G S Fraser: a Westerner’s analysis of haiku

Abstract

It is indeed very sad that G S Fraser has been remembered in Japan only as a literary emissary who tried to commit suicide. James Kirkup wrote to me:

I’m so interested in your plans for another book. On the whole, I think people like King, Thwaite, Enright, Barker and Fraser were really only superficially involved in Japan. They were on the outside, looking in, while I was always on the inside, looking out as well as in. I wanted to become deeply immersed in Japanese life and customs and literature and art, to encounter the Japanese on every level. The others, mostly British Council guests, were really more concerned with literary/academic careers, adding Japan as a sort of prestige point in their CV’s. I was totally without that kind of ambition, and wanted to live simply like the Japanese. Almost the first thing I was told on arriving at Sendai in 1959 was that Fraser had tried to commit suicide by jumping from a train after delivering an unsuccessful lecture in Sendai. This was all that the Japanese remembered of him. These are all points that seem to me to underline the superficiality and surface contact with Japan of these writers you mention.