Mutsuo Takahashi – författare

From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Originally published in 1970, this translation is the first available in English.In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, Twelve Views from the Distance presents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from his youth, Mutsuo Takahashi captures the full range of his internal life as a boy, shifting between his experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. With great candor, he also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown.Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many of his contemporaries have written about, Takahashi experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. In addition to his personal remembrances, the book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan. With profuse local color and detail, he re-creates the lost world that was the setting for his beginnings as a gay man and poet.

“In the name of / Man, member, / and the holy fluid, / Amen,” begins Mutsuo Takahashi’s epic one-thousand-line erotic fantasy poem, “Ode,” the centerpiece of his groundbreaking collection of queer poetry, Poems of a Penisist. Takahashi’s work, reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s, is a celebration of the male body, treating homosexual desire as something sacred. Stunningly beautiful and passionate, Poems of a Penisist is one of the most important compilations of homoerotic poetry written in the twentieth century.

Sleeping Sinning Falling is a generous volume of selected and new poems, written over the last twenty-five years by one of the major voices in twentieth century Japanese poetry. The translations are by Hiroaki Sato, who has published over twelve books in English translation. One of them, From the Country of Eight Islands, an anthology of Japanese poetry which he translated and edited with Burton Watson, won the American P.E.N. translation prize for 1982. "Mellifluous voice alone does not, of course, make a poet compelling. I soon found that Takahashi has, among other things, a high sense of drama - the sense that a poem is not something intended for the poet's satisfaction of his inner self alone but for other's partaking as well." -Hiroaki Sato, translator Mutsuo Takahashi, born in 1937, is a Japanese poet, essayist, and writer. He is most well-known for writing about male homoeroticism. His work has won him several literary awards such as Rekitei Prize, Yomiuri Literary Prize, Takami Jun Prize, Modern Poetry Hanatsubaki Prize, and the Kunsho award. Hiroaki Sato, born in 1942, is a Japanese poet and translator who frequently wrote for The Japan Times.