Yone Noguchi and the Little Magazines of Poetry (ES 3-vol. set)

This is the third and the final set of the Edition Synapse series which makes available in facsimile Yone Noguchi’s complete works in English, including all his published poetry, novels, literary essays, and art criticism.

Yonejiro Noguchi (1875–1947), known in the West as Yone Noguchi, was an influential writer of poetry, fiction, and essays (including art and literary criticism) in both English and Japanese. He was the only Japanese author who published original literary works in English, and he gained a strong reputation in Western cultural society before the Second World War. At the age of eighteen, he travelled to America alone and arrived in San Francisco in 1893. Soon after he found work there as a domestic servant. The bohemianism of the literary community in the Bay area attracted him and he made the acquaintance of Joaquin Miller, a renowned American turn-of-the-century poet. Miller then introduced him to Gelett Burgess, the editor of a humorous literary little magazine called The Lark. Burgess immediately noticed Noguchi’s talent for poetry and started to publish his poems in the magazine. When The Lark ceased publication, Noguchi continued to write poems and launched his own magazine, The Twilight, which, unfortunately, lasted for only two issues. Even after his return to Japan as a successful author and his appointment by Keio University as their first professor of English Literature, he appeared to value the format of the ‘little magazine’ as a medium for publishing poems. Together with his fellow poets, he edited another poetry magazine, Iris, which carried the works of English and Japanese poets in both languages.

This Edition Synapse collection—now available outside Japan from Routledge—reprints all the issues of those three magazines. The collection reproduces covers of the magazine in colour, along with many illustrations. The set is a vital source for those studying this remarkable and unique literary figure. It will also be welcomed by those researching the literary contacts between Japan and the West around the turn of the twentieth century.