SOURCE: "Return or No Return: Nishiwaki's Postmodernist Appropriation of Literary History, East and West," in Literary History, Narrative, and Culture: Selected Conference Papers, edited by Wimal Dissanayake and Steven Bradbury, University of Hawaii Press, 1989, pp. 122-31.

In the following essay, originally delivered at a conference in Honolulu in April, 1988, Hirata discusses the intertextuality of the poems in No Traveller Returns by suggesting that Nishiwaki appropriated both Western and Japanese literary traditions to construct the text's "Japaneseness."

After the dazzling display of modernist poetic language in Ambarvalia (1933), Nishiwaki Junzaburō's second book of Japanese poetry Tabibito kaerazu (No Traveller Returns), published in 1947, seemed to indicate his complete return to Eastern poetics with its central sentiment of mujō (transience). Indeed the surprising transformation of Nishiwaki's poetic language caused much indignation among the die-hard modernist poets of Japan at that time.

Yet, as recent source studies have revealed, the intertextuality of...