Hiroaki Sato

Prolific, award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry Hiroaki Sato recorded his thoughts on American society in mainly two columns across 30-plus years, collected here for the first time. This anthology of over 60 of Sato's commentaries reflects the writer's wide-ranging erudition and his unsentimental views of both his native Japan and his adopted American homeland. Broadly, he looks...

Who doesn’t love haiku? It is not only America’s most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognisable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere—Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra...