Kikuo Takano (born 1927) first wrote poetry in the bleak postwar years and is said to have burned his initial output. Aligning himself in 1953 with Ayukawa Nobuo's Arechi (Wasteland) poetry group, his subsequent work, existential and darkly spiritual, reflects the era's pervasive despair and peers beyond.
Takano's spirituality emerges in connecting with nature. In "The Sea," rivers flow into the sea, linking earth to sky, and he regards the sea as mother (the kanji for mother is part of that for sea):
Even I, when unable to go farther,