Time of Sky and Castles in the Air

Author: Ayane Kawata

Translator: Sawako Nakayasu

Publisher: Litmus Press (2010)

Time of Sky and Castles in the Air is the first full-length translation of Ayane Kawata’s poetry to be published in English. This single volume contains Kawata’s first book of poems, Time of Sky (first published in Japanese by Kumo Publishers, 1969), and her sixth, Castles in the Air: A Dream Journal (first published in Japanese by Shoshi Yamada, 1991).

Translator Sawako Nakayasu writes in the Afterword: “In Time of Sky we find terse lines that are unresolved—the tension is neither built nor released, but exists as if in its natural state, a note of music forever in suspension. It never arrives—it is and never was home.”

Of Castles in the Air, Nakayasu writes: “Its poems are derived from a notebook the author kept for 15 years, in which she recorded her dreams every morning upon waking…. The logic in these prose poems may feel familiar to us as dream logic, but we also find in them the complexity and anxiety attendant to of a lifetime spent living in a culture not one’s own, an ongoing reckoning with one’s dangers and desires, and the difficulty (and absurdity) of trying to communicate with others.”