On display at the East Asia Library from 3/6/25-5/13/25, selections from a recent donation from Yumiko Tsumura, a local poet and translator, related to three major modern Japanese authors, Yumiko Kurahashi, Ryuichi Tamura and Kazuko Shiraishi.

Yumiko Kurahashi’s meteoric career began with Parutai (The Party), a brilliant satire of the Japanese leftist students movement that she wrote while still a student. As part of a first generation of women writers who had benefited from equal opportunity for education in the post-war period, her innovative writing style, influenced by Satre, Kafka, and Camus, rocked the literary world of the 1960s, exposing structural inequities in Japanese society. Perhaps the most renowned post-WWII Japanese poet, Ryuichi Tamura’s poetry searingly reveals the agony of war and the disorientation induced by rapid modernization. Kazuko Shiraishi, known for performing her provocative poetry to jazz accompaniment, has been called the “Allen Ginsberg of Japan.”

We are delighted to introduce this donation in an exhibit in our main exhibit space. Please visit the East Asia Library to learn more about these three authors, who each left a powerful critique of the modern world.

Read an interview with the donor, Yumiko Tsumura, to learn more about her and each of these authors.