From the Tatras to Mount Fuji: Polish-Japanese Literary Connections

ulotka_do_ksiazki_ilustracja1_32.jpg, default, Fragment of an illustration by Magdalena Burdzyńska from the exhibition 'The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi', presented as part of EXPO 2

#language & literature

What did the Young Poland generation discover in Japanese art? And what did Tadeusz Miciński see in Mount Fuji? Why can Miłosz be called a haijin? How does Szymborska’s poetry align with Japanese metaphysics?

We examine Japanese inspirations in Polish literature and look for moments of solidarity between our seemingly distant societies, from the late 19th century to today.

Woodcuts, trinkets & dolls: literary japonica

Józef Mehoffer, 'Europa Jubilans', 1909, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

Poland’s literary fascination with Japan began in an antiquarian bookshop, or perhaps more accurately, in a collector’s cabinet. That collector was Feliks ‘Manggha’ Jasieński, who amassed around 15,000 Eastern artifacts in his Kraków apartment – nearly 6,500 of them were related to Japan (which he donated to the National Museum in Kraków in 1920).

Thanks to Manggha’s collection – and more broadly the fashion for all things Japanese – Japanese garments and art in the form of woodcuts, sofas and low chairs, vases and figurines all found their way into the apartments and salons of the Young Poland generation at the turn of the 20^th century. From there, they served as props in novels by Żeromski, Przybyszewski, Irzykowski and Miciński.

In Miciński’s Mené-Mené-Thekel-Upharisim!, Japanese décor is a key element of the hero’s palace, as noted by literary historian Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska:

Cast as a dandy, Jarosław […] has a Japanese room in his residence modelled on Des Esseintes’s chamber in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature – inside which stands a second room made from silk paper that, when the lamp is lit, becomes a sorcerer’s lantern. The highly suggestive description of the paintings shows that Miciński knew both Japanese legends (for example, tales of heroic ronin) and Japanese woodcuts.

Katsushika Hokusai, 'The Tama River in Musashi Province' from the series 'Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji', 1823, photo: public domain. Stanisław Wyspiański, 'View of the Kościuszko Mound in Kraków', 1904, photo: Silesian Museum in Katowice

One expression of the writer’s deeper interest is the only-surviving fragment of his ‘Japanese’ drama Kijomori. As historian Katarzyna Fazan suggests, Miciński’s play was likely a response to the performances of the Kawakami theatre troupe – starring the famous Sada Yacco – in Kraków and Warsaw in the early 1900s during their pan-European tour. The subject and hero, whom Miciński calls Jeni, were drawn from the famous 11th-century novel Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji).

Perhaps the best summary of these early artistic and literary fascinations with Japan by Polish creators is Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s 1903 fairy tale story Komurasaki, published in Chimera, the arts magazine headed by Zenon Przesmycki (a great advocate of Japanese culture). Its heroine is a porcelain doll (bijin), and the entire story takes place in the shop window of a Parisian antiquarian’s shop. As literary professor Hanna Ratuszna noted, the shop resembles the setting of Józef Mehoffer’s famous painting Europa Jubilans.

It’s possible that the fascination with Japanese art – in particular Hokusai’s renowned woodcuts Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (one of which was in Jasieński’s collection) – is connected to Stanisław Wyspiański’s series of drawings depicting Kraków’s Kościuszko Mound. Could the Kościuszko Mound have been the Polish Fujiyama?

Among the hairy people: exile & ethnography

Thumbnail — Bronisław Piłsudski on Sakhalin among Ainu children, photo: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

More direct encounters with Japan occurred at the end of the 19th century among ethnographers and exiled researchers like Bronisław Piłsudski and Wacław Sieroszewski. The former, exiled in 1887 by the tsarist authorities to Sakhalin, conducted pioneering research on the culture of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido. Brother to the famed political leader Marshal Józef Piłsudski, he spent many years among the Ainu, married an Ainu woman and started a family – his descendants still live in Japan today. It was in 1903, together with fellow exile and writer Wacław Sieroszewski, that he began studying Ainu culture on Hokkaido. One of the key results of their work was a treasure trove of unique audio recordings preserved on 100 wax cylinders.

