Bathhouse and Other Tanka

by Ishii Tatsuhiko, Hiroaki Sato (Translator)

The first US publication by the legendary tanka master of love, homoerotic desire, and destruction.  “Only when a man becomes all naked do you know the shades of his life as an existential being,” writes Tatsuhiko Ishii in his sensuous, exhilarating new collection of poetry Bathhouse and Other Tanka . For many decades now, Ishii has turned the classical poetic form of the tanka into its own innovative contemporary tradition. What was originally a five line 5-7-5-7-7-syllable verse form Ishii writes in one line, constructing his poems out of sequential one-line tankas, as if Basho and Lorca bathed together under the moon. In moving elegies to Yukio Mishima and Genji (the Shining Prince), tributes to Ezra Pound and Claude Lorrain, as well as to the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Mount Fuji, Ishii’s poetry resonates with a mix of philosophical lyricism, inquisitive exuberance, and homoerotic desire. “The ocean plane shines in the sun,” he writes in one poem in the aftermath of 9/11. “From now on every place will be a battlefield, sure.” In one sequence, we glimpse Proust through a photograph by Paul Nadar, in another clipping pubic hair and washing a horse become a rumination about real poetry. Ishii pens songs of momentary love and flames of lust, of mankind’s self-destruction and the self mirrored in the seven deadly sins. No other poet today can write about sniffing a young man in Tokyo or Tasmanian oysters like Ishii does with such majesty. Hiroaki Sato, the bestselling author of On Haiku, has been translating Ishii for over thirty years and captures the rhythmic pulse and turn of his “Poetry … harmful, a dream. Even the world, finally, due to poetry, liquefies …”

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Japanese Literature, Asian Literature, Japan

160 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2023

Reviews

[Terrance Lively · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book with some interesting poetry that at times gets repetitive and long. Overall it is interesting and stirring while also introducing me to a new (to me) form of poetry. It is an easy read but felt drudging at times.

[Gregory Duke]

Read a third of the poems. There is much to find striking, but the themes and lines became redundant and the hypermelodrama, while sometimes moving me, begins to ring more and more off-putting until I grew mildly annoyed. The homoeroticism and extreme intertextuality really really work for me, but long sequences of tankas are a tough sell for me as someone who generally prefers short poems, and I am not completely sold.

[George Neville-Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Ishii’s tanka each line is a poem and it’s nice to read an unabashedly gay Japanese poet who does not hid his desires like past, white washed , authors. I liked these enough that I might give the original Japanese a try.

[Neus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Born to read Bashō's hokku and Ishii's taka, forced to read Western millennial literature

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for the titular poem

[Alexander]

If I had known “tanka” was a form of poetry, I never would’ve gone to the library to pick this up