In 1686, the haiku master Matsuo Bashō penned one of Japan’s most celebrated poems, a simple description of a frog jumping into an old pond and the resulting sound. It captures a moment in seventeen syllables with Zen perspicacity. What is often forgotten, however, is its visual dimension. In its original form the verse would have been calligraphical, drawing on the great pictorial vocabulary of written Japanese. 

Visual Poetry of Japan 1684–2023 samples the rich tradition of poetic representation and play in Japanese, encompassing genres ranging from calligraphy, painting and the traditional haiku to calligrams, concrete poems and asemic writing. The Japanese language is particularly well suited to this. It consists of two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, as well as thousands of kanji characters, including pictograms for simple concepts such as ‘sun’, ‘tree’ and ‘person’. These can be used to great effect. For instance, the poet Fujitomi Yasuo’s 1999 work ‘Mizu No Oto’ (‘The Sound of Water’) is a rendering of Bashō’s haiku showing a frog leaping into a ‘pond’ under a cross. It’s a visual pun on the first kanji of the poem, 古 (‘old’).

The book includes works by both Japanese writers and artists and foreign ones inspired by or having some connection to Japan, such as Morgan Fisher, an English musician and photographer living in Tokyo. Works are presented in translation, in some cases alongside the originals. These show how complex translation can