Masaya Saito was born in Akita prefecture, a snowy region in the north of Japan’s main island, and grew up on a farm there. A graduate of both Tokyo University of the Arts and the University of Tokyo, he has traveled extensively in Russia, Europe, and the U.S. and has worked in Japan as a freelance writer, translator, and English teacher.
His Japanese haiku have appeared in various journals and newspapers, including Asahi Shinbun, Haidan, Haiku, and Haiku Bungei; in 2007 he won the Asahi Haiku Shinjin Award for his sequence of fifty haiku, Gasshō (‘The Hands Together in Prayer’). His English haiku have been published in Ash (TELS Press, 1988), in the journals Modern Haiku and Wingspan, and in the anthologies Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac (Kodansha International, 1996) and Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). His translations of Japanese haiku have featured in Prism International and Wingspan, and in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia UP, 2005), and his versions of poems by Nishiwaki Junzaburo have appeared in Translation.
Masaya Saito’s translations of Sanki Saitō’s autobiographical essays and haiku were published as The Kobe Hotel by Weatherhill in 1993); his Isobar translation of Sanki’s Selected Haiku 1933–1962 more than trebles the number of haiku translated, while his translations of Sanki’s wartime and postwar memoirs, Kobe and Kobe Sequel, has been republished by Isobar Press in late 2023 under the title The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs.
Masaya Saito lives in Tokyo but often visits his home in Akita.
Haiku:
Translations:
Sanki Saito: Selected Haiku 1933–1962
Sanki Saitō: The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs
