Translator: Aoyama, Miyuki
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A long rainy season : Haiku & Tanka
A thousand years ago women poets at the Japanese imperial court created a written aesthetic of unmatched elegance and technical skill. Today, Japanese women poets write with equal sophistication about romance, family life, and sexuality, and about divorce, loneliness, feminism, politics, and the West. In this landmark anthology of traditional short verse (the haiku and…
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Other side river : free verse
Japanese poets have been writing tanka and haiku for hundreds of years. Japanese free verse, however, is barely a century old, and women’s free verse in Japan is younger still. This collection, the second volume in the Stone Bridge anthology of contemporary Japanese women’s poetry, introduces the work of some three dozen of Japan’s finest…