I am a woman with a question. I do not know what the question is, but I feel it driving me.
Zuihitsu. A Japanese literary form, introduced to me by poet Kimiko Hahn. A species unto itself, she writes. Stray notes expressing random thoughts; a feeling of randomness that is not really random. She stresses a sense of disorder, artfully ordered by fragmenting, juxtaposing, varying even the topic within a piece. She practices the form in The Narrow Road to the Interior.
Lingle, Wyoming, 1917. A woman emigrates from Japan with her new husband. Her name is Konami Kinoto Kubo. She and Ujiro Kubo settle in a small community in eastern Wyoming, where many Japanese farmers have made homes. The story has been told that he brought her to a sod house, which was so terrible she lost heart and wanted to go back home to Japan. But...
