Tales

• Harbour Town
• Five Monsters
• The Commutation

Poems

• The Winter Slippers
• Persimmons
• Spider and Bee
• The Captain’s Walk in Summer
• Ozasa
• In the Spring Garden
• Memory and Flesh
• The Tobacconist
• It was on another morning

Photographs

• Shadowflowers
• Embracing Rivers – Persimmon leaf
• Naniwa rose
• Cicada’s wing in autumn
• Embracing Rivers – Cabbage leaf

Poems

It was on another morning

When the spring light fell into the arcade
As the last of the shopkeepers arrived
And shadows cast by the dirt on the glass overhead
Looked like fish and bladderwrack on the paving-stones

When the shutters began to clatter up
On the shops that still bothered to open
Along a gap-toothed avenue of commerce
That was new to the world in sixty-five

When Mr. Kadota started his perambulation
At the western end, as he does every day
Without fail, without an end in sight, without beginning
In any span of time one might recall

When he stopped at the cigarette machine
And put his money in to claim
His morning supply of thoughts and cautions
His retreat from excess ambition

When Mr. Kadota slipped the last
     of yesterday’s cigarettes
Into an ivory holder, put fire to the leaves, and started
     on the body of his perambulation

When the woman at the vegetable shop began
To shift boxes into the public gaze
And bent above her work to say
A crisp good-morning to the funny old man

When Mr. Kadota caught a glimpse of himself
     in the mirror of the hair salon, and saw
A funny old man – dark glasses in the morning light
     a cigarette in a holder, and an ancient bolo tie

When, in the course of his perambulation, Mr. Kadota came across
     the early merchants
The woman at the vegetable shop, the flower man
Those young men at the gaming parlour, and the supermarket girls

When Mr. Kadota arrested his perambulation at the corner
He looked back along the morning light
     to where he started out, and saw
A reward there after all, for an architect’s ambitions

Also from
Nishigawa Kobo

An Andalusian Dog’s Life
the case of my
detached retina
by Yaemi Shigyo

Click here for extracts.

Click here to order.