A Trip Around the World, Part 4

by with 6 Comments JapanMarriageParentingPoetryResearchRussiaTravelWritingYosano Akiko
[caption id="attachment_2568" align="alignleft" width="300"] Writing on train. (Photo by Chris)[/caption] It’s Sunday, July 2, as I begin this new entry, and my friend Chris and I are back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, having traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk and spent a day and a half in the town of Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal. It seems like we’ve been traveling for days, yet we’re not even halfway between Vladivostok and Moscow. We’ll pass that milestone sometime this afternoon. Akiko didn’t write that many poems about her train trip from Vladivostok to Moscow. But we do know about her Trans-Siberian journey from her account Pari made [パリまで、To Paris], which was published in four installments in the Asahi shimbun newspaper.* And I’m really struck by the differences between our two journeys. ...

Quarter-Century

by with 24 Comments GeneralMarriageParenting
[caption id="attachment_1050" align="alignleft" width="255"] August 15, 1987[/caption] My husband Dan and I were married 25 years ago today. In honor of this milestone, I share the following: A few weeks ago, an alarm went off in our house in the middle of the night. Dan got up to investigate. He returned a minute later and crawled back into bed without a word. “Was it the smoke alarm?” I asked. “Yeah,” he mumbled, clearly ready to resume his slumber. “What did you do?” “I took out the batteries.” “What?” I was now more awake. “But what if something’s burning?” ...