This Overflowing Light

Born in central Tokyo in 1920, Ishigaki Rin was one of the most daring and gifted poets of Japan's postwar cultural renaissance. She knew Japan before the war, during it, and afterwards, saw it move from hubris to disastrous defeat - which included the destruction of her family home during one of the worst firebombings of Tokyo in 1945 - to restoration into the community of nations. Her poetry is witness to this history as seen from her own specific viewpoint, that of a single woman working in a bank as the only support for her six-member family, at first engaged in labor union activities, but later moving to a politically more independent position. Her sharpness of vision and down-to-earth understanding of everyday urban life, and of the politics of family and the workplace, helped to create her reputation as a writer of 'life poetry' and as a poet of resistance, but this combines with a matter-of-fact, unsentimental, and often humorous intimacy with the ordinary creatures and things of the world, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, to shed an almost other-worldly light over some of the poems, even though they speak in tones and about subjects refreshingly earthy and earthly.

Janine Beichman's skilled and deeply sympathetic translations capture Ishigaki's breadth and depths in English, from the early postwar political poems and cries for freedom from family ties all the way to the late poems in which she contemplates her own death. 'How else, ' she asked, 'could you write poetry except from your own life?'

Ishigaki Rin (1920-2004), one of Japan's leading modern poets, was born in Tokyo and lived there most of her life. A serious writer from her mid-teens, she went to work at a major bank at the age of 14 in order to finance her writing activities. After the destruction of her family home in one of the the Tokyo firebombings of 1945, she continued to work at the bank and became the sole support of her six-person family), while writing prolifically. She published four volumes of poetry between 1959 and 1984, and her poems on war, work, women, and the quest for individual liberation, made her nationally famous. She remains one of Japan's most popular poets.

Janine Beichman is Professor Emerita of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo. She has published widely as a biographer of Japanese poets, most notably of Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko. In addition to Ishigaki Rin, she has translated other significant Japanese poets, including Ōoka Makoto, whose selected poems in English, Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems 1972-1989, appeared from Kurodahan Press in 2018; she also collaborated with Ōoka on wide-ranging anthologies of Japanese poetry in English translation. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and America PEN, and is a winner of the 2019 - 2020 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.