BL. W. B. Yeats

249. Naitô, Shirô. Yeats’s Epiphany: His Quest for the Last Masks. Kyoto: Yamaguchi, 1990.

One thread of Yeats criticism in Japan, traceable as far back as Noguchi (see 61, for example), relies on essentialist assertions about a perceived homogeneity between Celtic and Japanese cultures, which, the claim goes, Yeats ‘intuited’. At its best, as in Oshima (see especially 124d, 160, and 187), this starting point leads to informal essays that call attention to ‘Japanese elements’ in Yeats’s work without making too much of the ‘correspondences’. Naitô carries the point considerably further in two chapters here, ‘Zen Buddhism and W. B. Yeats’s Last Phase’ and ‘Yeats and the Ainu’. See also 196.