Wacław Sieroszewski’s earliest Eastern interests also stemmed from being exiled – he produced a rich body of literature on Siberian peoples, especially the Yakuts. He kept a diary documenting his 1903-1904 journey through Japan and created a fictionalised reportage of the research he conducted with Piłsudski, published in 1927 under the title Wśród Kosmatych Ludzi (Among the Hairy People).

Sieroszewski also wrote a series of ‘Japanese’ stories collected in the volume Z Fali na Fale (From Wave to Wave – the modern edition is titled Miłość i Śmierć, or Love and Death). Scholars note that tales such as ‘The Harakiri of Prince Asano Naganori’ (an episode from ‘The Book of Yuki no Akebono’) and ‘Reconciliation’ (from ‘The Book of Konseki Monogatari’) demonstrate a solid grasp of Japanese literary tradition. In the latter story – about a shogun who after many years away returns to his wife, spends the night with her, then wakes up beside a skeleton – today’s reader will recognise the classic tale that Masaki Kobayashi adapted for an episode in his famed horror film Kwaidan (1964).

The Russo-Japanese War: conscription, resistance, solidarity

Painting 'Soldiers' Reconnaissance' by Wiktor Mazurowski from the time of the Russo-Japanese War, during which the Polish painter served in the Russian army.

A particularly significant moment in Polish-Japanese relations came with the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904. Their fight with a common enemy – combined with the intensive conscription carried out in Polish lands by the Russian Empire in late 1904 – fuelled revolutionary sentiment (which fully erupted the following year), stoked independence slogans and spurred numerous calls for desertion.

The war was also the first time strong bonds of solidarity and resistance were forged between these two nations separated by an empire. The Polish press spoke admiringly of the skill and heroism of Japanese soldiers during the battles of Mukden and Port Arthur. People were eager to gossip about Russia’s imminent defeat. Anti-Russian rhymes and songs circulated (‘Moskal, you got your ass kicked on the Yalu!’), and there were even rumours that some Japanese generals were of Polish descent (the famous general Count Kuroki was said to be a descendant of the Polish colonel Apoloniusz Kurowski).

Satirical map created during the Russo-Japanese War by a Japanese student from Keio University. The map was based on an earlier British graphic by Frederick Rose (1877), produced during Russia’s Balkan wars. Source: Cornell University

None of this support changed the fact that tens of thousands of Poles served in the Russian army alongside soldiers of many other nations conscripted into the empire (including famed children’s rights advocate Janusz Korczak, who served as a doctor), and many of these Poles died in far-off Manchuria (poems were dedicated to them by the likes of Artur Ćwikowski) or fell into Japanese captivity. Legend has it that the Poles fought with very little enthusiasm, which may have contributed to Russia’s defeat.

As the authors of the History of Polish-Japanese Relations: 1904-1945 observe:

Poles were impressed both by the courage of the Japanese, who, despite limited experience with Western powers and only a few decades after beginning their modernisation, waged a victorious war against the powerful Russia, a traditional enemy of Poland, and by their ability to adopt fitting models from other cultures to build their strength, seamlessly weaving them into their native culture.

Excerpt from page 30 of ‘Historii Stosunków Polsko-Japońskich: 1904-1945’ by Ewa Pałasz-Rutkowska & Andrzej T. Romer

The war also opened up a political window of possibility for Poland’s future independence – which sometimes led to rather exotic encounters, such as the meeting between Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski on 12^th July 1904 on a street in Tokyo. These two political enemies, both seeking allies for the Polish cause, happened to arrive in the Land of the Rising Sun at the same time.

‘This land where misery has no borders’, or Poland’s fate as a warning (in Pōrando kaiko)

Poland was also present on the battlefields of Manchuria – at least symbolically – on the opposite side of the front, though the Polish soldiers fighting probably didn’t know it themselves. This was thanks to a song that entered the staple repertoire of Japanese wartime music in 1904. Titled Pōrando Kaiko (Reminiscence of Poland), its lyrics were drawn from verses found in Naobumi Ochiai’s larger patriotic work Kiba Ryokō (Journey on Horseback).

The song describes a traveller making his way through a bleak distant land, where he hears ‘tales of Poland erased from every map of the world’. He discovers remnants of past greatness – old castles and defensive walls reduced to ‘charred ruins’ – and is moved to ask the world’s simplest question: ‘to be or not to be, to build or to destroy’. Poland is portrayed as ‘a land where misery has no borders’, where ‘even a cuckoo’s flight casts a sorrowful shadow’. This image of Poland’s tragic fate, one caused by being beaten down by a powerful enemy, served as a cautionary mirror for early 20th-century Japan as it faced its own uncertain situation.

