--French Surrealism. Takiguchi (1903-1979) began to write surrealist poems, translate surrealist writers, curate exhibitions of surrealist art, write art criticism, and, later, paint, helping introduce Surrealism to Japan. He eventually became a major Japanese artistic and cultural figure whose collected works number fourteen volumes. In A Kiss for the Absolute, Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator Yuki Tanaka present the first collection in English of Takiguchi's ingenious, playful, and erotic poems, complete with an introduction and the original Japanese texts on facing pages. Takiguchi's obvious interest in style is perfectly wed to his daredevil rhetorical antics. His poems read as if they could have been written today, yet they are so original that they couldn't have been written by anyone else. Bang and Tanaka's skillful, colloquial translations offer English readers a long-overdue introduction to this important poet.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN POETRY

Only when a man becomes all naked do you know the shades of his life as an existential being, writes Tatsuhiko Ishii in his sensuous, exhilarating new collection of poetry Bathhouse and Other Tanka. For many decades now, Ishii has turned the classical poetic form of the tanka into its own innovative contemporary tradition. What was originally a five line 5-7-5-7-7-syllable verse form Ishii writes in one line, constructing his poems out of sequential one-line tankas, as if Basho and Lorca bathed together under the moon. In moving elegies to Yukio Mishima and Genji (the Shining Prince), tributes to Ezra Pound and Claude Lorrain, as well as to the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Mount Fuji, Ishii's poetry resonates with a mix of philosophical lyricism, inquisitive exuberance, and homoerotic desire. The ocean plane shines in the sun, he writes in one poem in the aftermath of 9/11. From now on every place will be a battlefield, sure. In one sequence, we glimpse Proust through a photograph by Paul Nadar, in another clipping pubic hair and washing a horse become a rumination about real poetry. Ishii pens songs of momentary love and flames of lust, of mankind's self-destruction and the self mirrored in the seven deadly sins. No other poet today can write about sniffing a young man in Tokyo or Tasmanian oysters like Ishii does with such majesty. Hiroaki Sato, the bestselling author of On Haiku, has been translating Ishii for over thirty years and captures the rhythmic pulse and turn of his Poetry ... harmful, a dream. Even the world, finally, due to poetry, liquefies ...

Arntzen's classic study and select translation of the Japanese medieval Zen poetry Crazy Cloud Anthology (Kyōunshū 狂雲集) by the Buddhist monk Ikkyū 一休 (1394-1481) is a carefully revised edition of the 1986 University of Tokyo Press edition which was issued as part of the Japanese series of the UNESCO collection of representative works.

This Quirin Press Edition offers the following features:

- Fully revised, updated, and expanded by the author. - Contains additional selected poems from Ikkyū's 一休 Kyōunshū 狂雲集 with text in Chinese script, and Japanese kundoku reading in Romanization. - Carefully typeset and proofed for typographical errors and inconsistencies. - Includes a new Preface and Afterword.

Keywords: Zen poetry, Japanese -- Translations into English. Ikkyū 一休, 1394-1481. Buddhist monks -- Japan.

Ikkyū Sōjun 一休宗純 (1394-1481), Zen monk and poet, is an unconventional figure in Japanese literary history. An eccentric personality, he raged at the corruption and hypocrisy of the wealthy Zen monastic system of his day. Defiantly living outside that institution for much of his life, his community included artists, actors, and women entertainers/ brothel girls. Many of his poems have sexual desire at their core, engaging with it as a kōan. Authentic Zen master as well as sensual lyricist, Ikkyū created some of the most original poetry in the entire Zen tradition.

Translations from the Crazy Cloud Anthology, or Kyōunshū 狂雲集, Ikkyū's major collection of poetry in literary Chinese, form the core of this work. Ikkyū's biography and historical context of medieval Japan are outlined in the first part of the introduction. The analysis sections provide a portal for the reader to enter the world of the poems by demonstrating how Ikkyū's poetry produces experiences of Zen most often through the dialectical use of allusion.

Ikkyū's non-conformism in response to a troubled, uncertain time will strike a sympathetic chord in the modern reader. Students of Japanese literature and religion, culture and history will find Ikkyū an engaging figure. And lovers of poetry will be inspired by his candour and free spirit.

Originally published by University of Tokyo Press in 1986 as part of the Japanese series of the UNESCO collection of representative works, the present Quirin Press edition both augments and revises this seminal exploration of Ikkyū's key poetic output.

A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy.

Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem Wild Grass on the Riverbank. Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.

Sanki Saitō (1900-1962), born Keichoku Saitō in Tsuyama, Japan, was a pioneering short story writer and poet whose bold, modern haiku challenged the conventions of his time. As a key figure in the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s, Sanki redefined the boundaries of haiku by breaking with the strict traditionalists who insisted on season words and the direct observation of nature. In their place, Sanki and his peers opened haiku to imagined experience, infusing it with radical new perspectives that would forever transform the form.

