Cat Town

Sakutaro 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 collections 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.

Sakutaro Hagiwara (1886–1942) was a Japanese poet and writer of free verse. He published several poetry anthologies and co-founded the literary magazine Kanjo, which focused on modern Japanese poetry’s departure from traditional rules and structural constraints. He taught at Meji University from 1934 until his death.

Hiroaki Sato is a prolific translator of Japanese literature and a columnist for The Japan Times since 2000. He has won several prizes for his translations, including the PEN Translation Prize. He lives in New York City.