Miho Kinnas was re-transplanted from Shanghai to Carolina. Her poetry collection Today Fish Only was published by Math Paper Press in 2015, and her work also appears in The Classical Gardens of Shanghai (HKU Press 2016) and Quixoteca: Poems East of La Mancha (Chameleon Press 2016). Her translations have been published in Star*Line (2015) and Cha (2017)
Haruki Murakami
I buy his new book, Killing Commendatore, and get on the bus. It’s written in his usual style but sentences seem slightly longer. Does he use more layered adjectives? Or there are more parallel nouns.
The bus I am on turns left. It should have been the right turn. The machine voice names an unfamiliar stop. I’ve been on this route since childhood. The bus passes a grey complex. It skips a hospital with two ambulances parked outside. The sign on the street corner reads The Town of Boat in the Bay. I have heard the name before. Like a cat watching an intruder, I was ready to jump off any minute.
Oh, I know. Murakami uses more metaphors than before. Rather elaborate metaphors. I did check the destination when I got on the bus. I wonder whether a wife goes missing as she normally is in the books he writes. The voice says the next bus stop will be my usual stop.
~
He Who Loves Bullet Trains
If sadness has a shape, it’d be uneven.
Shin Godzilla steps, steps on houses, houses, houses.
Spatial memory builds along the track.
A missing piece is replaced. But.
If dream draws a line, it’d be disconnected.
Things don’t go as planned. Therefore.
A little fugue will ring at the next stop.
Shin・kan ・sen
It’s too fast; my heart is still at Tokyo Station.