TWELVE VIEWS FROM THE DISTANCE
An incandescent memoir of a boy’s coming of age in wartime Japan

By Mutsuo Takahashi
Translated by Jeffrey Angles
University of Minnesota Press | 256 pages
ISBN 978-0-8166-7936-2 | paperback
ISBN 978-0-8166-7277-6 | cloth |

From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. In twelve chapters that revisit critical points in his boyhood, Mutsuo Takahashi re-creates the lost world that was the setting for his beginnings as a gay man and poet.

http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Views-Distance-Mutsuo-Takahashi/dp/0816679363
PRAISE FOR TWELVE VIEWS FROM THE DISTANCE:

“It is magnificent that in this book, Twelve Views from the Distance, the poet Mutsuo Takahashi has managed to achieve firm prose that, while unmistakably the work of a poet, shines with a black luster much like a set of drawers crafted by a master of old. This book is a magnificent collection of sensations and of memories, much like the toys we might find in a dark closet. The part toward the end in which the theme of his “search for a father” crystallizes in a copy of an erotic book radiates a certain tragic beauty.” Yukio Mishima

“Twelve Views from the Distance is a wrenching memoir about growing up in southern Japan during the war and just afterwards in an extremely poor family of day laborers. Utterly dependent on his hard-bitten grandmother and his often absent mother, a very promiscuous woman, Mutsuo Takahashi withdraws into himself and lives in his very rich imagination. That he was destined to become Japan’s leading gay poet may or may not be obvious from these painful but lyrical memories.” Edmund White