Ochiai based his poem on a real journey made more than a decade earlier by Major Yasumasa Fukushima. In 1892-1893, Fukushima rode alone from Berlin to Vladivostok, gathering intelligence for Japan. Along his route, he visited Polish cities such as Konin, Poznań, Warsaw, Łomża, Augustów and Suwałki, and may have even met local independence activists. A fragment of his travel report inspired Ochiai’s Pōrando Kaiko, which, according to some accounts, Japanese children would learn about in schools up until 1945.

Heroism, sacrifice for the fatherland & the first kamikazes

The naval battle of Port Arthur in a period Japanese print, photo: Wikimedia. The fortress of Port Arthur was defended by several thousand Poles, many of whom ended up in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.

One of the most striking echoes of the Russo-Japanese War in Polish prose is Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s 1907 story Ave Patria, Morituri Te Salutant. Its protagonist is Takeo Hirose (called Hirosze by Reymont), a real Japanese officer who in 1904 led a suicide attack with small boats against Russian ships at Port Arthur. Reymont extols their bravery and selfless devotion to their country:

And one by one, ‘as God-hurled stones that densely over ramparts fly’, the corpses of ships and people plunged to the bottom. One by one they died joyfully for their distant homeland, one by one they lay in heroic heaps, hurling themselves into the abyss with terrible majesty of sacrifice and duty.

As we can see, in this case – thanks to him quoting Słowacki – the sacrifice of these Japanese patriots was given a hint of the tradition of Polish romanticism. Before shouting his final banzai and gazing one last time toward the dawn, Hirose reflects:

‘What is man?’ he wondered. ‘He is a wave rising from the depths for the blink of an eye, then gone forever! Who knows he was even here? The sea is eternal, Japan immortal! I am and I shall vanish, scatter like spray, perhaps only to be the shadow a tree casts at sunset…’

It’s no accident that Takeo Hirose would soon become a national hero in the imperial and increasingly-militarised Japan – later during World War II, kamikaze pilots would model themselves on him.

Stefan Żeromski shared similar admiration for this Japanese readiness to lay down one’s life, even going so far as to suggest it could be a model for Polish society. In his drama Róża (Rose), his fascination for Japanese heroic sacrifice finds its way into the words of the character Czarowic:

In just a few decades, the Japanese have become a people who’ve astonished, dazzled and blinded the old world. Every Japanese – not just the samurai but even the peasants and labourers – renounces life and every earthly pleasure when it comes to the highest good. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of these sacrifices. It’s enough to mention the Battle of Mukden, the immortal order of General Hayashi – ‘Shiné!’ [Die!] – and its unwavering execution. The Polish nation stands at the other end of that ladder of sacrifice. […] Thus the Polish nation remains in bondage, the most humiliating known to human dignity.

From the Tatras to Fujiyama, or Miciński’s land of the golden chrysanthemum

Illustration by Magdalena Brudzyńska depicting Polish-Japanese literary connections – with the Tatras and Mount Fuji. The illustration comes from the exhibition 'The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi', presented at EXPO 2025 Osaka from 3 to 23 October 2025, Knowledge Capital in Osaka, photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska for IAM.

Tadeusz Miciński, the leading fantasist and myth-maker of the Young Poland era, was also captivated by the Japanese nation’s inner strength, even if it, as Barbara Podraza-Kwiatkowska notes, ‘cultivated a decadent strain in his work’.

During the Russo-Japanese War, he penned two specific anti-Russian poems that praised Japanese heroism: Hymn do Wschodzącej Jutrzenki (Hymn to the Rising Dawn) and Bitwa nad Jalu (Battle on the Yalu). In the former, he wrote:

In the dark of night, Orion gleams
Above the giant Tatra range –
My spirit soars there – beyond the sea
To the land of the golden chrysanthemum:
There dwells a valiant people of knights,
For whom death is dearer than dishonour –
There, above laurel-wreathed shores,
the volcano Fujiyama burns bright.

For Miciński, the mystique of a nation of knights for whom ‘death is dearer than dishonour’ melded with his Eastern fascination, which he saw as a source of renewed energy that could heal Western civilisation. Japan, embodied by Mount Fuji, recurs alongside other Eastern motifs in his magnum opus Nietota: The Secret Book of the Tatras.

