A Bridge of Words: Views Across America and Japan

Hiroaki Sato is best known as an expert and prolific translator of Japanese poetry into English. For 44 years, however, his day job was in the research department of a large Japanese trade organization in New York, writing reports on various aspects of American society. These observations led Sato to provide regular columns, as well as book reviews, to two English-language newspapers in Japan from 1984-89 and from 2000-2017.

This anthology of over 60 of Sato’s commentaries reflect the writer’s wide-ranging erudition and his unsentimental views of both his native Japan and his adopted American homeland. Broadly he looks at the Pacific War and its aftermath and at war (and our love of it) in general, at the quirks and curiosities of the natural world exhibited by birds and other creatures, at friends and mentors who surprised and inspired, and finally at other writers and their works, many of them familiar – the Beats and John Ashbery, for example, and Mishima – but many others whose introduction is welcome.

Whether Sato loves America or not is beside the point. He is in the business of critical appraisal and translation, of taking words seriously and watching to see how often those who speak and write measure up to their own ideals.