Writing under the pen name Sanki, meaning Three Demons, his reputation as a literary maverick grew rapidly. His radical, inventive approach to haiku, however, also made him a target of Japan's militaristic government. In 1940, Sanki was imprisoned as part of the wartime crackdown on dissident artists and writers, and he was officially silenced--banned from writing or publishing his work.

Three Demons brings together Sanki's most evocative haiku, meticulously curated and beautifully translated by Ryan Choi. Drawing from five of Sanki's collections--Flags (1940), Night Peaches (1948), One Hundred Haiku (1948), Today (1952), and Transformations (1962)--this anthology introduces readers to the revolutionary spirit and emotional depth of a poet who helped redefine one of Japan's most treasured literary traditions.

A collection of classical Japanese haiku selected and translated by one of America's premier poet-translators.

Haiku is one of the most popular and widely recognized poetic forms in the world due to its brevity, emotion, and astounding ability to capture the unique experience of a single moment. This collection, beautifully translated by Sam Hamill, compiles over two hundred haiku from classic Japanese literature written by masters of the genre like Bashō, Buson, and Issa. Based on images from nature, these poems express themes of joy, temporality, beauty, wonder, loneliness, and loss, inviting the reader to participate in the authentic experiences of these poets.

Visual Poetry of Japan: 1684-2023 collects a multitude of Japanese poetic, aesthetic and visual expressive forms into an overview of works spanning more than 300 years. From visual translations of Bashō, to Taishō-era textual manipulation of characters, to Yamamoto Kansuke's lexical verse and surreal photography, to John Solt's postcard art, this curated set of haiku, calligrams, collages, concrete poems, and other works, offers extraordinary visions to the eye, mind and heart.

Editor Taylor Mignon's previous books include VOU: Visual Poetry Tokio, 1958-1978 (Isobar Press, 2021) and Bearded Cones & Pleasure Blades: The Collected Poems of Torii Shōzō (highmoonoon, 2013).

Shortlisted for the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair.

The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.

shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt yamagushiku's practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says, I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.

Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet's homeland is an impossible destination.

A prize-winning translation of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry

Hyakunin Isshu is the most famous and popular collection of Japanese poetry, and the first work of Japanese literature ever to be translated into English. Compiled in the fourteenth century, the book is a collection of one hundred waka poems (a precursor of haiku), dating back to the seventh century. It's had a huge influence on Japanese culture ever since it was first published and is considered one of the three most important works of Japanese classical literature along with The Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise.

For more than seven centuries, these poems have resonated with countless readers ... Peter
MacMillan's] excellent new translation of these poems makes clear why they have mattered
so much for so long ... revealing] the vivid emotions that have kept the heart of the
collection beating all this time. --TIME

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

As a poet, potter, painter, martial artist, and Buddhist nun, Otagaki Rengetsu transformed a life of tragedy into one of artistic and spiritual transcendence, ultimately becoming one of Japan's greatest female poets.

This collection features a survey of her finest poetry accompanied by a sampling of her pottery and paintings. As never before, John Stevens captures the radiant and powerful simplicity of Rengetsu's life and art in this biography and new translation of her work.

A sweeping anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love, war, trees and mountains, everyday life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accessible translation.

Winner of the 1982 American Book Award for Translation

The first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū is considered, along with The Tale of Genji, to be one the most important works in classical Japanese literature. In Japanese the title means Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves, the anthology of anthologies from the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan during the Asuka and Nara periods--the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of the laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern Dialogue of the Destitute, from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the poems of the frontier guardsmen. As its name suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves represents a culling of what was considered the best from an epoch of cultural and literary innovation perhaps unparalleled in Japanese history.

This edition incorporates books one through five of the twenty that make up the original Man'yōshū and includes an introduction by the translator, Ian Hideo Levy, that provides a general historical and cultural background for this monumental work.

Chronicle of Drifting enacts a restless quest for belonging, interweaving dreamlike imagery and Japanese lyricism

Yuki Tanaka's stunning debut, Chronicle of Drifting, explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Tanaka's restless imagination roams among places and personae-a village mermaid, a geisha in the Midwest, a flâneur in Tokyo--searching for a permanent self and a sense of community. In the feverish world of these poems, inspired by the Japanese tradition of tanka and haiku, as well as by timeless surrealism, one meets a light-lashed horse, an imaginary chauffeur, an out-of-business psychic, a girl who skewers a fish with a flower stalk. In poems ranging from lyric to prose, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge--like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels empty, a blue outline.

Taylor Mignon has lived in Tokyo for many years, and during that time he has built up an important collection of copies of the avant-garde magazine VOU, edited by the legendary Kitasono Katue. Although the magazine, originally founded in 1935, had long included visual images (the earliest one reproduced here dates from 1954), in the decade or so before Kitasono's death in 1978, the magazine became notable for the amount and quality of visual poetry it printed. VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1954-1978 is Taylor's selection of work by nine leading contributors, along with his profiles of the poets and Eric Selland's introduction placing the work in its historical, cultural and political context.

Quintessential classical Japanese haiku--selected and translated by one of America's premier poet-translators--now available in a pocket edition.

