Japan -- The Kobe Hotel by Saito Sanki and translated by Saito Masaya

Saito Sanki. The Kobe Hotel. Saito Masaya, tr. Tokyo. Weatherhill. 1993. xiii + 196 pages. $12.95.

The introductory material provided by the translator helps us fix the haiku poet Saito Sanki, who lived from 1900 to 1962, in his place and time: an outrageous iconoclast, determined to go his own way in a Japan not prepared to permit difference, flouting the niceties of conventional life, in perpetual revolt not, unfortunately, against the fascistic government under which he lived but rather against "normal" middle-class society in a markedly abnormal nation. Although questioned and detained briefly by the authorities and, like other artists of twentieth-century Japan, admired for his disdain of all authority--political, military, or corporate--Saito did little to oppose the horrors visited upon the Asian world by his countrymen in any meaningful public way. He preferred instead to create a life of indulgent licentiousness, which, while perhaps shocking...