Nobuko Kimura has published six volumes of poetry, the first, "Collected Poems of Kimura Nobuko" (Kimura Nobuko Shishu), in 1971, and the most recent, "Going Around the Day" (Himeguri), in 1996. Although clearly in the Surrealist camp -- she draws both from her dreams and her everyday life to create a world in which fantasy and reality intermix -- Kimura subscribes to no established poetic group or school, and has created and maintained a distinctive poetic voice.
Now, the well-known essayist, poet and translator Hiroaki Sato makes the work of Kimura available to readers in English. When assembling his forthcoming "White Dew, Dreams, & This World: An Anthology of Japanese Women Poets From Ancient to Modern Times," Sato found that he liked Kimura's work so much that he decided to translate a number of her poems into English and publish them as a separate book. The result, "The Village Beyond," contains 54 poems selected from Kimura's six books of poetry. Thus, in a single volume Sato has assembled a vivid summary of the poet's career, with the poems providing an emotional and imaginative autobiography of Kimura.
In his introduction, Sato quotes Kimura as saying that in the beginning, her poems were made by "faithfully recording [her] dreams" and that for her "a dream is not just a set of images but an actual experience." Later, she explains that if the poems did not seem right, she began to add elements of real-life experience, embellishing the poems with her inventive imagination. It is a compliment to her that the seam between dream and reality is invisible.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.