In that book, linking the spiritual life of a nation with its natural landscape, he made Fuji the universal symbol of the Japanese national spirit:

A people must have its soul before it, in full majestic form, like a mighty mountain rising above marshes and plains – its whole spirit from its forest of impressions below, its higher thoughts in its sheer cliffs – rolling boulders of doubt in its deserts – its icebergs of faith that sparkle in the sun and in starlight in the dark – feeding rivers and clouds! Just as the Armenians have Ararat, so the Japanese gaze a thousand miles into their volcano Fujiyama – this is their national life’s symbol, their symbol of the soul itself.

By analogy, the Polish equivalent of Fuji, the mountain toward which Poland’s gaze should be turned, would be Mount Giewont in the Tatras.

Literary professor Jolanta Wróbel-Best notes that these affinities could be why Miciński’s work is currently quite popular among Japanese Slavic scholars (including at the University of Tokyo), some of whom are translating his famous poetry collection W Mroku Gwiazd (Stars in the Dark).

Hiroshima-Auschwitz, or never again…

Hiroshima, Japan, view of the city after the atomic bomb explosion in August 1945, photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

It wasn’t just the nearby threat of the Russian Empire that nurtured Polish gestures of solidarity and empathy towards Japan. After World War II, and throughout much of the Cold War, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became potent reference points for generations of Poles living under the shadow of nuclear threat. The poet Władysław Broniewski, known for his patriotism and war experiences, wrote:

The twentieth century cracked the atom.
Hiroshima fell.
The atom hung over the world –
Will nothing stop it?

Broniewski had shown solidarity with Japan even earlier. In 1923, upon hearing of the catastrophic earthquake in Kantō, he penned the poem Yokohama, which included imagery of the tsunami that compounded the city’s devastation.

In the 1960s, Poland and Japan, although they were then in opposing political blocs, found common ground in the anti-nuclear peace movement. Its inception is often dated to 1962 and the Hiroshima–Auschwitz Peace March undertaken by four Japanese activists starting in Hiroshima. They reached Auschwitz on 27^th January 1963, the 18th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. In their manifesto, they declared: ‘Hiroshima is a symbol of resistance against nuclear war, and Auschwitz is a symbolic plea that such inhuman deeds must never happen again.’

As Holocaust researcher and Polish studies professor Ariko Kato explains, the aim of the activists was solidarity in their call for peace under the banner ‘No more Hiroshima. Never again Auschwitz.’ From this melding emerged ‘Hiroshima-Auschwitz’, a concise symbol capturing the twin horrors of the 20th century.

It was in this historical context that Krzysztof Penderecki composed his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). Other popular works also echoed the theme, such as Violetta Villas’ song Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Cover of Joanna Rudniańska's book 'Dreams of Hiroshima'; photo: public domain.

The spectre, and simultaneously the bogeyman, of atomic annihilation epitomised by Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunted Polish society throughout the decades of communism – even after its fall. Visions of nuclear catastrophe – present in evacuation drills, children’s fears and punk-rock songs like Dezerter’s Atomowa Śmierć (Atomic Death) – survived the Cold War. Their expression in contemporary literature might be found in Joanna Rudniańska’s 2019 novel Sny o Hiroszimie (Dreams of Hiroshima), which tackles postmemory and the Hiroshima-Auschwitz-Warsaw complex in a postmodern vein. The tragedy of Hiroshima also appears in her book for younger readers, Bajka o Wojnie (A Fairy Tale about War).

In recent years, the threat of nuclear disaster was revived after the Fukushima meltdown in 2011. Polish cultural responses include Julia Holewińska and Tomasz Szerszeń’s play Hiroshima/Love and Katarzyna Boni’s Ganbare! Workshops in Dying (2016). The latter was one of the most celebrated Polish reportage books of the 2010s, translated into English, Czech and Ukrainian.

Polish masters of haiku & tanka

Czesław Miłosz, photo: Janet Fries/Getty Images.

In this last section, let us look at the Japanese inspirations found in Polish poetry from the second half of the 20^th century. Although it is worth remembering that Japan left its mark on Polish verse well before this period. For example, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz experimented in 1919 with the ancient uta form in his poetry, resulting in his tome Oktostychy (Octastichs), and in 1926 Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska included Japan-tinged poems in her Pocałunki (Kisses).

