Inscribed Red

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As celebrated as Akutagawa Ryunosuke is as a short story writer, his haiku-the first of which was composed in 1906, the same year Akutagawa began to read contemporary Japanese literature-is relatively unknown outside of Japan, and rarely translated. Akutagawa's teikei (fixed-form) haiku, like his fiction, mostly eschews modernism in its embrace of classical forms, and derives as much from literary tradition as from lived experience. If not for their precision, learning, and psychological depth, Akutagawa's haiku share more in common with the haikai of the 17th and 18th century than with 20th century haiku. Frequently they portray a modern consciousness in relationship with an idealized nature that exists more in the Japanese psyche than the landscape that surrounds him.

Included in this volume are over 500 of Akutagawa's haiku in a new translation