Seen and Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail by Yone Noguchi

Seen and Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail by Yone Noguchi

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.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

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), a Japanese poet, novelist, and critic who worked in both English and Japanese, was a poet, novelist, and critic. He was born in Tsushima and studied Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer's writings at Tokyo's Keio University, where he also practiced Zen and composed haiku. He moved to San Francisco in 1893 and started working at a newspaper founded by Japanese exiles. Noguchi blossomed as a poet under the guidance of Joaquin Miller, an Oakland-based writer and outdoorsman. Before arriving to New York via Chicago in 1897, he produced two collections.

His debut novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, was released in 1901. Noguchi, however, grew tired of America and sailed to London, where he released a third collection of poems and met writers such as William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy. He returned to New York in 1903, re-energized and ready to continue his career, but left for Japan the following year after his marriage to journalist and schoolteacher Léonie Gilmour, with whom he had a son, ended. As the Russo-Japanese War thrust his country into the international stage, Noguchi rose to prominence as a literary critic for the Japan Times, recommending Western playwrights such as Yeats to study Noh drama.

He was a well-known international lecturer in the second decade of the twentieth century, mostly in Europe and the United Kingdom. Before shifting his attention to Japanese-language verse, Noguchi released Japanese Hokkus, a collection of short poems, in 1920. As Japan approached conflict with the West, Noguchi shifted from leftist politics to the nationalism promoted by his country's authorities, straining his friendship with Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and alienating himself from former colleagues around the world. In the horrific American firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, his home was destroyed; he died only two years later, having reconnected with his son Isamu.