Haiboku no Jojo is a collection of criticism in which Yoshio Hishikawa reconsiders lyricism and the speaking subject in postwar tanka against the background of avant-garde tanka. It refuses to treat emotion in tanka as mere private feeling, instead reading it within the tension between era and expression.

An avant-garde critical collection that rereads postwar tanka lyricism as a question of defeat and renewal.

"Ishitsu e no Jonetsu" is a tanka critical essay by Sanshini Ueda that won the first Contemporary Tanka Criticism Award in 1954. Its title signals a desire to engage with sensibilities and forms different from established understandings of tanka, placing it near the starting point of Ueda's later critical work as poet, novelist, and essayist.

An early critical essay that presents passion for the different as a new point of departure for tanka criticism.