My Father the Dog

The debut Carcanet collection by a celebrated translator of Basho, who now turns his hand to composing original English-language haiku concerning the brutal murders that took place in an isolated mountain village in Japan not so long ago.

My Father The Dog is a haunting sequence of haiku inspired by real killings in an isolated mountain village in Japan. After decades working in the city, a man returns to his childhood home to care for his parents and their small farm. When they die, grief, rural isolation, and mounting tensions with neighbours lead to his slow unravelling: a threatening haiku posted on a shed wall, the adoption of two dogs, and the growing belief that one dog is the reincarnation of his father. Structured in three sections echoing the three lines of a haiku, the book moves from the man’s troubled homecoming to the aftermath of the killings, and finally to the fugitive’s hallucinatory experience hiding in the forest awaiting capture. By placing extreme violence within a form associated with restraint and natural beauty, My Father The Dog creates a disturbing formal tension, producing a work that is spare, precise, and deeply unsettling.