Trees and Their Leaves

"Let the look of a tree's leaves be in my writing," wrote the poet Wakayama Bokusui in the ten tanka that open this book. Written in his first years at Numazu, below Mount Fuji, these essays, prose poems and verses follow a restless walker and a devoted drinker through ordinary days: the joy of a new pair of straw sandals, the hunt for a house big enough for a family of nine, an island of the Inland Sea where he copied out his most troubled poems, an unpromising climb of Mount Ashitaka to stand face to face with Fuji, notes to his poetry society on sake, food and the proper way to cheer, and the story of his fourteen books of tanka.

Between them come quieter pieces on summer noons, rain, cicadas, ants and fishing, the calls of cuckoos in the mountains, and a long hymn to the season of young leaves. Prose gives way to poetry and back again, in a voice at once humorous, tender and lonely.

Each piece is translated complete and unabridged directly from the Japanese, with endnotes and source information.