As one of those pernicious corrupters of taste whom poet-translator Kenneth Rexroth once damned for traducing Japanese haiku into a foreign tongue, I wish to thank several partners in crime. At Harvard, teachers and colleagues: Howard Hibbett, for sparking my curiosity about the interplay between witty linked verse and humour; Haruko Iwasaki, for taking me under her wing in reading frivolous prose; the late Nagatomi Masatoshi, for fomenting my interest in Buddhism and the Absurd; Edwin Cranston, for sharing the secrets of his alchemistical transformation of Japanese poetry into the gold standard of English renderings; and Jay Rubin, for mischievously unleashing Penguin on me.
At Penguin: Mariateresa Boffo, for backing this project from the get-go; Isabelle De Cat, for the stylish handling of the cover art; Matt Bacon, Bianca Bexton, Dinah Drazin, Katie Jarvis, Ruth Pietroni and Louise Willder, for their various contributions; and particularly Kate Parker, for the brilliant copyediting, Stephen Ryan, for the meticulous proofreading, Anna Hervé and Richard Duguid, for the editorial managing, and Jess Harrison, for aiding and abetting me at every turn, even when work proceeded waddlingly. In Madison (where seemingly lingers in the ether the shade of Robert Spiess of the Modern Haiku Press), at the University of Wisconsin, friends, colleagues and staff in Asian Languages and Cultures as well as Memorial Library. And others who shall remain unnamed – save Marjeta and Robert Jeraj, Robin Mittenthal, Kayo Tada, Asakawa Seiichirō, Glynne Walley, John Solt, robin d. gill, David McCann, Iwata Hideyuki, Robert Campbell, Richard Gilbert and above all, for his acumen, generosity and camaraderie, Lee Gurga. Any shortcomings or infelicities herein are my own.
Several institutions have touched me with their big-heartedness: the Japan Foundation, for a peripatetic summer of archival exploration across Japan; Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library, for unfettered access to the Special Collections; Kakimori Bunko in Itami, especially Okada Urara and Director Imai Miki; the National Institute of Japanese Literature; Kyūshū University Central Library; the Museum of Haiku Literature in Shinjuku; Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and UW-Madison’s Graduate School, for supplemental travel support and research assistantships; and UW-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies and its director, Gene Phillips, for subsidizing my guest speaker series featuring scholar-translator David Barnhill, poet-blogger Melissa Allen and then-editor of Frogpond, Francine Banwarth.
I am likewise grateful to those who, having invited me to speak on this project, were gracious hosts: Ed Cranston, at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute; Esperanza Ramirez-Christiansen, at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s Center for Japanese Studies; Jill Casid at UW-Madison’s Center for Visual Cultures; Sara Geyer at UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities; Peter Nosco, at a faculty development workshop run by the University of Hawai‘i’s East–West Center; Jeffrey Angles, at Western Michigan University’s Soga Japan Center; Gayle Bull, at Foundry Books in Mineral Point; Richard Torrance, at Ohio State University’s Institute for Japanese Studies; Jason Abbott, at the University of Louisville’s Center for Democracy; Benedetta Lomi, at the University of Virginia; Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao, at National Taiwan University in Taipei; Wenchi Lin, at National Central University in Chungli; Earl Jackson Jr, at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu; Catherine Turley, at the University of Colorado’s Asian Studies Graduate Conference; Sumie Jones and Russell Valentino, at Indiana University’s Institute for Advanced Study; and Will Fleming, at Yale’s Center for East Asian Studies.
Students in my undergraduate courses and graduate seminars at Harvard and Wisconsin have my appreciation for their insights and patience with work in progress, particularly Alicia Foley, Genesie Miller and Michael Toole, as do my undergraduate research scholar Stephen Zellmer, my teaching fellow Ethan Bushelle and my graduate project assistant Giovanni Bottero. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to Hasegawa Makoto and Terumi, Wakana Tomoko, Judy Kern, Ruth Earl and Gene Kern. This book is dedicated to my children, Mika Alana and Elias Zen.