STEEP TEA: Kimura Noboku



"Born and brought up in a farming village in Ibaraki, Kimura [Nobuko b. 1936] attracted attention with poems that mix folkloric and dream elements. "A poem is born, not so much because I make one," she once said. "It's just that something spurts out of me and hurriedly presses me into writing it down." She started publishing her poems in her twenties and came up with her first book in 1971. Five books followed. Since the 1980s she had also published books of poems for children. A housewife since her marriage, she has remained independent of any poetry group."

--Hiroaki Sato in a preface to his selection of Kimura's poems in "Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology."

Hiroaki Sato stated somewhere else that while translating Kimura's poems for this anthology, he was so taken by her work that he translated and published a separate book of her poetry called "The Village Beyond."

Kimura's short poem "Mundaneness" evokes perfectly the dream-like domestic life that I was beginning then to share with my lover, the fierce desire to tear out of the solidifying substance of reality. I wrote "Broccoli" in protest against my life.

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