Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Fukuoka, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan
About Tarō Naka
- Taro Naka (Japanese: ????, Hepburn: Naka Taro, 23 January 1922 – 1 June 2014) was a prize-winning Japanese poet.
- He was born Shojiro Fukuda in Hakata, now Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu in western Japan.
- At school he read, among others, Sakutaro Hagiwara, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Baudelaire, and the Kyoto School philosopher Kitaro Nishida.
- In April 1941, he entered Tokyo Imperial University to study Japanese Literature.
- Some of his earliest poems dealing with the war and its immediate aftermath appeared in his debut collection, Etudes, in 1950, published by his high-school classmate Tokuo Date's Eureka Press. Between 1957 and 1964, Naka worked on what the critic Shobin Hirai, among many others, considered his magnum opus, his 1965 collection Ongaku ('Music').
- It was published by Shichosha, Japan's foremost poetry publisher, in a limited edition of four hundred copies.
- It received widespread critical praise and was awarded the Yomiuri Prize and the Saisei Muro Prize.
- The collection is characterized by its high degree of attention to the interplay between the visual, phonetic and semantic aspects of words.
- In 2003, he composed a no play, Shikotei ('The First Emperor'), which was performed at the National Noh Theatre on 20 March 2014, a few months before Naka passed away from pneumonia in June 2014.An English translation of his work, Music: Selected Poems, was published by Isobar Press in July 2018.
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