Mutsuo Takahashi is one of Japan’s leading living poets. He has published more than three dozen anthologies of poetry and is a prolific essayist, literary historian, and critic.Hiroaki Sato is a Japanese poet and prolific translator who writes frequently for the Japan Times. Burton Watson is an award-winning translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry and literature.

"Mr. Takahashi was exempted from the human principle that every young boy grows up to be a young man. . . . He did not have to go down to the bottom of the sea, down to the bottom of the female genitalia, which many a young man mistakes for a philosophy, mistakes for profundity." -Yukio Mishima