AUTHOR BACKSTORY: "As a testament to his maverick reputation, he was imprisoned in 1940 during the government's World War II persecution of avant-garde artists, and was officially forbidden to write, being deemed especially pernicious for his perversion of traditional literary forms: in his body of work, which resists simple summary, the classical moraic rules andkireji(punctuative expressions) are often intact; the seasonal references (kigo) are neither religiously heeded nor scrupulously avoided; and he tended to write in thematic sequences instead of stand-alone units."-Ryan C. K. Choi