Jouer au feu

First edition, printed in small numbers on handmade Japanese paper with long kōzo fibres, with natural vegetal inclusions and untrimmed deckle edges. The colophon bears no indication of print run. Not in Worldcat. The Harvard-Yenching Library holds only a 1970 reprint; also absent from the major collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at the MET on international Surrealism.

Publisher’s binding in pink Bradel-style boards, French title label pasted to rear board, Japanese title label pasted to slightly sunned spine, housed in slipcase covered with handmade paper with vegetal inclusions, slightly darkened on spine, minor rubbing to upper edge.

Rare association copy, signed and inscribed by Chiruu Yamanaka to Georges Hugnet “À Georges Hugnet / Hommage de son ami lointain” [his friend from far away] with the autograph mention “c/o J.O.C.K. Radio Station, Nagoya”.

Yamanaka Chiruu, known as “Tiroux” to his French Surrealist fellow writers, discovered Surrealism through his work at NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation), whose address he gives at the bottom of his inscription. He was one of the movement’s promoters in the 1930s and had made contact with André Breton, Paul Éluard and Georges Hugnet. He translated numerous Surrealist works into Japanese, published at the same address as the present copy: Aragon’s Le Libertinage in 1934 with illustrations by Hans Arp, to whom Yamanaka dedicates a poem in this collection (p. 37), Breton’s L’Immaculée Conception in 1936, and Paul Éluard’s Dessous d’une vie in 1938.

He founded the magazine Ciné and would later contribute to Mizué, through which he forwarded the ideas of the Western avant-garde movements of Dadaism and Surrealism. Two years after the present collection of poems, Jouer au feu, in 1937, he would organize the international Surrealism exhibition (Kaigai chōgenjitsushugi sakuhinten) in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, including 400 works of art and documents by forty European Surrealist artists, in the spirit of the London Surrealist international exhibition the previous year. Yamanaka inscribed this copy of his Surrealist poems to Georges Hugnet, who appeared alongside Éluard and Penrose on the organizing committee of the event. The exhibition had a major impact on the avant-garde artistic movements in Japan, but also on Japanese society, still reluctant to these innovations. Hugnet was equally active, and in the same year would publish La Carte surréaliste, an innovative means of putting forward the ideas and unpublished works of artists such as Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, André and Jacqueline Breton, Salvador Dalí, Roland Penrose, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy.

In 1938, in the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, published for the international Surrealism exhibition in Paris, Yamanaka and his co-organizer Takiguchi appear as “the promoters of the Surrealist movement in Japan”. But Japanese Surrealism was harshly repressed from the 1940s onwards, with “the arrest of members of the ‘Poets’ Club’ in Kobe — led by Yamanaka and closely linked to Takiguchi —, of communist-leaning members of the magazine Rien on 8 December 1941, of Fukuzawa and Takiguchi in April 1941, and of members of the artistic societies ‘Forme’ and ‘Roma-ji-kai’ in Hiroshima on 9 December 1941, all investigated for Surrealist or Surrealist-leaning activities deemed subversive and associated with communist activity” (Mélusine, Centre de recherche sur le surréalisme de Paris III).