A conversation with Marc Brüseke on lineation, plainness, and carrying Ozaki Hōsai’s haiku into English in One Thin Body, published by Analog Submission Press.

You’ve spent a long time with Hōsai’s work. For readers meeting him for the first time, who was he?

Ozaki Hōsai was born in Tottori Prefecture in 1885. He studied law at Tokyo Imperial University, worked in insurance, got married, and for a while lived what looked, from the outside, like a conventional life. But it didn’t last. He drank, he struggled in salaried work, and his marriage ended. By his early forties, he had given up on almost everything and was living as a hermit-priest on the island of Shōdoshima, writing haiku and drinking until his death in 1926 at the age of forty-one.

He’s usually placed alongside Taneda Santōka as one of the two great figures of free-verse haiku — haiku that abandoned the seventeen-syllable form and the need for a seasonal word.

Why is he so little known in English?

It’s hard to say. Santōka has had several English translators over the years and has built up a modest readership. Hōsai has had one book, Hiroaki Sato’s Right Under the Big Sky, I Don’t Wear a Hat, published by Stone Bridge Press in 1993. That’s it. One book, over thirty years ago, and it’s been out of print for some time. If you want to read Hōsai in English today, you’re essentially out of luck. There’s almost nothing available. I wanted to help change that.

Part of the reason he’s undertranslated may be that his poems are quieter, harder to excerpt. Santōka gives you the wandering monk and the open road, there’s something romantic about it that travels well across cultures. Hōsai gives you a man alone in a room, coughing. It’s less immediately appealing, but I think it’s at least as powerful. It just asks for a different kind of attention.

The chapbook is called One Thin Body. Where does the title come from?

It’s from one of the haiku in the collection, one of the poems from his final period on Shōdoshima:

Mosquitoes shrill —
one thin body
in the night

It felt right for the chapbook. It captures something essential about the late work. The body reduced to itself, still present, and still registering sensation.

Can you say something about your approach to the translation?

The main decision was to lineate each haiku on its own terms. Some of them arrive as a single line. Some need two lines, or three. I didn’t want to impose a rule in advance. Sato’s 1993 translations rendered every haiku as a single line, which reflects a serious argument about the monolinear nature of Japanese haiku, but I think it flattens the poems in English. It removes the pauses, the places where a haiku catches its breath or cuts short.

Beyond lineation, the guiding principle was weight and pace. How quickly an image arrives, how abruptly it stops, and how much it doesn’t explain. Hōsai’s late poems don’t resolve. They just register something and stop. I wanted the English to do the same.

How did you choose the 52 haiku for this chapbook?

I aimed to selected poems that trace the full arc of Hōsai’s life, from his early work through to the Shōdoshima poems. There’s movement. Poems that have some lyrical fullness to poems that have stripped almost everything away.

The 52 haiku aren’t meant to be representative. They’re meant to be read in sequence, in a single sitting. The chapbook is short enough to read in one go, and I think that’s the best way to experience it.

This is the second publication from Analog Submission Press for 2026. Can you say something about the edition itself?

It’s printed in an edition of 26 copies, of which 25 are numbered for sale. Small enough that each copy feels like it matters. You’re not producing stock. You’re making books. In a moment that leans towards excess, such as more content and more output and more noise — this feels like a way of working against that.

Pre-orders come with two broadsides. What are those?

They’re postcard sized prints featuring a single Hōsai haiku that doesn’t appear in the chapbook. They’re designed to be kept, pinned up, or slipped into another book. It’s a small extra for people who commit early.

What do you hope readers take from these poems?

I don’t hope for anything specific. These are poems that pay attention to very small things, such as a sparrow’s warmth, the sound of your own footsteps, or a match going out in the wind. Sometimes the small things are enough.

If someone reads this chapbook and comes away feeling that Hōsai is a poet worth knowing, that would be plenty.

One Thin Body: Selected Haiku of Ozaki Hōsai is available to pre-order now. The chapbook is printed in an edition of 26 copies, with 25 numbered for sale. Pre-orders include two limited-edition A6 mini broadsides featuring additional haiku not included in the chapbook.

Pre-order here →

Marc Brüseke | Editor
Analog Submission Press
York, England
analogsubmission.com