Tōson’s Selected Poems

A coconut drifting from an unknown island, a bush warbler remembering winter, a traveler beside the Chikuma River: these poems give longing a landscape and a voice.

Selected by Shimazaki Tōson himself in 1927 from four early collections, the volume brings together intimate love lyrics, elegies, songs of work, and dramatic poems spoken by sisters and forest spirits.

Two authorial prefaces reflect on youth and poetic freedom. The poems draw upon Japanese legends, Chinese verse, Greek mythology, and biblical imagery as they follow the years Tōson spent in Sendai, Tokyo, Kiso-Fukushima, and Komoro.