Printed Matter, “Tokyo’s International Literary Review,” which boasts of being Japan’s oldest English literary journal, can now claim to be Japan’s largest.

The 20th-anniversary issue, published last year, was more than twice its usual dimensions and volume, tipping the scales at coffee-table book proportions with 237 pages of poems, prose, reviews, translations, photographs and drawings.

Since its humble beginnings in the late 1970s as a collection of papers gathered from members of the Tokyo English Literary Society, Printed Matter has undergone a series of editors and contributors, developing from a sporadic mimeographed publication to small magazine quarterly and now a shiny, weighty, glossy-covered catalog. To launch the latest issue, the current editor, Edgar Henry, has assembled a cast of performers and artists from varied disciplines for an event dubbed Tokyo Rose, to take place Jan. 30 at Shibuya’s Club Asia.

The program will include poetry readings, opera arias, original films, pop bands, Shakespearean and Marlovian actors, modern and traditional Japanese dancers, improvisational comedians, shamisen players and a Theremin performance.

Authors and poets will read sections of their original works that appear in the upcoming issue of Printed Matter. Guest readers will include British poet Stephen Forster and Japanese contemporary poets Shuntaro Tanikawa, Naoko Kataoka and Keiko Ikadamaru.

The impetus behind the varied collective of talents assembled for Sunday’s show is the same philosophy that guides Henry in the format of Printed Matter.

“The show brings together a variety of artists who don’t usually get a chance to mingle,” says Henry. “We have all these acts that combine to create a huge variety show. The idea is to find a space and take advantage of this golden opportunity to assemble diverse talents doing their own thing, developing their own audience following and sharing this space with their audiences.

“That’s what Printed Matter is doing: creating a venue for a wide variety of local and international talents and having them come together under one umbrella.”

Promising further innovations in the upcoming publication, Henry enthusiastically hails a bigger, better and riskier Printed Matter. “Along with a great deal of poetry there will be several reviews, including Denis Doyle on Ted Hughes’ ‘Birthday Party,’ ” he says. Also, look for material by the renowned poets Shuntaro Tanikawa and Kazuko Shiraishi; poetry by Les Murray, “Australia’s greatest living poet“; five new translations by Bill Elliot of Tanikawa’s poems; and translations of Nietzsche’s poems by Forster.

An essay by Tim J.G. Harris on a poem by Christopher Middleton is a wonderfully instructive lesson in how to fully enjoy reading poetry. Harris’ explanation of Middleton’s poem “In Balthazar’s Village” reads like an anthropologist excavating for clues, digging up possibilities of symmetry, history and cosmic content.