“This tastes great,” you said and so

the sixth of July—

our salad anniversary

Writing on the blackboard,

I pause to rest my hand—

in those seconds

think meltingly of you

Ultimately the appeal of her poems rests on their universality, on our recognizing as we read them “Yes, that’s just how it is!” or “I know that feeling, too.” She says she seeks to express the “swayings of the heart” (kokoro no yure); that she succeeds is clear from the reverberations she sets up in our hearts. In her own afterword to her poems she sums up by saying that “to live is to create poetry, to create poetry is to live.” It is ironic that (if we may believe her) Machi Tawara has no real lover; these real-sounding love poems spring largely from imagination, based (she says shyly) not on a particular longing for any one person so much as a general longing for human contact. That her poems have moved the hearts of so many, touching the lives of millions of people with whom she would never otherwise have had communication, seems to please her enormously.

Juliet Winters Carpenter
Kyoto, 1989

PUSHKIN PRESS

Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books—everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary.

Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world: we publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Antal Szerb, Paul Morand and Yasushi Inoue, as well as compelling and award-winning contemporary writers, including Andrés Neuman, Edith Pearlman and Ryu Murakami.

Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again. Here are just some of the titles from our long and varied list. For more amazing stories, visit www.pushkinpress.com.

THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF

GAITO GAZDANOV

‘A mesmerising work of literature’ Antony Beevor

BINOCULAR VISION

EDITH PEARLMAN

‘A genius of the short story’ Mark Lawson, Guardian

TRAVELLER OF THE CENTURY

ANDRÉS NEUMAN

‘A beautiful, accomplished novel: as ambitious as it is generous, as moving as it is smart’ Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Guardian

BEWARE OF PITY

STEFAN ZWEIG

‘Zweig’s fictional masterpiece’ Guardian

THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY

STEFAN ZWEIG

‘The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed’ David Hare

JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT

ANTAL SZERB

‘Just divine… makes you imagine the author has had private access to your own soul’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

BONITA AVENUE

PETER BUWALDA

‘One wild ride: a swirling helix of a family saga… a new writer as toe-curling as early Roth, as roomy as Franzen and as caustic as Houellebecq’ Sunday Telegraph

THE PARROTS

FILIPPO BOLOGNA

‘A five-star satire on literary vanity… a wonderful, surprising novel’ Metro

I WAS JACK MORTIMER

ALEXANDER LERNET-HOLENIA

‘Terrific… a truly clever, rather wonderful book that both plays with and defies genre’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times