Autumn of Contemplation and Other Writings

A lonely garden catches autumn light. Frogs fill the night with answering voices. A poet and his wife sit beside a charcoal fire, waiting for the sea’s red sunrise. In these three works, Kitahara Hakushū brings grief, desire, poverty, and domestic tenderness into close contact with the natural world.

Autumn of Contemplation moves between poetic prose and long, rhythmically unfolding poems. Its preface asks what poetry should be, while its landscapes search for enduring truth in things that seem to vanish. Further Words on Snow and Fireworks recalls the spirited artistic gatherings of Tokyo, the growth of new poetic forms, and the painful events that drove the poet away from the capital.

Mica turns life at Misaki into a sequence of brief, vivid songs. Crows, dogs, vegetables, fishing boats, and camellias blaze with a light that is at once bodily and religious. One of modern Japan’s major poets, Hakushū writes with a distinctive sensitivity to sound, color, and the fragile connection between the self and the world. This new English translation includes concise notes and the author’s closing reflections. AI-assisted translation.