Shūzō Takiguchi’s experimental poetry collection, A Kiss for the Absolute, has finally been made available to Anglophone readers through the efforts of translators Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka. Central to 20th-century Japanese art, his work in orthodox surrealism offered new outlets for post-war avant-garde artists. His roots in mythology and French surrealism bridge various subconscious landscapes, from Dalí and Cleopatra to a disorienting Mont Blanc, in English verses that only appear all the more dense when placed beside its original Japanese.

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A daredevil in rhetoric, he introduces himself to the reader with a surreal image of fish colliding at an intersection.

The emotional heart of the book is an antic reworking of stories he grew up with, his ambitions shining through in lines like ‘famished immortal birds/mistake a tin can of words / for a tiny morsel of meat’. None of it feels particularly inevitable, but the image of the quandary of the bird that loses all sense of analysis in hunger resonates strikingly as the line itself unfurls horizontally across the page like an inescapable banner. The best stories here are mostly vignettes told without beginning or ending, transforming whimsical insights into linchpins. Takuguchi acknowledges ‘my compassion was all in verse’ even as his work of documenting life’s quotidian feelings doubles in prose and verse.

By weaving these images into the fabric of his temporally subtle narrative, he reminds through lines like ‘I go mad / I sleep soundly’ that ultimately he aims to dramatise a very mortal anxiety surrounding societal change. A simple line in an otherwise colourful and hyperbolic poem detailing birds and stars as symbols for the downfall of one’s expectations, his language overflows with an intense fascination towards the natural phenomena as an explanation. His various cultural myths are pasted together like scrapbook art, offering mini-odes to truths and experiences hovering just a little out of reach of the reader. Obliquely, this pushes his work in a quasi-modernist tradition with its aestheticisation of the fragmentary and abstraction.

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In its multiplicity, Takiguchi and his vaguely metaphysical humour truly stand out

At his best he is a creator out of sheer-willed obsession, yoking the disparates of old and new skilfully. Though his language veers into the idiomatically oddball in lines like ‘wait, take holy bonbons and adorn her swollen breasts, as if with a string of lights’, he pulls it off due to the mischievous intent showing through. At his not-quite-great, the characters he depicts are thinly sketched archetypes he moulds description, metaphor and imagery around, as in the case of ‘that architect with a cigar-coloured throat who is scheming’ and ‘panthers all out of lovely light’. This disquiets the reader incomprehensibly and distantly, inviting uncertainty around a freewheeling array of plotlines.

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This collection as a whole is bittersweet, personal, and unforgettable in its intimacy.

It is also deliberately monstrous and multiple, messy with the parameters of plot and structure. This is demonstrated most clearly at the quip characterising ‘an immense bird on an invisible bed / the wind’s viscera seem beautiful’; the sense of mutability of a creature of flight and the invisibly moving air blurs away at definitions of beauty. Bang and Tanaka do a wonderful job invoking Takiguchi’s carefully built universe of filtered emotion, his mythic musings and evocative allusions, and inviting us to join a dialogue across language, tradition and time.