Memories

A red-necked firefly, a queen from a deck of cards, a boat carrying a theater through town: in Kitahara Hakushū’s Memories, the smallest sensations open onto a lost childhood.

An autobiographical essay leads into poems of Yanagawa’s waterways and the mountain home of the poet’s mother. Sake warehouses, summer epidemics, garden flowers, magic lanterns, and popular performances fill a richly colored world. Wonder and affection stand beside dread, jealousy, and the uneasy awakening of adolescence.

The collection moves through children’s songs, sixty-one brief fragments, poems of vanished days, and the intimate sorrows of Tonka John, the name attached to the poet’s remembered younger self. Its final sequence preserves the voices and customs of Yanagawa, including the twenty-five numbered pieces of Sake Mold.