Cat Town: Selected Poems

by Sakutarō Hagiwara, Hiroaki Sato (Editor)

Sakutarō Hagiwara remains a singular figure in modern Japanese poetry. His experimentation with traditional forms led to his becoming the most significant pioneer of free-style verse in Japan. Hagiwara’s first book of poetry, Howling at the Moon, astonished readers and was an immediate success—two poems were deleted on order of the Ministry of the Interior for “disturbing social customs.” Hagiwara blends everyday colloquialisms with literary language to remarkable and unsettling effect. Through meditations on mundane images of nature like dogs, bamboo, grass, turtles, eggs, seedlings, frogs, and clams, his poetry palpably conveyed the “modern malaise.” Hagiwara expanded on “an invalid’s” perception of the world in his second book of poems, The Blue Cat. Both of his major published books are included here in full, along with a substantial selection of poems and prose poems from his other collections and a complete translation of Cat Town, a prose-poem roman. These works wholly transformed the poetic landscape in Japan for all future generations. Award-winning translator Hiroaki Sato, called by Gary Snyder “the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English,” has also written an insightful introduction to this edition.
 

Genres: Poetry, Japan, Japanese Literature, Magical Realism, Classics, Literature, Asia

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2014

About the author

Hagiwara Sakutarō (萩原朔太郎) was a Japanese writer of free-style verse, active in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the “father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan”. He published many volumes of essays, literary and cultural criticism, and aphorisms over his long career. His unique style of verse expressed his doubts about existence, and his fears, ennui, and anger through the use of dark images and unambiguous wording.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction, by Hiroaki Sato
A Note on This Edition

Howling at the Moon (1917)

Preface

Bamboo and Its Pathos
--Sickly Face at the Bottom of the Ground
--Grass-stalk
--Bamboo
--Bamboo
--Chrysanthemum Gone Rancid
--Turtle
--Flute
--Winter
--Hanged in Heaven
--Eggs

Dish of Skylarks
--Hands of Sentimentality
--Mountain Living
--Seedlings
--A Case of Murder
--Tray Landscape
--Dish of Skylarks
--Seeds on a Palm
--Heavenscape
--Anxiety

Sad Moonlit Night
--A Sad Distant View
--Sad Moonlit Night
--Death
--Dangerous Walk
--Alcoholic's Death
--Bone-Dry Crime
--A Frog's Death

Rotten Clam
--The Reason the Person Inside Looks Like a Deformed Invalid
--Chair
--Spring Night
--The World of Bacteria
--Swimmer
--Daybreak
--Cats
--Clam
--In a Corner of a Wheat Field
--Sunny Spring
--Rotten Clam
--The Essence of Spring
--Along with a Gift

Lonely Lust
--Love-Pity
--The One Who's in Love with Love
--Prince of May
--White Moon
--Portrait
--Lonely Personality

Unknown Dog
--Unknown Dog
--Looking at the Top of a Blue Tree
--Frog
--Climbing a Mountain
--Seaside Inn
--Solitude
--White Public Benches
--Fear of the Countryside

Two Long Poems
--Skylark Nest
--Flute

Blue Cat (1923)

Preface

Illusory Bed
--Twilight Room
--Longing for a Bed
--Surveying the Offing
--To Be Held in Strong Arms
--Longing I Walk in a Crowd
--The Hand Is a Cake
--Blue Cat
--Moonlit Night
--The Feeling of Spring
--Sleeping in a Field
--A Fly's Song
--So Terrifyingly Melancholy

Melancholy Cherry
--Melancholy Flower-Viewing
--Secrets of the Garden of a Vacant House Seen in a Dream
--Black Harmonium
--The Riverside of Melancholy
--The World of Fantasy the Buddha Saw
--Rooster

The Lonely Blue Cat
--Miserable Streetlamp
--A Fearful Mountain
--Song Without Title
--Sensuous Cemetery
--Crumbling Flesh
--Raven-Feathered Lady
--Green Flute
--Song of a Hermit Crab
--Sad Prisoners
--Pussy Willow
--A Melancholy Landscape
--Field Mouse
--Dead Person in May
--Metempsychosis and Transmigration
--A Lonely Life-History

Appetite of Quiet Refinement
--Calendar of Laziness
--Appetite of Quiet Refinement
--In the Horse Carriage
--Blue Sky
--The Most Primitive Sentiment
--Weather and Thought
--Let Us Go to a Village Where There's the Sound of a Flute

