HOWLING AT THE MOON: Poems and Prose of Hagiwara Sakutaro, translation and introduction by Hiroaki Sato. Kobenhavn & Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2002, 316 pp., $11.95, (paper)

Hagiwara Sakutaro is one of Japan's most important, and most cherished poets. His first volume of poetry, "Howling at the Moon" (Tsuki ni Hoeru), published in 1917, remains one of the most readable and most popular books of poetry in Japan. His second volume, "The Blue Cat" (Aoneko), came out in 1923. The startling innovation that Hagiwara brought to Japanese poetry was the successful use of colloquial language, a contrast to the formal, long standing 5-7-5 syllabic verse that dates back to the earliest period of Japanese literature, and survives today in the still popular tanka and haiku.

Over the years Hagiwara produced four additional volumes of poetry, at times reverting to classical language and themes. His reputation and popularity in the literary world, however, still lean heavily on his first two volumes of poetry. It was not simply the successful break away from the long-established and deeply ingrained traditional forms that marked Hagiwara's poetry; he is also revered for moving accounts of his own emotions, the sadness and joy that he felt about his own life. He used images that are found in all periods of Japanese literature -- bamboo, moon, cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums -- but in his passionate expression, these images of beauty were seen as decaying, musty and ominous. He found loneliness in the dark roots of the bamboo grove; he felt the odor of cherry blossoms to be musty, as if they too were a source of melancholy; withered chrysanthemums became images of decay and sadness.

His poems are sometimes lucid, sometimes mysterious, and at times obscure. Here prolific translator Hiroaki Sato offers the complete text of "Howling at the Moon" and "The Blue Cat," as well as a selection of poems from other books, a few of Hagiwara's prose poems, and a complete translation of "Cat Town," a prose fantasy that reads like an internal monologue on the poet's sense of his own unbalanced emotional life.