Photo/Illutration Poet Ryoichi Wago at his home in Fukushima on Sept. 15 (Shohko Fujisaki)

Although Fukushima-based poet Ryoichi Wago missed out on winning a U.S. translation award for his work in October, he is clearly making a name for himself overseas.

In 2017, the French translation of Wago’s “Shi no Tsubute” (pebbles of poetry) received an award for best foreign-language poetry collection from French literary journal Nunc.

With his “Since Fukushima” shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize hosted by the American Literary Translators Association, Wago, 56, keenly feels he is becoming a voice in the English-speaking world as well.

“I want to deal with the world more than ever and spread the word about everyday life in Fukushima as a form of literature,” said the author, who works as a teacher at a prefecture-run senior high school.

“Since Fukushima” is a collection of Wago’s poems translated into English by Judy Halebsky and Ayako Takahashi, and was released from Vagabond Press in February 2023.

The anthology brings his poems published until 2021 under one title, including those from “Shi no Tsubute” which is based on a series of verses shared on Twitter immediately after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster that triggered the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

In his poetry, Wago has concentrated on depicting daily life in Fukushima, as well as its climate and ambience. He has also tackled the drastic change in the landscape of his hometown as well as the death of a student in the tsunami whipped up by the magnitude-9.0 earthquake.

The author was also afraid of and angered by radiation.

“I was initially writing about Fukushima, which overnight was transformed into an extraordinary place because of the earthquake and the nuclear disaster. I wanted to keep a faithful record of what I felt in my heart and found my writing naturally taking the form of poetry,” he said.

In one of the poems in “Since Fukushima,” Wago bluntly expresses his anger and sorrow over the refusal of museums in the United States to loan artworks by Ben Shahn to a Fukushima museum planning a traveling exhibition in Japan. It was a time of heightened concern about radiation at home and abroad.

Although some of his poems have universal themes and do not evoke the disaster or Fukushima, readers cannot help but be reminded of the northeastern prefecture.

After the release of “Shi no Tsubute,” he began to receive invites to events held around the world where he would recite his works.

Recalling the applause that invariably erupted, Wago likened it “to a rumbling of the ground, a physical response as if they were letting out a triumphant shout.”

For Wago, the earthquake and nuclear disaster are inextricably linked to any discussion about everyday life in his hometown.

“I see a similarity between the absurdity of the disaster and the absurd death of my grandfather who died while being detained as a forced laborer in Siberia after World War II,” Wago said. “It can also be the starting point for my preoccupation with the Fukushima disaster.”

He continued, “Absurdities of this kind are still being repeated in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar ... . I must squarely face what is happening around the world through poetry. With this stance, I hope to break the sense of stagnation that pervades modern poetry.”

Wago said he has never forgotten what poet Kazue Shinkawa, who died in August, told him in a postcard he received 11 years ago: “Please make sure you do not leave your readers behind.”

“(Poet and novelist) Kenji Miyazawa wrote poems in a way that was understandable to his students and farmers,” Wago said. “I hope to accomplish something similar without building barriers.”

“Life,” his 26th poetry anthology, published by Seidosha in October, is written in a simple style that aims to entice novices into the world of modern poetry.

But when they open the pages and step inside, they find themselves faced with the author’s pursuit of surrealism.

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