Bathhouse and Other Tanka

[Ishii’s] writerly gaze is distracted, attuned to the tactile, to subtly pungent smells, to moisture dripping from a sumo wrestler’s chest. … The poems are peripatetic delights. Poetry for him is an intercontinental playground, and Ishii maps his messy personal desires across it.–Patrick Preziosi “Commonweal Magazine”
During the Heian period, tanka were used as a form of communication between lovers. Ishii’s tanka retain some of that ancient veneer, agony obfuscated by apathy, the body of the beloved, just out of damp reach.–Nina Li Coomes “The Believer”
Hiroaki Sato’s brilliant translation maintains Ishii’s innovations, including the poet’s nontraditional use of punctuation. This collection is an excellent introduction to the beauty of Ishii’s verse.–Isle McElroy “Vulture”

Tatsuhiko Ishii, poet and essayist, was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1952. For much of his life, he worked as a journalist for one of Japan’s largest newspapers and book publishers, The Asahi Shimbun, covering cultural affairs locally and abroad, while also working for their editorial, advertising, and production departments. At age twenty he won the New Poet’s Prize in Japan, and in 1997 he received an Asian Cultural Council grant to spend several months in the United States to research gay culture. Ishii has published a dozen collections of tanka since 1982, one edition of which appeared in France in 2012. Hiroaki Sato—”the master translator” (Forrest Gander)—is a writer and translator of Japanese poetry and prose, classical and modern, who has won a PEN translation prize and two Japanese-U.S. Friendship Commission translation prizes.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.