Owing to some remarkable resemblances in tone and imagery Hagiwara Sakutarō has had the misfortune of being dubbed "the Japanese Baudelaire". In much the same way Chikamatsu Monzaemon became "Japan's Shakespeare" and Osaka (of all places) "the Venice of Japan". Such pairings compel invidious comparisons and are invariably unfair to the supposed Japanese counterparts. Chikamatsu and Hagiwara are major writers, but the juxtapositions with Shakespeare and Baudelaire serve only to point up their shortcomings.

Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942), who has also been described as "the father of modern Japanese poetry", is undoubtedly the most important of all the Western-style poets since the Meiji Restoration. His work is hypersensitive, introspective, and often deeply affecting. The title-poem, one of the most successful of Graeme Wilson's ingenious versions, suggests his writing at its best:

Face at the bottom of the world:
A sick, a lonely face,
One invalided out
Of every inner place;
Yet, slowly there uncurled.
Green in the gloom the grasses sprout.

And, as rat's nest stirs,
Its million tangled hairs
One queasy quivering,
Thinnest of winterers,
The bamboo shoot prepares
Its green grope to the spring.

Sad in the ailing earth,
Tongue-tender with dispair,
Green moves through grief's grimace;
And, sick and lonely, there
In the gloom of the under world,
At the bottom of the world, a face.

With recurrent images of disease, pain, and decay Hagiwara evokes a nightmare world populated with slithering earthworms, disgusting sea animals, and putrefying corpses: "Around the area of the dead white stomach / Something unimaginable flows."

The poems are virtually devoid of live people, except for the overwhelming person of the writer himself who spares no self-pity in describing the constant assaults on his sensibility. The verse is often powerful, but it is marred by a certain monotony of tone, a plangent hypersensitivity, and a total absence of intellectual backing. In traditional Japanese verse of the tanka and haiku variety these would be minor blemishes at the worst; in a Western form of poetry they became serious defects.

On the title-page the poems are described as having been "translated"; but in his introduction Mr Wilson defines them, more accurately, as "transmutations", and explains that they

are translations only in the sense that Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat is a translation of the work of Omar Khayyam. I have not regarded the literal words in Hagiwara's texts as of prime or even secondary importance. Instead, I have sought first to convey the feel and intent of his work, the meaning of the feelings behind the vocabulary.…

The trouble with this approach is that we can never tell whether it is Mr Wilson's poetry we are reading or Hagiwara's. It is only a scholarpoet with the overwhelming linguistic command of an Arthur Waley who can permit himself to take such liberties with the text; and at times even Waley went too far.

The use of rhyme, which is of course entirely absent from the Japanese, sometimes forces Mr Wilson into strange convolutions and archaisms ("quietude innate", for instance, to rhyme with "man's animal estate"); but far more damaging in a book that purports to represent the work of a major Japanese poet is Mr Wilson's proclivity to add images and ideas that have not the remotest equivalent in the original text. Two examples will suffice. "Green Flute" ("Midoriiro no Fue") ends in Japanese with the following simple sentence: "Isso konna kanashii bokei no naka de, watakushi wa shinde shimaitai no desu. Ojosan ". (Literally, "Girl, I should prefer to die in such sad evening twilight".) As transmuted by Mr Wilson this becomes:

Girl, I could easily
In such a place concerning
Grief and the end of day,
Grief and the night returning,
To death's menagerie
Stagger away.

The final stanzas of "In the Bar at Night" are:

Even when drunk
And the glass ringing
Like a tolled bell,
The ghost so summoned
From that rum world
Will tell you nothing,
Proves infidel.

Even when drunk …
o doomed Madonna,
Suffer us stare
At the dark green wall
In the bar at night;
For the hole is there.

"Infidel", "doomed Madonna"—strange words indeed for even the most Westernized of Japanese poets! But before the unwary reader jumps to any conclusions about alien influences on Hagiwara's thinking, it should be pointed out that "doomed Madonna" corresponds in the original text to the standard Japanese word for "ghost" (yōkai), while "proves infidel" corresponds to nothing at all ("rum", incidentally is Mr Wilson's rendering of the ordinary Japanese word iyō, "strange").

It is all very well to say that such alterations convey "the feel and intent of [Hagiwara's] work"; but unless Mr Wilson enjoys some form of direct communication with the spirit of the departed poet, by what possible licence can he insert a phrase like "O doomed Madonna", with all its complex implications for the Western reader when nothing even remotely similar exists in the Japanese text? Mr Wilson's outstanding poetic gifts could be used far better in creating his own verse than in inventing ideas and images for other writers.