Kimura Nobuko, who was born in 1936, has created a unique poetic world solidly anchored in born dreams and reality. As she once put it, for her “a dream is not just a set of images but an actual experience.” In her signature pieces the sense of absurdity reminiscent of Ionesco achieves a strong sense of realism and rationality. She has published six books of poems “for adult,” as she jokingly notes, and five books of poems for children.
Hiroaki Sato, who was born in 1942, is a leading translator of Japanese poetry into English. Among his forthcoming books are White Dew, Dreams, & This World: An Anthology of Japanese Women Poets (North Point Press, 2002); My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Mishima Yukio (Columbia University Press, 2002); and Snow in a Silver Bowl: A Quest for the World of Yûgen (Stone Bridge Press, 2002). He writes a monthly column, “The View from New York,” for The Japan Times.
