The expression of the poet Ryuichi Tamura, as he looks out at the reader from the cover of this book, reminded me just a little of photographs of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, though without the pince-nez and the cravat. There is a similar haughtiness and distance to Tamura, as he casts a cold eye upon the world. It is reflected in his poetry and undoubtedly derives from his experience.
Tamura was born in 1923 and, "like many of his contemporaries, was something of a political and cultural dissenter in the years leading up to World War II," the introduction tells us. Though he was obliged to serve in the Japanese forces once the war had begun, he had also been greatly impressed by a translation of T.S. Eliot's great Modernist poem "The Waste Land" when it appeared in 1940. After the war, Tamura joined with other poets to form a group called Arechi (The Wasteland).
The wasteland embodied in this name referred of course to the devastation of Japan with which the poets were confronted. Tamura was one of the most clearheaded among those now groping for an appropriate response. The tone that he came to adopt was exceedingly detached: "My poems are simple things / like reading letters from a far country / there's no need for tears" he writes in "Far Country." Rather than dramatizing the experience of war, he represents it coolly, obliquely.