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I Saw a Pale Horse and Selected Poems from Diary of a Vagabond. By HAYASHI FUMIKO; translated by Janice Brown. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asian Program, Cornell University, 1997. xi, 151 pp. $22.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).
Hayashi Fumiko (1903-51) was an especially prominent and prolific female writer who, at certain points in her career, as Donald Keene has observed, "was the most popular writer in the country" (Dawn to the West, vol. 1. p. 1142). Hayashi was best known for her ostensibly autobiographical "diaries" and as the indefatigable chronicler of resilient characters, predominantly women, who occupy the underside of Japanese society. However, she began her literary career as a poet, and often included her poetry within later prose. Janice Brown's fine translations of over fifty of Hayashi's early poems from I Saw a Pale Horse (1929) and selections from her Diary of a Vagabond (1928-30) makes a significant contribution in expanding the range of poetic works that can be included in courses on modern Japanese literature in translation.
Brown's slender volume offers a model of clarity, beginning with an informative biographical essay and ending with a sustained analysis of the thirty-four poems that appeared in I Saw a Pale Horse. The wonderful, original 1928 cover of that work-a kind of Rorschach print...