Will and Darkness
--Pale Horse
--Is Thought a Design?
--Odious Scenery
--Warbling Birds
--Bad Season
--Heredity
--A Face
--White Rooster
--Hiding Behind Nature

Sensuous Soul
--Sensuous Soul
--Flowery Sentiment
--One-Sided Love
--Dream
--Spring Evening
--◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉
--The Army

Other Poems and Prose Poems (1913-1939)

--Night Train
--Cherry Blossoms
--On a Trip
--An Impression of Early Summer
--Moonlit Night
--Harmful Animals
--Dreaming of a Butterfly
--That Nape Is a Fish
--The Gray Road
--Commerce
--Farmer
--A Matroos Song
--Firing a Cannon
--Yoshiwara
--Waves and Darkness
--Driving a Panting Horse
--From an Auroral Region
--The Riverbank of Desolation
--Discarding Memory
--Pathos! Don't You Ever Return?
--The Octopus That Does Not Die
--Mirror
--In Nature
--House
--Father
--The Feeling of Material
--The Terror of Suicide
--A Madman Watching a Clock
--The Hirose River

--Cat Town (1935)

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to read this collection of poetry--well, really it is two collections of poetry and a sort of poetic novella or longer prose poem. And who cares about a poet is who was the son of wealthy physician, pampered, self-absorbed, horribly spoiled, who became a (by his mother's account) a selfish drunk, feeling sorry for himself? Well, Hagiwara was the first symbolist poet in Japan, who was writing largely a century ago, and as it turns out is one of the most influential poets in twentieth century verse. He wrote free verse, in largely colloquial language, though he also liked tanka, wrote prose poems, collections of aphorisms. And it's almost uniformly melancholy.

But the collective impact of this collection is lovely, lyrical, filled with longing (for love, for happiness) and close attention to detail. He is unique in that he fears or is put off by nature and feels most comfortable in the city. Maybe my favorite piece was the prose Cat Town, surreal, magical. He says, in an introduction to Howling at the Moon (1917), "The inherent purpose of poetry is to contemplate the essence of the feeling itself trembling inside of the human heart. Poetry is what grasps the nerves of feelings. It is a live, working psychology." He says,"I want to nail my gloomy shadow into the moonlit earth. Lest the shadow flowing me forever." Poetry he says later is a "sad consolation for me. . . it is the sound of a blue heron calling in the marshes of life, the sound of a wind darkly whispering over the reeds on a moonlit night," and "Someone like me is no more than a blue cat's nightmare." This is Baudelaire and Rimbaud territory he is strolling through. A discovery for me in this 2014 new collection of his work!

[Eadweard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel sorrow over the dust-white light of this room
I feel lonely about the powerless tremor of this life. Lover you’re sitting there,
by the pillow on my bed
Lover you’re sitting there.
Your slender neck
your hair you’ve grown long
listen my gentle lover
please stroke my miserable face
I feel sorrow
I watch
there a painful emotion
the melancholy of a landscape that sickens and expands
ah from a corner of the lachrymose room  
tired
wandering over the floor the ghost of a fly
Lover
maiden sitting by the pillow in my room
what do you see there
what do you see about me
are you looking at my emaciated body  
the shadow that thought left in the past
lover
as if smelling a sour chrysanthemum
I smell your mysterious passion  
your pale faith
come
let us unite ourselves body to body
----




the heart is lonesome
the heart, early in its youthful boyhood, cast a shadow on my life
the gradually enlarging shadow of solitude
the shadow of terrifying melancholy grows.
Now I sit in my room alone
and gaze at the shadow of my fading soul
----



In a field where bats swarmed
I watched a pillar of crumbling flesh
it trembled lonely in the evening darkness
smelled raw like dead-man’s-grass that flutters at a shadow
and was as ugly as rotting meat with throngs of maggots crawling on it.
Ah in this landscape that trails shadows
my soul clutches an itchy terror
like a ship that has come from a harbor  
it has come crossing the islands with wraiths in the distance
it’s neither wind nor rain
all of it a dark fear clinging to the sufferings of love and lust
and at the dull flute-sound that a snake charmer makes my crumbling shadow wept lonely

[Anima · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waves of shattered dark glass dissembling structures, shapes, visible dimensions - Sadness ? Beauty? Peace?- maybe all of them in the converged reflections gathered for hearts able to see beyond...
spring night
‘As I look around at the distant beach,
along the wet beach path,
a row of invalids, bodies below their waists missing, is walking,
walking unsteadily.
Ah, over the hair of those human beings as well,
passes the spring night haze, all over, deeply,
rolling, rolling in,
this white row of waves is ripples.’

