Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979) was one of the most prominent Japanese Surrealists. He corresponded with André Breton and translated his 1928 Surrealism and Painting into Japanese two years after it was published in France. Because of his association with the French Surrealists, Takiguchi was imprisoned in 1941 by the Japanese “thought police” and held for more than eight months. After his release, he stopped writing and reinvented himself as a visual artist and art critic. In 1967, admirers of his work collected the individual poems that had previously only appeared in magazines and published them in Japan as The Poetic Experiments 1927–1937.
