Araki Yasusada

Araki Yasusada was a non-existent Japanese poet, presumably the creation of US literature professor Kent Johnson. The publication of Yasusada's poetry by major literary journals such as the American Poetry Review, Grand Street and Conjunctions during the early 1990s created an embarrassing scandal for these publications, who had to defend themselves against charges that they only published the poetry because of political correctness.

Araki's Fictional Biography

Araki Yasusada was supposedly a survivor of the Hiroshima atom bomb. He was born in 1907, attended Hiroshima University (before it was even founded, in 1949), worked in the postal service and was conscripted into Japanese army during World War II. He died of cancer in 1972. His son discovered his poems and notebooks and in 1991 they began to appear in print in the United States.

The 'notebooks' included editorial comments, smudged ink and illegible text, and other elaborate attempts to give the appearance of authenticity. They also included hints to their own unravelling, however, such as references to poets who probably would not be known to Japanese poets of the period and anachronistic references to things like scuba divers.

Kent Johnson

The real writer of the poems is widely believed to be Kent Johnson, professor of Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, though he has never claimed authorship. Beliefs about Johnson's role as author stem in no small part from observations that Johnson edited the Yasusada texts for the Wesleyan University Press and Johnson's mention of Yasusada in his doctoral dissertation.

The texts that had been published in the poetry journals also were sent to various academics. They had been sent from a variety of locations and presented Yasusada as an invented persona that was used by one or more people who intended the keep the origin of the texts secret.

Rumors began to spread. Johnson admitted to some critics that Yasusada was nothing but an invented pseudonym "somebody" used to conceal the writer's origin. Some editors who asked who the real writer was claim to have received different answers. One of them was that the real writer was "Tosa Motokiyu," one of the three "Japanese translators"- or at least 95% were his, the rest being Johnson's older work, which Motokiyu had requested to include in his Yasusada fiction. He continued to lecture on Yasusada and denied the hoax in interviews. At one stage he claimed that Motokiyu asked him to take credit before his death and that Motokiyu's name was yet another pseudonym.

There were a number of rumors about other supposed co-authors, including the leading avant-garde Mexican composer, Javier Alvarez, who appears as co-editor of the work with Johnson. Publishers demanded their money back and criticized the hoax. Wesleyan cancelled the publication of the poetry collection. Some critics noticed that Johnson had published similar poetry in 1986 under the name of Ogiwara Miyamori, in Ironwood magazine.

Criticism

After the 'hoax' was discovered, several journals rejected previously accepted poems. The hoax has been called "a criminal act" by Arthur Vogelsang, editor of American Poetry Review, which had previously published a special supplement of Yasusada poems, including an alleged portrait of the author. But numerous critics were supportive, praising both the conceptual nature of the fiction and the quality of the writing.

External links

• Hyper-Authorship: The Case of Araki Yasusada
• The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax
• "Ruthven’s Faking Literature, Forging Literature and Faking Forged Literature"
• Arthur Vogelsang's Letter to editors of the Boston Review
• Three Footnotes: Eliot Weinberger Eliot Weinberger on the Yasusada affair