The poet Akira Tatehata has a wide-ranging imagination as rich, and yet as controlled, as the brush of the most delicate artist. His poems are sometimes playful, sometimes philosophical, but always a surprise. He is indeed a major poet who has moved Japan's modern poetry into new territory by choosing prose as a medium. As Jerome Rothenberg has written, Tatehata has "the ability to move clusters of language and perception into larger assemblages," a narrative that escapes from narrative to create a world that startles us so we can see.
Collected here for the first time in English translation by the prolific essayist and translator Hiroaki Sato, "Runners in The Margins" contains over 70 poems from Tatehata's three volumes of poetry. The first of which, "Yohaku no Runner," published by Shichosha in 1991, received the very prestigious Rekitei New Poet Prize, and is included complete in Sato's translation. The poems are extremely avant-garde, but they are prose-poems.
Tatehata is also internationally known as an art critic and curator. He has had a major role in bringing modern art from other countries to Japan, as well as introducing avant-garde Japanese art to the world. He was the adviser and text writer for the Kusama Yayoi Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998.