Cat Town by Sakutaro Hagiwara, Translated by Hiroaki Sato

 Sakutaro Hagiwara was, translator Hiroaki Sato tells us, an "'inspirational' poet," not in the sense that he would inspire his readers (though he may have), but in that he depended upon inspiration to compose his poems, at least in his two most important collections, Howling at the Moon and Blue Cat, both of which are included in this volume. 

"Toward my own poems," Hagiwara writes, "at the time of creating them I am nearly blind and myself don't even know what kind of thing I am singing of. . . . I am merely catching a kind of rhythm that flows at the bottom of my heart and unconsciously pursuing the rhythm, therefore at the time of creation my own self is merely something like a half-conscious automatic machine."

His work, however, is never simply unadulterated automatic writing: he did revise. He manages, though, to tap into something that cannot be paraphrased into anything less than it is (a message, an argument, a description . . . ). His rhythm and the images to which it gives rise are always worthy of our attention.

Hagiwara was an alcoholic, sporadically suicidal, and suffered from bouts of mental illness. In the plainest of everyday language he gives us notes from his underground; the tone is relentlessly morose but so genuine that we cannot look away.

This anthology concludes with Cat Town, which Hagiwara describes as "A Roman in the Style of a Prose Poem," but which readers of Borges and Calvino will recognize as a short story. Hagiwara starts from an experience we have all had: we lose our way and become disoriented, and in our disorientation, our remove from the familiar, we see a new world. He spins this familiar experience into something fantastic.

Unfortunately, Sato's translations are not printed en face with the originals, so it is difficult to judge their fidelity.  That they read well in Sato's English, though, is indisputable. We must be grateful to him from bringing these poems into English.