Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English

Poetry. In the early 1990s, a number of respected US literary journals published the poems of Araki Yasusada, a Japanese poet and Hiroshima survivor who turned out to have never existed. The most likely author of this "hoax" (if it even is a hoax) is probably Kent Johnson. For this book, Johnson claims that Yasusada was in fact the creation of yet a third writer who uses the pseudonym Tosa Motokiyu, and who requested (prior to dying in 1996) that his legal identity never be revealed. ALSO, WITH MY THROAT is a collection of letters, in imperfect English, that Motokiyu wrote as Yasusada. Edited by Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez, this new book might renew some of the many polarizing responses to Yasusada's first appearance. "This is essentially a criminal act," claimed Arthur Vogelsang at the time. Carolyn Forche, on the other hand, argued that "'Yasusada's' writing is an entry into a spiritual space...It is a work of art in the largest sense."