ABSTRACT
Clad in multicolor outfit with flying-saucer hat a typical reading has Kazuko Shiraishi unfurling her poetry scroll and whether in Japanese or English reading to jazz accompaniment. The post-war Japan dominated by political conservativism, corporation economics, and a conformist family and education regime, might almost has been predicted to create anti-bodies. Fiction confirmed the signs in Beat-flecked novels like Kaoru Shoji's Akazukin-chan Ki Wo Tsukete/Be Careful Little Red Riding Hood and Ryu Murakami's Kagirinaku Tomei ni Chikai Buru/Almost Transparent Blue. The poetry of Shiraishi and Nanao Sakaki assuredly refracts different lives and genders, perceptions of the world in two different registers of idiom. Whether or not Shiraishi enters the roster as registered Beat enlistee, there can be little doubting Beat's silhouette even as it combines with a life and work indisputably of her own prevailing. As Allen Ginsberg, Beat's premier versifier, links back to Whitman as Good Gray Poet, so Sakaki, Japanese poet foot-patroller links to Ginsberg, America's c.
