Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems

Makoto Ōoka (1931-2017) was the premier poet and critic of his generation in Japan and known abroad as an emissary of Japanese poetry and culture. By the time Ōoka was twenty-five, his first books-one of poems and one of criticism-had established him as a spokesman for contemporary poetry. He often visited Europe, Asia, and the United States, introducing Japanese poetry traditional and modern to foreign audiences through readings and lectures at the Collège de France, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton Universities, and literary festivals. A major area of activity was linked verse, based on the traditional Japanese poetic form of renga. In the 1970s, Ōoka began experiments with this collaborative form in Japan and his pioneering endeavors soon brought him into contact with poets around the world. Ōoka's works have also been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Korean, Macedonian, and Spanish.

Janine Beichman is Professor Emerita of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo. She has published widely as a biographer of Japanese poets, most notably of Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko. In addition to Ishigaki Rin, she has translated other significant Japanese poets, including Ōoka Makoto, whose selected poems in English, Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems 1972-1989, appeared from Kurodahan Press in 2018; she also collaborated with Ōoka on wide-ranging anthologies of Japanese poetry in English translation. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and America PEN, and is a winner of the 2019 - 2020 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.