In this collection of haiku, translator Sam Hamill has compiled the best from the tradition, spanning the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, with particular focus on the three great masters: Bashō, Buson, and Issa. Based on images from nature, the poems address the themes of joy, temporality, beauty, wonder, loneliness, and loss.

Haiku may be the most popular and widely recognizable poetic form in the world. In just three lines a great haiku presents a crystalline moment of image, emotion, and awareness. Elements of compassion, silence, and a sense of temporality often combine to reveal a quality of mystery. Just as often, haiku may bring a startling insight into the ordinary, or a flash of humor. Collected here are over two hundred of the best haiku of Japanese literature--written by the great masters of the genre.

The featured poets are Bashō, Buson, Issa, Moritake, Sōin, Sanpū, Kikaku, Ransetsu, Kyorai, Raizan, Kakei, Onitsura, Taigi, Chiyo, Sogetsuni, Sogi, Fuhaku, Teiga, Kikusha-ni, Tayo-jo, Sōchō, Shōha, and Shiki.

This is a pocket-size reissue of The Sound of Water (Shambhala, 1995).

Discover this classic translation of one of Japan's most famous poetry anthologies.

This gem of Japanese poetry has preserved its charm for over a century. Dating from the 13th century, this collection of Hyaku-nin-isshiu (literally one hundred poems by one hundred poets) contains one hundred evocative and intensely human poems. The selections are written as Japanese tanka (featuring a five-line thirty-one syllable format in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern) and were composed between the seventh and 13th centuries before being compiled by Sadaiye Fujiwara in 1235. These short poems consist almost entirely of love poems and picture poems intended to bring some well-known scene to mind: nature, the cycle of the seasons, the impermanence of life, and the vicissitudes of love. There are obvious Buddhist and Shinto influences throughout.

To make the sounds more familiar to English readers, the translator has adopted a five-line verse of 8-6-8-6-6 meter, with the second, fourth, and fifth lines rhyming. His accompanying notes put the poems into a cultural and historical context. Each poem is illustrated with an 18-century Japanese woodcut by an anonymous illustrator. Despite the centuries that have passed since these poems were written, modern readers are certain to connect with their themes and their beauty.

Modernist poet Sakutarō Hagiwara's first published book, Howling at the Moon, shattered conventional verse forms and transformed the poetic landscape of Japan. Two of its poems were removed on order of the Ministry of the Interior for disturbing social customs. Along with the entirety of Howling, this volume includes all of Blue Cat, Hagiwara's second major collection, together with Cat Town, a prose-poem novella, and a substantial selection of verse from the rest of his books, giving readers the full breadth and depth of this pioneering poet's extraordinary work.

This English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.

Izumi Shikibu (978- ), author, femme fatale, and prominent member of the Heian court, was first and foremost a poet--the greatest of her time, perhaps the greatest her country has ever known. Incorporated in numerous imperial anthologies, Izumi Shikibu's work has been admired through the ages.

In this richly poetic diary Izumi Shikibu shares with us each and every turn in her tempestuous relationship with Prince Atsumichi, a relationship that began with the casual exchange of poems, deepened in the course of numerous setbacks, and culminated in her joining the prince at the imperial court.

The Izumi Shikibu nikki is not only a literary giant's account of her most intimate thoughts; it is an unforgettable glimpse into an utterly enchanting word--a world 'dowered with a rare and exquisite taste, ' a world filled with color and fragrance, but above all a word in which 'everywhere, everywhere, there is poetry.'

Born in 1903, Shimpei Kusano has long been among Japan's best-loved poets. Asking Myself/ Answering Myself introduces him to a wide American audience, with selections from over half a century of his work, in translation by Cid Corman. There is scarcely a child (or an adult) in Japan unfamiliar with Kusano's frogs. Their trills, transcribed and fancifully translated by the poet into frog soliloquies, dirges (Lululu's Funeral to be accompanied by Chopin's Funeral March), and celebrations are, says Corman, figures of nature--in its largest sense--and of absolute innocence ... . They mock our pretentions but share them too--gently. Witty, lyrical, vigorous, Kusano is a poet of praise--for the savor of snake-liver sake or crunchy raw potatoes, the hissing night sea, a changing sky: O half a sun now./ mightiest member of the universe./blind my two upstanding eyes with a whack of light. Kusano has traveled widely, and Cantonese as well as the English he studied during his years in China still find their way into his poems. In 1935, he and friends founded Rekitei (Historical Process), a monthly magazine out of which grew a poetry group with over a thousand members--now the largest in Japan. Head and heart of the Rekitei group, Shimpei Kusano is still writing, giving readings, and promoting other poets as well as haunting Gaku (School), his famous little bar in downtown Tokyo.

Traveling back and forth in time, from before the Japanese Internment to the present day, it skips a generation examines Alison Lubar's relationship with their grandfather who, along with his mother and sister, was imprisoned at Tule Lake Relocation Center.

The poems consider intergenerational trauma & healing, and what survives, while also reflecting upon the intersections of multiracial & queer identity in today's world.