The Yasusada case, I shall argue here, can be understood as a reaction formation experienced by a literary community that no longer trusts the individual talent to rise above mass culture and hence must find a poetry worthy of its attention in increasingly remote and improbable locations. Ancient storytellers and poets have spoken of our origins which defined our beings entirely. We have admired the genius of modern writers for their uncanny ability to construct experiences that seemed at once unique and universal. They were the mediums of the Real. They were the sites of truth.
Poetry is weak in face of the nuclear horror of Hiroshima.
What we read in the literature of the atomic bomb is not only the rage of the people but the shame of language. Hiroshima is not merely an improbable but an impossible site for poetry. But that very impossibility beckons our poetry. Araki Yasusada was such a bearer of the impossible. There is no Paul Celan, no Primo Levi in Japan.