Tarō Naka (1922-2014) was born Shōjirō Fukuda in Hakata, on the island of Kyūshū in western Japan. He entered Tokyo Imperial University in 1941 to study Japanese Literature but was called up to serve in the Japanese navy in October 1943. His first collection, Etudes, was published in 1950; his first mature collection, Music (1965), received the Yomiuri and Murō Saisei prizes. He published four further poetry collections: Hakata (1975), No-Self Mountain Temple Diary and Other Poems (1985), Excerpts from Travellers of the Dark (1992), and Requiems (1995). In 2003, his nō play The First Emperor was published; it was performed at the National Noh Theatre in March 2014. He also published numerous critical works, including Hagiwara Sakutarō and Others (1975) and The Words of Poetry (1983), and prose essays such as The Music of Melancholy (1977) and The Garden of Time (1992).