More recently, both Stanisław Grochowiak and Czesław Miłosz independently embraced the haiku. In his 1978 tome Haiku-Images, Grochowiak crafted his own particular formula for lyrical miniatures, ones we can safely say are unlikely to fulfil Japanese criteria for the genre:

I gathered a leaf of autumn and awoke an old man
People come to the mill where I die sitting in silence
by the light of a torch

‘Wisdom’ by Stanisław Grochowiak, trans. AZ

Whereas Miłosz not only composed haiku-like pieces in late collections such as To (That) and A Roadside Dog, but he was also productive as a translator. Translating from English, he brought haiku classics from both Bashō and F. Moritake into Polish. His own unorthodox haikai include:

On straw-yellow little hills,
above the cold blue sea,
black bushes of the thorny oak

‘Zachód’ (Sunset) by Czesław Miłosz, trans. AZ

Extraordinary. A house. Tall.
Surrounded by air. It stands.
In the middle of a blue sky.

‘Z Okna u Mego Dentysty’ (From My Dentist’s Window) by Czesław Miłosz, trans. AZ

It seems that in the case of this particular poet, his interest in haiku has been blended with his fascination with sensory concreteness, mindful poetics and sudden epiphany – all these qualities align Miłosz with haiku’s Zen roots. The art historian Beata Śniecikowska even calls him a haijin, a Japanese haiku poet.

A different poetic form from Japan, the aristocratic tanka, captivated Zbigniew Herbert. His poem Wagon, written after Emperor Hirohito’s death, honours Hirohito as a tanka master who wrote ten thousand poems, including ones about iron railways. It was precisely this work that became the focus of the Polish creator’s attention – and a pretext for deep reflection on conservative attitudes and the ‘future of traditional poetry’.

The eminent Japanese scholar Tokimasa Sekiguchi argues that the poet managed to put his finger on ‘Japanese reality’: ‘Zbigniew Herbert penetrated the depths of Hirohito’s tanka. Without that understanding, he could neither have felt compelled nor been able to write Wagon.’

I consider the poem ‘Wagon’ to be an exemplary work in which the ‘cultivation of the vanishing art of poetic contemplation’ has truly come to fruition. However, this occurred not within Polish-language literature, but within the already remarkably transcultural texts of world literature.

From ‘Hirohito dla Zbigniewa Herberta’ (Hirohito for Zbigniew Herbert) by Tokimasa Sekiguchi, trans. AZ

The Japanese core of Szymborska’s poetry

Hiroshige Andō, 'Evening Shower over the Great Bridge and Atake' from the series 'One Hundred Famous Views of Edo', photo: public domain.

Discovered a century earlier by the artists of Young Poland, Wisława Szymborska came to Japanese art in the late 20^th century, penning a poetic commentary on the famed woodcuts of Hiroshige Andō in the collection People on a Bridge. She observed that, in these Japanese prints, time itself seems to come to a halt:

Time has been stopped here.
Its laws are no longer consulted.
It has been relieved of its influence over the course of events.
It has been ignored and insulted.

On account of a rebel,
one Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being who, by the way,
died long ago and in due course),
time has tripped and fallen down.

Excerpt from ‘The People On The Bridge’, trans. Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh

Meanwhile her iconic poem Nothing Twice resonates with a sentiment attributed to the 16th-century tea master Sen-no Rikyū, who voiced a similar opinion.

However, as Sekiguchi notes, Szymborska’s lyricism, and its underpinning philosophy of kinship with all beings, reveals deeper affinities with Japanese Buddhism and traditional metaphysics.

These qualities found in Szymborska’s experience of the world and poetry, which the scholar describes as radical and open, particularly resonate with the Japanese Sekiguchi. The scholar finds elements of them in poems such as A Speech at the Lost-and-Found (‘I’m not even sure exactly where I left my claws, / who’s got my fur coat, who’s living in my shell’), A Note, Among the Multitudes, A Few Words on the Soul (‘We have a soul at times. / No one’s got it non-stop, / for keeps’) and I Am Too Close. In this latter poem, we read:

[…] And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues. […]

Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh

Sekiguchi even likens some of her lines to koans:

The sky is everywhere,
even in the dark beneath your skin.

