Can there be another country in the world where poetry is almost as regular a feature in newspapers as the weather forecast? Many -- perhaps even most -- newspapers in Japan carry columns of poetry on their pages. It is made easier by the fact that Japanese poems are traditionally very short, and that many can be written in a single line.
"The peculiar genius of Japanese poetry," the poet and critic Makoto Ooka has observed, "lies in brevity." Ooka himself is one of the most distinguished selectors of poetry for a newspaper. His column, Oriori no Uta, has been carried daily on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun with few breaks for more than 20 years. Despite a recent interruption while the selector was abroad, it was resumed again on May 1.
A selection of the contents of that column is published by Kodansha International in their Bilingual Books series, under the title of the column, and translated into English by Janine Beichman. The text appears throughout with the Japanese and English on facing pages, and there is a short, and usually illuminating, commentary on each poem.