[Bookish Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A human being living in a house is a sad landscape to the earth."

I'd never heard of Hagiwara before I stumbled on this gorgeous book with its smooth, minimal orange-yellow cover and tantalisingly curved spine. I'm a poetry person, I am drawn to the way a good poem compresses experience / desire / memory / sound / feeling etc. into a few, sharp and melodious lines. Good poetry helps me breathe.

I loved this collection, it was so unlike anything I'd read before. Hagiwara is a self confessed romantic emotionalist, although I believe he is a solitary romantic who indulges in nature and yet feels the weight of its shortcomings - he is a romantic that has lost his sight of romance. The collection keeps repeating the same patterns: blue cats, rotting crysanthemums, the cemetary, the nape of a plump woman's neck, dishes of skylarks, the lust of a silent lover and the night-dew. I love these repetitions, they are often surreal and provide the poetry with its music.

"Where does this feeling of love come from
take off your melancholy costume and fly away at
once on the night-dew wind"

Though he is melancholic, often nihilistic, he appreciates the beauty and strangeness of every day life - noting the subtle movements of a lover's hand, the reflection of foliage in a pool on the ground, the taste of good food. This poetry may fool you, you may read it and think it simple (indeed, I've always found nature poetry twee and simplistic) - it is aching with depth. These peculiar, stunning poems howl at the moon and don't shy away from grotesque subjects, they do not mask their own devout sexuality or their fear of terrible things happening. Indeed, many of these poems appear to reveal our sense of the crazed paranoid hiding beneath a mild demeanour.

I gave this collection 5 stars because it is so unusual, so wonderfully written, so interesting that is shocked and shifted something within me. I especially love the final passage on a town full of cats acting as human beings that he believed was as real as the day. A dreamer and a great illusionist - creating magic from everyday things - Hagiwara is one to read.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skylark Nest (1886–1942)

With the saddest heart in the world I walked down the riverbed of my hometown.
On the riverbed, starworts, horsetails and such, parsley, shepherd’s-purse, and even the roots of violets profusely grew.
Behind the low sandmound the Toné River flows. Like a thief, darkly helplessly flows.
I was still, crouched on the riverbed.
Before my eyes is a bush of riverbed-mugwort.
A handful, the bush is. Like an emaciated woman’s hair the mugwort loosely moved in the wind.
I am deep in thought about some unsavory thing. A terrible ominous thought.
And, with an almost deranged sun shining upon my hat, muggy, I’m exhausted, perspiring.
Like a parched man panting, yearning for water, I shot out my hand.
As if grasping my own soul I grasped something.
Grasped something like bone-dry hair.
Hidden in the riverbed-mugwort a skylark nest.
Piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, in the sky a skylark calls.
I gazed at the pitiful skylark nest.
The nest swelled on my large palm, gently as a softball.
The sensation that fawns, seeks love from those innocently raised, was apparently felt in my heart.
I became freakishly lonely and felt pain.
Like a parent bird I craned my neck again and peered into the nest.
Inside the nest, as in a beam of light at evening, it was vague and dark.
An incomparably DELICATE pathos, like touching the cilia of a feeble plant, brushed the peripheries of my nerves like a shadow and was gone.
Illuminated by the scant beam of light in the nest, rat-colored skylark eggs, about four of them, gleamed solitary.
I stretched my fingers and picked up one of them.
The lukewarm breathing of a living thing tickled the belly of my thumb.
A confounding sensation like looking at a dying dog, boiled up at the bottom of my heart.
Of the lukewarm unpleasantness of the sensation of a man at such a moment a disastrous crime is born. A heart afraid of crime is the forerunner of a heart that gives birth to a crime.
I looked at the egg held between my fingers gently against the sunlight.
Something faintly red and vague was visible like a clot of blood.
Something like cold juice was felt.
At that moment I felt a raw-smelling liquid oozily flowing between my fingers.
The egg was torn.
A barbarian’s fingers had savagely crushed a delicate thing.
On the rat-colored thin eggshell the character K was inscribed, red, and lightly.
An exquisite bird-bud, bird’s parent.
A nest made with a lovely beak, a small animal’s job for which it did its best, a manifestation of a lovable instinct.
Various good-natured, demure thoughts welled up violently in the bottom of my heart.
I tore an egg.
Killed love and joy, did a job full of sorrow and curse.
Did a dark unpleasant deed.
I made a gloomy face and looked at the ground.
On the ground pebbles glittered, glass fragments, and grass roots, everywhere.
Piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, in the sky the skylark calls.
There’s a raw-smelling odor of spring.
I was again deep in thought about that unsavory thing.
That a human being dislikes the odor of a human being’s skin.
That a human being feels that a human being’s sexual organs are hideous.
That at times a human being looks like a horse.
That a human being betrays a human being’s love.
That a human being dislikes a human being.
Ah, misanthrope-invalid.
Reading a certain famous Russian’s novel, a very heavy novel, I came upon the story of a misanthrope-invalid.
It’s an excellent novel, but a terrifying novel.
Not to be able to love with one’s body those whom one’s heart loves, what a hideous thought. What a hideous illness.
Not once since I was born have I kissed girls.
Nor have I ever simply put my hand around the shoulders of the birds I love and talked like an elder brother.
Ah, birds whom I love, I love, I love.
I love human beings. Nevertheless I fear human beings.
Sometimes I escape from everyone and become solitary. And my heart loving everyone becomes tearful.
I always like, while walking on a deserted lonely beach, to think of the crowds in the distant city.
About the lamp-lighting time in the distant city, I like to walk alone in the park grounds of my hometown.
Ah, yesterday as usual, I kept dreaming sad dreams.
I smelled the odor of rotten human blood.
I feel pain.
I become lonely.
Why can’t one love with one’s body those whom one loves with one’s heart?
I repent.
Repent.
Whenever I feel pain, I repent.
Sit on the riverbed sand of the Toné River, and repent.
Piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, piyo, in the sky the skylarks call.
Riverbed-mugwort roots profusely spread.
The Toné River is flowing stealthily like a thief.
Here and there, I see farmers’ melancholy faces.
The faces are dark, looking only at the ground.
On the ground, spring, like smallpox, is ponderously erupting.
With what pity I picked up the skylark egg.




