The Guest Cat-- Takashi Hiraide

Short Review

A bestseller in France and winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen

. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife — the days have more light and color. The novel brims with new small joys and many moments of staggering poetic beauty, but then something happens….
About The Author

Takashi Hiraide : was born in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1950. Just after graduation from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, he published his first collection of poems, "The Inn" (1976), a book which inspired a strong response from the readers of the 1970s, a sequence that began his career as one of the leading poets of Japan's post-war generation.

During this decade, he continued to further develop his work in poetry and poetics. He was later awarded the Education Minister's Art Encouragement Prize for Freshman for his second book of poems, "For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut" (1982).

"Portraits of a Young Osteopath" (1984) is his third book of poems, in which he incorporated a new method for introducing descriptions of natural science in poetry.

In 1985, he spent three months at the University of Iowa as a poet in residence for the International Writing Program. In 1987 he published "Green Ray in My House", in a complex style of free verse, prose poem, and novel.

In 1990 he began teaching at Tama Art University, where he is now a professor of Poetics and Art Science as well as a core member of the new Institute for Art Anthropology.

In the past seventeen years, he has published, in addition to contemporary poetry, books of various genres and forms, including a book of ambiguous genre, which borders between poetry and essay ("Notes for My Left-hand Diary", 1993; winner of Yomiuri Literary Award), a poetic book of letters addressed to a dead artist ("Postcards to Donald Evans", 2001), a serial collection of traditional tanka and diary ("One Hundred and Eleven Tankas to Mourn My Father", 2000), a novel of autobiography and surrealism ("The Guest Cat", 2001; winner of Kiyama Shohei Literary Award), and several books of essays on art, travel and sports. In particular, "Poetics of Baseball" (1989) is not merely a book about the sport, but also uses the analogy of baseball to write about poetics itself.

In 1998 and 1999, Hiraide was a visiting scholar at the Berlin Free University, a year-long experience which produced his travelogue, "The Berlin Moment" (2002), following the traces of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan, for which he was awarded The Travel Writing Award.

He has also brought forth two volumes of work by "Irako Seihaku" (2003), which serve as not only a biography about the reclusive and prominent Japanese poet of the old Meiji-era, but also a critique on major problems of modern Japanese poetry, as well as a unique novel employing a special narration system reliving the unknown diary of the forgotten poet. This work has received the Minister of Education's Art Encouragement Prize and the Toson Shimazaki Memorial Award from Rekitei.

Hiraide sometimes works with book design such as "The Complete Works of Irako Seihaku" as well as his own "Irako Seihaku", which received The Minister of Economy & Industry's Prize, Book Design Concours in 2004.

He has published four books of poetics, "Future of Shipwreck" (1982), "At the Tip of Attack" (1985), "Doubt about Light" (1992), "Multiple-Way Street" (2004).

In September of 2005, Hiraide was invited to Sprachsalz, the international literary festival in Hall, south Tirol of Austria, as a "godson" to Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Oe, who was a special guest for the festival, highly praised Hiraide's writings for providing a new direction for prose within the field of poetry.

On a similar note, "William Blake's Bat" (2004) is a book of short essays on his ordinary life about which the novelist Natsuki Ikezawa wrote, "I would like to evade calling these writings essays or stray notes or short pieces. It's very beautiful, but readers cannot see where the contrivances for the beauty of these writings are. It's perhaps concerned in his way of life, at least with his way of living."

Hiraide is also the author of several books corresponding with outstanding artists, including Donald Evans along with On Kawara and Mitsuo Kano. He gave a lecture at the On Kawara exhibition at Kunstverein in Koeln in September of 1995. The lecture was translated into German and published as a text of "On Kawara Erscheinen-Verschewinden" ("On Kawara Appearance-Disappearance") (Maly Verlag, Koeln, Germany, 1997). Mitsuo Kano has made a printed work called "Serpentinata" in colour intaglio, inspired by a critical poem by Hiraide. The work comes in its own box, including a print of the poem.

There are five complete books of Hiraide's work in translation, "Postcards to Donald Evans", translated into English by Tomoyuki Iino (Tibor de Nagy Editions, New York, USA, 2003) , "Le Chat qui venait du ciel", translated into French by Elisabeth Suetsugu (Editions Philippe Picquier, France 2004), and "For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut", translated into English by Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions, New York, U.S.A. 2008) which is a recipient of the 2009 Best Translated Book Awards for poetry. "Til valnøttens gjenstridige utholdenhet", translated into Norwegian by Ika Kaminka (Forlaget Oktober, Norway 2013), and "The Guest Cat", translated by Eric Selland (New Directions, 2014).

There are other translations of his poems into English, German, French, Russian, Chinese and Korean that have appeared in anthologies and poetry magazines.

Hiraide currently lives in the west suburbs of Tokyo with a cat and his wife, the poet Michiyo Kawano.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1st edition (January 28, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811221504
• ISBN-13: 978-0811221504
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 7 inches

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