Kusudama. The classical meaning is a small perfumed pouch, the scent created through a mixing of herbs and flowers, but Yoshioka’s childhood memories would associate this word with brightly colored papier-mâché balls that were hung in the covered market places of prewar Tokyo, and which were placed in front of newly opened shops to attract customers. These kusudama were once a common sight in Tokyo, especially in Shitamachi, Tokyo’s lower-town neighborhood located along the Sumida River, where Yoshioka grew up. Several meanings converge in this word: the exotic pouch or grab-bag containing all manner of things; the teeming, crowded and very worldly market place; and embedded within kusudama we find kusuri (medicine), which can be taken in the same way as the Native American term – a kind of magic – and tama, which means gem or, with a different written character, spirit or soul. (From the translator’s afterword.)

Minoru Yoshioka (1919-1990), the great late-modernist poet, published nine major collections between 1955 and 1984. After his second collection, Monks, won an important prize for younger poets in 1959, he was embraced by the avant-garde, and in the following years would influence a broad range of younger poets, including Kazuko Shiraishi and Takashi Hiraide. In the 1970s he began experimenting with appropriation and collage as a means of stepping outside his now well-established poetic language by ‘borrowing the voices of others.’ The culmination of these experiments is his magnum opus, Kusudama (1984), a multi-voiced collage of inner voices and quotations, here brilliantly translated by Eric Selland.

In the 1980s the young Eric Selland was living in Tokyo and spending his Saturday afternoons at the Top Café in Shibuya, where Yoshioka regularly met with younger poets. While working on his translation of Kusudama Selland received much help and encouragement, and many answers to specific questions about the text from the author himself. The result was the remarkable translation of Kusudama published by Leech Books in Vancouver in 1991 – which Yoshioka, sadly, did not live to see.

Now Eric Selland has revisited his translation for this second edition, lightly revising the text on occasions, adjusting the layout so that it more closely follows Yoshioka’s original lineation, and adding some helpful notes. The result brings back into English-language circulation the most important work of one of Japan’s most important late-twentieth-century modernist poets.

24 September 2021, 78 pages,8 x 8 in / 203 x 203 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-37-9

Click here to read an extract from this book.

A marvellous review of Kusudama by Simon Collings has been published online at Litter Magazine. The review captures the flavour of the book – intertextual, collage-like, mythical, erotic, paradoxical, linguistically sharp, down-to-earth – very well. Click here to read the whole review.

Billy Mills has also published a strong, insightful review of Kusudama – with sharply selected quotations from the poem – as part of his ‘Recent Reading November 2021’ on his blog Elliptical Movements. Click here to read the whole review (Kusudama is the last of the four books he discusses, so you’ll need to scroll down a bit).

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