Hirato Renkichi - Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance

Hirato Renkichi, Spiral Staircase: Collected Writings, Trans. by Sho Sugita, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016.


Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance. Contributing to the earliest productions of Japanese avant-garde poetry, his aggressive experimentation with speed, spatialization, and performability would later influence what became a lively community of Dadaist and Surrealist writers in pre-war Japan.Spiral Staircase is the first definitive volume of Renkichi’s works to appear in English.

Translator Sho Sugita’s ingenious handling of the high-impact, anxiously mutating poetry of Hirato Renkichi—central to the blink-and-it’s-over Japanese Futurist literary movement, dead at 29—brings into sharp focus a momentous, of-the-moment figure little known in the English-speaking world. Hirato’s spring-loaded motto:
Directness is my mores.
My        action.
My        art. (from “Poem of Directness”) —David Grubbs

It's hard to fathom how a poet with such balls could go under the radar for nearly one hundred years. Hirato Renkichi's devotion to poetry puts him in the company of Rimbaud and Mayakovsky, and his work also provides a fascinating view into the flow of experimental forms from west to east in the early twentieth century. Sho Sugita's labor in contextualizing and translating this collection is a real gift to English-language readers.—Lisa Jarnot

Meaningful Union

Look,
The speedy movement of froth,
The smooth falling
     Shifts of the center,
Denture of curves,
(ririri……ri……rin)
Simultaneous metallic roar,
     Echoes.
Meaningful union!
Look,
At this organic union,
This mutuality of comfortable determination!

Hirato Renkichi: Nothing Day / Not Guilty, an Unfinished Novel
Translated by Sho Sugita

Born Kawahata Shoichi on December 9th 1893 in Osaka, Hirato Renkichi attended Sophia University in Tokyo for three years before dropping out and attending Gyosei Gakko to study Italian. He started writing poetry in 1912, first publishing in Banso under the guidance of Kawaji Ryuko. Although he worked at Hochi Shimbun News and Chuo Geijutsu Art Publishing, he suffered from a pulmonary disease, often failing to make ends meet for his family. He passed away on July 20, 1922 in Tokyo, at the age of 29.