A biography of Japanese tanka master Ishikawa Takuboku, who pioneered an unmistakably modern poetic style.

Donald Keene is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author and translator of more than thirty books on Japanese literature and culture. His Columbia University Press books include The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (2013), So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (2010), Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (2009), Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841 (2006), and Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (2002), as well as a definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature.

Highly recommended.

Well-researched, well-written, informative and interesting.... A sympathetic portrait of an important figure in Japanese literary history.

Well-researched.... Keene's finely wrought translations of Ishikawa's poems glimmer ever more brightly, sandwiched between the dark episodes of the young poet's short life.

Recommended for Japanese literature collections and any reader searching for a new poet to discover.

Jeffrey Angles, translator of Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako:
The poetry of Ishikawa Takuboku holds a landmark position in Japanese poetic history. With his worldly yet highly introspective, self-reflexive, and frequently melancholy tone, Takuboku developed one of the most distinctive, singular voices in the Japanese poetry of the Meiji era. Donald Keene has done the English-speaking world a major service by presenting this survey of the life of a critically important tanka master.

Charles Shiro Inouye, professor of Japanese literature and visual culture, Tufts University:
The First Modern Japanese is a poignant though familiar tale of the genius and premature death of a promising artist. As Donald Keene notes, Ishikawa Takuboku was a pivotal figure and someone to consider when thinking about larger topics such as the meaning of modernity. Keene's insightful and compelling study of Takuboku lets us finally see the dark side of Japan's tearful, beloved poet.