Paulownia Blossoms

Paulownia blossoms, bitter coffee, colored glass, and a lonely flute fill this intimate collection of Japanese lyric poetry. Kitahara Hakushū watches the smallest changes of color, scent, and sound, finding in flowers and street scenes both sensual delight and painful isolation.

More than four hundred tanka follow the seasons through gardens, cafés, theaters, hospital rooms, and prison. Six prose sketches explore the poet’s restless senses and the difficult relation between art and life. Love becomes entangled with shame and confinement, while familiar plants and animals acquire unsettling emotional force.

Hakushū, who died in 1942, was a major voice in modern Japanese poetry. This new English translation preserves the collection’s complete sequence, its prose interludes, and the physical line structure of its verse, with brief notes on names, allusions, and uncertain readings. It offers a sustained encounter with a poet whose exquisitely attentive vision can also be troubling and severe. AI-assisted translation, prepared and edited by Valentin Sarić.