Yoshimoto Taka’aki, Five War poems translated by Manuel Yang

When Tomorrow Comes

When tomorrow comes
In a harsh dream
Check
Whether or not you’re tangled up in thorn
Because you’ve passed so many hours, already
Slightly heavier than the sin of a sinner
And slightly shabbier than a sinner’s costume

While the world you dreamed of
Doesn’t come yet
If you fall from a bickering of small love
Expose
Your bones and the girl’s
On the road where the fighters pass through
Because
The many young fighters
Are already going to a lonely future
While they don’t know what’s true and what’s a lie

If before a big event
A small matter sneaks up on you, light
Each of its flower candles
For those who were badly hit
Smile and for those who couldn’t endure and died
Give
A flower decoration
Because you already
Smell sin in the world
And have stolen
Rest from the shoulder of the fighters

When tomorrow comes
Construct a bitter dream inside a bitter dream
And to a future lonelier than a lonely fighter
You go too
Because the fighters are already hesitating
And they’re waiting for you

Yoshimoto Taka’aki (1924- ) is arguably the most important thinker in post-World-War-II Japan. His poetry, literary criticism, political writings, and theoretical works have all exerted indelible influence in their respective fields, and they are all bound together by Yoshimoto’s self-critically vigilant and consistent grounding of his ideas on what he has termed taishū no genzō (“original image of the people”). He is unquestionably the most original anti-elitist and anti-vanguardist intellectual of modern Japan.