Mutsuo Takahashi is one of Japan’s leading living poets. He has published more than three dozen anthologies of poetry and is a prolific essayist, literary historian, and critic.Jeffrey Angles is associate professor of modern Japanese literature and translation studies at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minnesota, 2011).

• ContentsNote about Japanese NamesChart of Family MembersTranslator’s IntroductionTwelve Views from the DistanceThe Snow of MemoryGrandma’s HouseTales of Long AgoSpirited AwayOn Mother’s BackHeaven and HellThe Various Types of SeaPrinces and PaupersThe Shore of SexualitySkies of BloodImagining FatherCommunities outside the WorldAfterword to the English TranslationGlossaryEnglish Translations of Mutsuo Takahashi’s WritingTranslator’s Acknowledgments

"It is magnificent that in this book, Twelve Views from the Distance, the poet Mutsuo Takahashi has managed to achieve firm prose that, while unmistakably the work of a poet, shines with a black luster much like a set of drawers crafted by a master of old. This book is a magnificent collection of sensations and of memories, much like the toys we might find in a dark closet. The part toward the end in which the theme of his ‘search for a father’ crystallizes in a copy of an erotic book radiates a certain tragic beauty." -Yukio Mishima