The World-Weary Poet and Woman and Other Essays

Love is the secret key to human life. So begins "The World-Weary Poet and Woman," the essay that made Kitamura Tōkoku the most daring critic of his generation. In the two years before his death at twenty-five, he asked what love, poetry and the poet could mean in a Japan rushing into the modern world.

These twelve essays and reviews of 1892 and 1893 take on the leading novelists of the day, Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda Rohan and Saitō Ryokuu; the love plays of Chikamatsu and the pleasure-quarter fiction of the Genroku age; Princess Fuse of Bakin's Hakkenden; Raskolnikov and Hamlet; Mount Fuji as the home of the Muse; the voice of all things that only the poet hears; and the future of the Japanese stage. One essay, written as a review of a poem about a love-suicide, turns into a defense of love-suicide itself.

This collection contains The World-Weary Poet and Woman; Kyaramakura and Shin Hazue-shū; On Reading Abura Jigoku; On Reading Utanenbutsu; On the Purity of Maidens: An Observation of Princess Fuse in the Toyama Cave; The Crime of Murder in Crime and Punishment; Thoughts on the Muse of Mount Fuji; On "Katsuragawa" (An Elegy), and Thence on Love-Suicide; Preface to an Elegy; The Voice of All Things and the Poet; Contemplations of an Evening; and What Is the Future of Dramatic Poetry? Each is translated complete and unabridged from Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes and source information.