Among the many literary and artistic experiments of the 1920's in Japan, the work of anarchist and avant-garde poet Hagiwara Ky jir (1899-1938) offers a particularly challenging reconception of the relationship between the body, the city, and the poetic text. My presentation will examine the mid-1920's collaboration between Hagiwara and the Mavo group of avant-garde artists, who shared a keen interest in new media, technologies, and architectural forms, and a desire to transform the uses and formal possibilities of art and literature. Hagiwara's treatises and highly graphic poetry unravel the distinction between inside and outside, and between natural and artificial, as body, machine, architectural form, and written text commingle. In response to more clearly bounded ideas of interiority, Hagiwara proposes a model of the poem (and the poet) as an open circuit, employing the analogy of the intake of oxygen and the circulation of blood through the body.
Nevertheless, the rhetoric of "openness" in Hagiwara's poetry and treatises is countered by a rhetorical undercurrent of subterfuge and duplicity, since both body and text must function in a treacherous urban space under surveillance by the state. As I will argue in my presentation, Hagiwara's work offers new critical models for our understanding Taish and Sh wa literary culture, and prefigures the appearance of the cyborg bodies and cyber texts which fascinate us today.