Cat Town

"Sakutaro Hagiwara is the ultimate modern Japanese poet. He first perfected the use of the colloquial language as a medium for modern poetic expression. Using that language, he reveals a sensibility that can be tough, neurotic, ironic, touching, and profound, sometimes all in the same poem. Always rhythmic and occasionally obscure, poem after poem can represent a scintillating verbal and spiritual adventure, particularly in the lucid and elegant translations created by Hiroaki Sato." --J. Thomas Rimer

"To translate writing that is strange in the original into writing that is strange in translation, but equally compelling and not alien--that takes a master. With the great Sakutarō Hagiwara, so dear to the Japanese that he is mostly referred to by his first name, Sakutarō, the master translator is Hiroaki Sato. Hagiwara is not just the most influential poet of his generation, the one who shattered conventional forms, the one who argued that reason can take us only so far. His body of radically expressive work, continuously addressed by literary magazines since his transformative book, Howling at the Moon, inspires the most innovative Japanese poets writing today. Hagiwara is the big cheese all right, and Sato has the gifts necessary to render his incomparably sharp taste." --Forrest Gander