But Tawara does not limit herself exclusively to the vernacular. She avails herself of a wide range of Japanese, including classical words (“ones I particularly like”). Several makura-kotoba, or “pillow words”—traditional poetic modifiers—appear, and there are allusions to individual older poems and to the eighth-century Man’yoshu, Japan’s oldest poetry anthology. The language employed is thus not mere “young people’s Japanese” but a literate, sophisticated mixture of old and new—with emphasis, throughout, on new.

This combination of old and new is present in the opening poem (though impossible, alas, to suggest in translation):

Kono kyoku to kimete kaigan zoi no michi

tobasu kimi nari “hoteru kariforunia”

Always playing this song

you race along the seacoast road—

“Hotel California”

Here the word nari is a classical copula, contrasting with the modern, American flavor of the song title.

The same poem illustrates another feature of her work—the tendency for meaning to straddle, not coincide exactly with, the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic groupings. “Ki-me-te-ka-i-ga-n” (literally, “deciding seacoast”) is a 7-syllable cluster in the poem above, but decidedly not a unit of meaning in itself. Tanka are often described as “five-line” poems, but this is misleading in several respects—not least being the fact that they are almost always written in a single line in Japanese. All of the poems in Salad Anniversary appear in the original as a single vertical line, three to a page; however, several are interrupted with a space to mark a major break in the poem—a break which may appear at any point. In her second tanka collection, Toritate no tanka desu (“Fresh-picked tanka”), Tawara has experimented with writing tanka in two and three lines of various lengths (although she claims that “in her heart” she still thinks of tanka as a single line). In my translations I have generally adhered to a three-line format, and have aimed at brevity without attempting to duplicate syllable counts.

What has so endeared these poems to the Japanese public? One answer seems to be the cheerful, light tone—perfectly suited to the fresh, crisp, “salad” image. The emotions are genuine and deeply felt, but never bitter or overwhelming. The sadness of ending a relationship is balanced by relief, the decision swift and clean:

Like getting up to leave

a hamburger place—

that’s how I’ll leave

that man

She seems to be standing at a slight remove from herself, never totally lost in an emotion, but always partly outside it, observing herself and those around her with a light and coolly objective eye.

Although love, or the lack of it, is the main focus of Tawara’s poetry, she writes also of home and family; of life in a big city; of her experiences teaching; of music and cooking and baseball and the sea; of travels in China; of odd moments of sudden insight or whimsy, premonition, or surprise:

The day I left for Tokyo

Mother looked older by all the years

of separation ahead

As in the title poem, she values the ordinary things in life, the small events, finding beauty in them and in a life where every moment is intensely, fully lived: