Sleeping Sinning Falling is a generous volume of selected and new poems, written over the last twenty-five years by one of the major voices in twentieth century Japanese poetry.

The translations are by Hiroaki Sato, who has published over twelve books in English translation. One of them, From the Country of Eight Islands, an anthology of Japanese poetry which he translated and edited with Burton Watson, won the American P.E.N. translation prize for 1982.