Today’s Guest haiku is from Mineko Takahashi, from Japan. She is an early-retired linguist who used to teach at universities. Now she teaches Japanese to foreigners living and working in Tokyo, so that they can pursue their career purposes.
Like many of us Mineko writes Haiku to express her observations and finds it really useful to attend meetings with other Haiku writers and get their thoughts and comments on her work. Her Haiku group is MIHC, which is scheduled to hold an international conference and publication of haikus and haiku related articles in 2018 commemorating it’s 25th anniversary,
Mineko invites all of us to participate in the 1-week conference in Tokyo in March or April 2019. She says it would be great if we submit our haikus to their monthly meetings via email. Apparently they have quite a few participants from abroad every month and for the international anniversary conference but would be happy to receive more participation.
Check out these links:
http://www.geocities.jp/yix04102/
http://www.association-francophone-de-haiku.com/afh/2019/Sakura_Haiku_Festival_2019.pdf
If you are a French speaker Mineko recommends the French language Haiku Magazine “Gong”
Where can you find Mineko?
She has Instagram accounts: “your_private_japanese_tutor” and “ur_japanese_tutor” which teach Japanese characters
At FB @yourjapanesetutor which discusses many facets of the language from the viewpoint of a foreign learner
Now for her Haiku.
What’s the background, the inspiration for this work?
She told me that at the “turn of the year I spent a week alone as my husband visited his mother in a hospice, now blind due to cancer.
So, it was a solitary end of the year and a beginning of the new year.”
She was alone and felt the year turning very quietly. This made her think about others, some people always have this quiet experience at this time, some people never have others around and would this change them?
She was driven to write this because of the surreal eerie fear of being alone at this time of year.
And so:
silently
changing years
man also
Mineko, that was lovely, really moving. Thank you.
