There is a persistent hum of activity among small-press publications in Japan, much of it concerned with poetry and a good deal of it translation.
IWANA, by Kurahara Shinjiro, translated by William I. Elliott & Nishihara Katsumasa. Dowaya, 2010, 131 pp., ¥2,100 (hardcover)
The bilingual or English versions that quite regularly appear, beautifully bound and printed if sometimes badly proofread, represent a huge and often overlooked desire to communicate the poetic culture of Japan to the outside world. Sometimes, too, in all this eagerly produced work, there appears a little gem. "Iwana" is one such volume.
According to the translators' afterword, Kurahara Shinjiro (1899-1965) was born in Kumamoto Prefecture, and went to study in Tokyo, where he discovered and was jolted by the poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942).
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