Seen and Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail

Seen and Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail (1897) is a collection of poems by Yone Noguchi. Written only three years after his arrival in San Francisco, these poems capture the emotions of a young man far from home. Fluent in English and adept with the open, flowing style of free verse, Noguchi remains unique in his vision of earthly life.

Noguchi’s poems are songs of light and shadow, in tune with animals, seasons, spirits, and complex emotions. His words are leaves, his thoughts are curtains knocking “with their shadowy hands” upon his door. His “[p]oetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean gray haired hill, in sober-faced evening. / And the next page is Stillness.” Alone in a foreign country, he finds solace in the strange music of nature, hope in the words he can make of it. He envisions himself asleep in the depths of a canyon, writing letters that will never arrive, longing for the crickets to sing. “The homeless snail climbing up the pillow, stares upon the silvered star-tears on my eyes! […] Oh, I am alone! Who knows my to-night’s feeling!” He asks, the homeless snail asks, and his reader longs to answer.

This edition of Yone Noguchi’s Seen and Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail is a classic of Japanese American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Yone Noguchi (1875-1947) was a Japanese poet, novelist, and critic who wrote in both English and Japanese. Born in Tsushima, he studied the works of Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer at Keio University in Tokyo, where he also practiced Zen and wrote haiku. In 1893, he moved to San Francisco and began working at a newspaper established by Japanese exiles. Under the tutelage of Joaquin Miller, an Oakland-based writer and outdoorsman, Noguchi came into his own as a poet. He published two collections in 1897 before moving to New York via Chicago. In 1901, he published The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, his debut novel. Noguchi soon tired of America, however, and sailed to England where he published a third book of poems and made connections with such writers as William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Reinvigorated and determined to continue his career, he returned to New York in 1903, but left for Japan the following year following the end of his marriage to journalist and educator Léonie Gilmour, with whom he had a son. As the Russo-Japanese War brought his nation onto the world stage, Noguchi became known as a literary critic for the Japan Times and focused on advising such Western playwrights as Yeats to study the classical Noh drama. He spent the second decade of the century as a prominent international lecturer, mainly in Europe and Britain. In 1920, Noguchi published Japanese Hokkus, a collection of short poems, before turning his attention to Japanese-language verse. As Japan moved closer toward war with the West, Noguchi turned from leftist politics to the nationalism supported by his country’s leaders, straining his relationship with Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and distancing himself from his former colleagues around the world. In 1945, his home in Tokyo was destroyed in the devastating American firebombing of the city; he died only two years later, having reconnected with his son Isamu.