Books by Kawano Yuko

An extraordinary love story unfolds in these pages, more than forty years of a wife and husband balancing the reality of being in relationship with the truth of each their ';own-being' through the exacting discipline of tanka poetry. Day by day, they observed and concentrated their ever-shifting emotions into five-line capsules. It is not a fairy tale; all sides of love find expression here, including its loneliness, uncertainty and ephemerality even after decades of marriage. This record proves there is no ';ordinary' in the everyday of human life, not when it is borne witness to by poets with wide-open, honest hearts. - Sonja Arntzen, Professor Emerita, University of Toronto, translator of the Kagero Diary and Sarashina Diary