Sakutarō Hagiwara remains a singular figure in modern Japanese poetry. His experimentation with traditional forms led to his becoming the most significant pioneer of free-style verse in Japan. Hagiwara's first book of poetry, "Howling at the Moon," astonished readers and was an immediate success--two poems were deleted on order of the Ministry of the Interior for "disturbing social customs." Hagiwara blends everyday colloquialisms with literary language to remarkable and unsettling effect. Through meditations on mundane images of nature like dogs, bamboo, grass, turtles, eggs, seedlings, frogs, and clams, his poetry palpably conveyed the "modern malaise." Hagiwara expanded on "an invalid's" perception of the world in his second book of poems, "The Blue Cat." Both of his major published books are included here in full, along with a substantial selection of poems and prose poems from his other col- lections and a complete translation of "Cat Town," a prose-poem "roman." These works wholly transformed the poetic landscape in Japan for all future generations. Award- winning translator Hiroaki Sato, called by Gary Snyder "the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English," has also written an insightful introduction to this edition.

This work comprises the first complete English translation of Shi no Genri, one of the most important attempts at a theory of literature written in the modern period. Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942) was not only an original poet but also a perceptive and lonely literary critic. This book, in his own words, "is not a collection of fragmentary writings, but a thoroughly systematic and organized discourse" on poetry and other related arts. He sees the future of Japanese poetry as being tied to the characteristics of Japanese language, and even to the destiny of Japan.

This work comprises the first complete English translation of Shi no Genri, one of the most important attempts at a theory of literature written in the modern period. Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942) was not only an original poet but also a perceptive and lonely literary critic. This book, in his own words, "is not a collection of fragmentary writings, but a thoroughly systematic and organized discourse" on poetry and other related arts. He sees the future of Japanese poetry as being tied to the characteristics of Japanese language, and even to the destiny of Japan.

Hagiwara writes in the preface: "The author's past life was that of a disconsolate iceberg that drifts and flows in the extreme regions of the northern seas. Looking at the phantom-like auroras from various spots of the iceberg, he yearned, suffered, rejoiced, sorrowed, at times getting angry with himself, as he wandered on vainly with the tides.... Above his heart were always the disconsolate clouded skies of the extreme regions, the soul-ripping winds of the Iceland howling, screaming. He wrote all that painful life and the diary of a real person in these poems."