Extract from ‘The Sky’, trans. Baranczak & Cavanagh

Polsko-japońskie imperium chmur

Cover of Jacek Dukaj's novel 'Cloud Empire' (2020).

Japan has not ceased to fascinate Polish writers in the 21st century. Apart from the previously-mentioned works by Boni and Rudniańska (the latter also wrote the 1998 dystopian novel Miejsca [Places], set in a world reminiscent of a fantastical Japan), recent explorations have been created by Marcin Bruczkowski (2004’s Bezsenność w Tokio [Insomnia in Tokyo] and other novels), Joanna Bator (her 2004 reportage Japoński Wachlarz [Japanese Fan] and 2014’s Rekin z Parku Yoyogi [Shark from Yoyogi Park]) and Karolina Bednarz (2018’s Kwiaty w Pudełku: Japonia Oczami Kobiet [Flowers in a Box: Japan Through the Eyes of Women]).

One of the newest Polish texts weaving together many of theses Polish-Japanese threads is Jacek Dukaj’s 2020 novel Imperium Chmur (Cloud Empire). Acting as a sequel to Bolesław Prus’ 19th-century classic The Doll, it follows Stanisław Wokulski and his friends into an alternate reality. In Dukaj’s world, Japan pursues a different path of modernisation and emergence from centuries of isolation.

Here, a metal lighter than air invented by the recently deceased Professor Geist takes on military significance when O Ho Kyi, an emissary from the ‘Country That Does Not Exist’, brings the technology to Tokyo.

Dukaj’s narrative arcs back to the epoch we began this article with, the Russo-Japanese War, imagining an alternative version in which Polish-Japanese cooperation and the sky-borne Ships of the Iron Spirit, products of Polish genius, both play decisive roles. What more could a reader possibly want?

_^Sources:_{^{‘Nie-byt w Wypożyczonym Kimonie' (Non-being in a Borrowed Kimono) by Katarzyna Fazan; ‘Leci Bomba Leci – Atomowe Lęki Dzieci w PRL’ (A Bomb is Falling – Children's Atomic Fears in the Polish People’s Republic) by Zuzanna Grębecka; ‘Japonia w Kulturze i Sztuce Polskiej Końca XIX i Początków XX Wieku’ (Japan in Polish Culture and Art of the Late 19th and Early 20th Century) by Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik, 2016; ‘Widzialny Porządek czy Ukryty Wymiar? Haiku-Images Stanisława Grochowiaka’ (Visible Order or Hidden Dimension? The Haiku-Images of Stanisław Grochowiak) by Anna Krawczyk; ‘Wprowadzenie: Ponad Retoryką “Hiroszimy–Auschwitz”’ (Introduction: Beyond the Rhetoric of ‘Hiroshima–Auschwitz’) by Ariko Kato [in:] ‘Holokaust i Hiroszima w Perspektywie Porównawczej’ (Holocaust and Hiroshima in Comparative Perspective), edited by Ariko Kato and Jacek Leociak, 2020; ‘“Jaki Jest Piesek? Śliczny”: O Recepcji Twórczości Wisławy Szymborskiej wśród Japońskich Studentów (‘What is the Puppy Like? Beautiful’: On the Reception of Wisława Szymborska’s Works among Japanese Students) by Barbara Morcinek, 2012; ‘Historia Stosunków Polsko-Japońskich’ (History of Polish-Japanese Relations), vol. 1 by Ewa Pałasz-Rutkowska & Andrzej T. Romer; ‘Inspiracje Japońskie w Literaturze Młodej Polski: Rekonesans’ (Japanese Inspirations in Young Poland Literature: Reconnaissance) by Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska, 1983; ‘…i Jak Motyle w Barwnym Ogrodzie… – Uwagi o Japonizmie w Twórczości Tadeusza Micińskiego’ (...and Like Butterflies in a Colourful Garden... – Remarks on Japonism in the Works of Tadeusz Miciński) by Hanna Ratuszna; ‘Eseje Nie Całkiem Polskie’ (Not Quite Polish Essays) by Tokimasa Sekiguchi, 2016; ‘Lekcja Uważności: Czesław Miłosz i Haiku' (A Lesson in Mindfulness: Czesław Miłosz and Haiku) by Beata Śniecikowska, 2014.}}

Originally written in Polish, translated by Adam Zulawski, August 2025

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