SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Writings of Yone Noguchi: An East-West Literary Assimilation, Volume 1, Associated University Presses, 1990, pp. 13-29.

In the following excerpt, Hakutani provides a short biography of his subject, and discusses the primary influences, both eastern and western, on Noguchi's poetry.

1

Yone Noguchi was born in a small town near Nagoya in 1875. In the late 1880s the young Noguchi, taking great interest in English texts used in a public school, read Samuel Smiles's writings on self-help. Perhaps inspired by Smiles, but in any case dissatisfied with his public school instruction, he withdrew from a middle school in Nagoya and went up to Tokyo in 1890. At a prep school there he diligently read such Victorian writings as Thomas Macauley's, exactly the type of reading many a literary aspirant was doing on the other side of the Pacific.

A year later, detesting the national university that an ambitious...