Sublime

The Makioka Sisters,

Teishin,

zelkova tree

Makiko, the one visiting me today from Osaka, is my older sister. She’s thirty-nine and has a twelve-year-old daughter named Midoriko. She raised the girl herself. For a few years after I turned eighteen, I lived with them in an apartment back in Osaka, when Midoriko was just a baby. Makiko and her husband had split up while she was pregnant, and a

One of these was the haiku poet Taneda Santoka.

Haruko left a tiny laughing brass Buddha up high, in a corner of the attic, where he is still laughing to this day.

the ishitateso, “the monks who place stones,”