Araki Yasusada - Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson

The real writer of the poems is widely believed to be Kent Johnson, professor of Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, though he has never claimed authorship. Beliefs about Johnson's role as author stem in no small part from observations that Johnson edited the Yasusada texts for the Wesleyan University Press and Johnson's inclusion of Yasusada's poetry in his doctoral dissertation.

The texts that had been published in the poetry journals also were sent to various academics. They had been sent from a variety of locations and presented Yasusada as an invented persona that was used by one or more people who intended the keep the origin of the texts secret.

Johnson admitted to some critics that Yasusada was nothing but an invented pseudonym "somebody" used to conceal the writer's origin. Some editors who asked who the real writer was claim to have received different answers. One of them was that the real writer was "Tosa Motokiyu," one of the three "Japanese translators"- or at least 95% were his, the rest being Johnson's older work, which Motokiyu had requested to include in his Yasusada fiction. He continued to lecture on Yasusada and denied the hoax in interviews. At one stage he claimed that Motokiyu asked him to take credit before his death and that Motokiyu's name was yet another pseudonym.

There were a number of rumors about other supposed co-authors, including the leading avant-garde Mexican composer, Javier Alvarez, who appears as co-editor of the work with Johnson. Publishers demanded their money back and criticized the hoax. Wesleyan cancelled the publication of the poetry collection. Some critics noticed that Johnson had published similar poetry in 1986 under the name of Ogiwara Miyamori, in Ironwood magazine.