Poet Shuntaro Tanikawa also a translator of Peanuts

TOKYO - Shuntaro Tanikawa (right), Japan's most popular poet for more than half a century, died in Tokyo on Nov 13, at age 92.

His stark and whimsical poems, blending humor with melancholy, made him a kind of everyman philosopher ideally suited to translating the Peanuts comic strip and Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese.

The death at a hospital was confirmed by his daughter, Ms Shino Tanikawa, who did not specify a cause.

A perennial front runner for the Nobel Prize in literature, Tanikawa was a revered figure in Japan, not just in literary circles, but also among casual readers. It was common to see commuters reading his books on the subway.

He published more than 60 collections of poetry, beginning in 1952, when he was 21, with Alone in Two Billion Light Years - a book that heralded a bold new voice who shunned haiku and other traditional Japanese forms of verse.

Being alone and sneezing at the universe's bewitching tendencies were sentiments that echoed throughout Tanikawa's writing.

In poems like Before We Were Born, At Midnight In The Kitchen I Wanted To Talk To You and A Morning Takes Shape, he sketched the quotidian, beguiling and lonesome moments of daily life.