Chilean poet Tomás Harris's Cipango--written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author's best work to date--employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he'd reached the Far East ('Cipango, ' or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America--manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there--and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society. The author's vision is of a decadent, apocalyptic world that nonetheless contains the possibility for regeneration.