*

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four stars for the poetry, and five stars for the prose and title piece "Cat Town." In fact the last last four or five pages is worth the price for the whole book. It is basically a poetic series of observations of city life, and getting lost in the urban world. Then it ends up as being a city of cats - a nice visual. In fact Sakutaro Hagiwara has a strong visual sense in his work. For me, it is like little films - and I do love the fact that he hates nature life and loves the world of the city. So in other words he is another drunk poet, who is troubled by his world - yet loves the sensual side of life. My type of guy.

Most of the poems were written in the 19 teens, so you don't get a taste of politics but like Dazai, more of the life of a man who wasted his years by .. . writing poetry and drinking.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy makes a virtue of morosity. He has a passion for sorrow that is coupled with vivid details. His dejection is palpable but tempered by an extremely trenchant gift for describing his feelings via images. "I want to nail my own gloomy shadow into the moonlit earth. Lest the shadow follow me forever."
On the centennial anniversary of his first book, "Howling at the Moon," this overview seems mandatory for serious poets and students of poetry. Sometimes regarded as the first Symbolist Japanese poet, Hagiwara remains fresh and relevant owing to his starling imagery and innovative efforts to describe his emotions.

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clams have never once caused a single and singular man so much distress. I’d say calm down but the letters betray an ominous similarity to the object of so much disdain in this, and only this, instant. Velvet-lined meat grinder, I have a clam too, clam down clamp down. Sex had a sour melancholic odour if done for too lengthy a period. Florid in the Sun’s rotting vermillion pathos for graveyards and giving a sensuous name to anything funerary - limbs of a woman or several or your mother’s multiplicitous. Bone-dry and lonely skylarks are splintering in the fear inducing countryside of youth, while dogs howl at the moon and die just to deepen my solitude. Rotting cherries. Rotting blossoms. Rotting cherry blossoms.
tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu tefu
If you know me at all you know I am frightened of moths in the night always aimed at my face like a beacon. Coquettishly white chrysanthemums are always rotting in this spring heat of the cruelest month taken too literally. Here dreaming of moist grasses full of sentiment over and over again till an unrecognisable architecture within the dream emerges made for lonely lovers and spectral cats. Dropping the Sakutarō Hagiwara line any time someone questions as to why I never finished my degree, “… unable to finish college, prone to illness, and tormented by youthful lust.”

[Catalina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe this is awesome in Japanese or something, but in English? No, just no!!!

[a]

really great collection, esp prefaces and prose lol

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

To Sakutaro Hagiwara

What a sad moonlit night!
In cat town
the lonely blue cat
became dripping wet with pathos.

