Description

The Work

From the Author’s Note:

I was born and educated in Tokyo and left Japan in 1988 to work with refugees in Thailand and Laos. While there, I gained perspective on the meaning of location, loss, and creating a home. Thailand is also where I met my American husband. Once he and I settled in Vermont in 1996 and started to raise our children, I began writing Japanese haiku and tanka as daily email messages to my parents, trying to give them a picture of my life here. Gradually, I began using that daily practice as a way to make sense of living in two worlds. In 2000 Judith Chalmer and I began meeting to translate my work into English. That process is yet another way of making sense of living with more than one version of what I know as the world.

The Edition

The poems in this collection are presented in Japanese and English set in Legacy Sans and Kozuka Mincho Pro and printed letterpress on Hahnemuhle Gutenberg. The title pages of the seven sections are each printed on a different color of Hahnemuhle Bugra in matching inks. The covers are Barcham Green Hayle depicting a snow field in an acrylic wash. There is a note on the text along with author and translator notes. The book is bound in the Japanese retchoso style and housed in a folder covered in stained tyvek. The edition is 74 pages, 7.5in by 7.5in limited to 100 signed and numbered copies. 2012