You were saying rain!
Ah, listen, and look at this
mysterious melancholy.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bleh. Don't like this guy at all. I guess repeating yourself over and over is 'modern.'

[anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

bleh. sad man™

[Amy Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about Cat Town from reading Jeff Vandermeer's foreword to Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. I don't know enough about Japanese modernist poetry (or poetry in general) to feel sure-footed about these poems, but I can say that they are striking, and sometimes strikingly morbid in ways that feel influential? I particularly enjoyed the one about how the essence of spring is a proliferation of worm eggs, and after he spends the whole poem describing how every beautiful thing is actually covered in tiny disgusting worm eggs, in the last line he sort of shrugs, calling it "so-called spring," "more or less." But mostly there is no shrugging, and the best poems are more frequently oblique, dream-like visions. (The poems of the first collection in particular seem literally to have been penned during or following a mental breakdown of some kind, and they read like an exhausted, barely coherent dream-diary.)

The long prose poem for which the book is named reminded me of one of Du Maurier's stories, but radically stripped down. It's a long build-up to a single uncanny image that is just undeniably effective, if not quite horrifying. I loved it and could see it influencing a psychedelic strain of horror.

[Amy Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. I've occasionally had similar moments to those described by the protagonist, where for a moment I have absolutely no idea where I am, and then, a moment later, things come into focus, and I'm exactly where I should be. I also love the underpinning Japanese cultural background, calling such moments being "bewitched by a fox". Now I want to dig up more by this author.

[Abi · Rating 3 out of 5]

We read "The Town of Cats" as well as an essay (not in this book) on Sakutarō and the City (i.e. his changing perceptions of it throughout his work over the years) by Hugh Clarke, which was very interesting. I thought the poem was fine. Interesting, but perhaps a bit too unsettling for me.

[Jack Malik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a challenge-read for me. Many misses. Yet, there are bits and pieces I adored. Bangers include Bone-Dry Crime (p. 26), Calendar of Laziness (p. 104), The Riverbank of Desolation (p. 152), and A Madman Watching a Clock (p. 160).

[Taylor Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating, strange, bewildering, melancholic. An interesting collection of expressive, rhythmic poetry deeply muddled in the intoxicating despair of modernity.

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the dark at the bottom of the ground,
a lonely invalid's face emerging.

[Kat Macdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got it as a heartfelt Christmas present and loved it

[justin]

anything written by extremely abrasive person is worth indulging, but i'm a little divided with the works. the poems plucked out of his later writings is very good

[Juniperus · Rating 1 out of 5]

hot topic deviantart emo bullshit except the titular story which was better but could have used more cats imo

[Winterwade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rightfully considered one of the essential voices in Japanese poetry, Hagiwara's work is vivid and often uncomfortably raw; the vivacity of his terminology and structure is often at odds with the lugubriousness of the subject matter, creating in this juxtaposition a wonderful sense of novelty and pleasure for the reader. Encompassing both the mundane- the growth of bamboo, howling dogs- and the spiritual, Hagiwara's poetry is a joy to read.

This volume, neatly pocket-sized, contains at 224 pages a wide selection of Hagiwara's work, covering most aspects of his poetic style(s).

The translator has done an exemplary job producing smoothly-flowing but very accurate versions from the Japanese- something that one can by no means take for granted particularly with modern translations, wherein adherence to rhyming structure can sacrifice exactitude, and indeed vice versa.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Haruki Murakami attempted a Ghibli. His signature melancholy-tinged magical realism paired with the delightful quirkiness of the studio’s themes. Indeed, the poems in this collection are rhythmic and vibrant even if Hagiwara is narrating a serial murder or wallowing in his sorrows. Mostly his subjects are flora and fauna, pastoral landscapes, and the urbanizing Tokyo. The title is also derived from the novella that closes this selection which I think is about the famed Cat Island in Japan. Love!

[James Quincy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Hagiwara Sakutarou's best known works translated to English.

Howling at the Moon remains my favourite anthology after reading this collection with its haunting expressionist imagery.

In addition, I also really enjoyed Cat Town, the short story not to be confused with the title of this collection.

[Milla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, though in the end the poems tend to repeat themselves. This is quite different from the other Japanse poetry I know, less formal and more modern. It ends with a dream-like short story, Cat Town, which is a short but cool read.

[Amelia Kester · Rating 5 out of 5]

please, please, please, please, please, please, please (x infinity) read this book

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful.