11 Comments

What a wonderful essay! And thank you for the references, I am reading both. Regarding Damian Flanagan's A.A. Gill quote that there are two kinds of cultural criticism, I think I am come from a third type. Some of my thoughts about Japan come from years of study, but there are huge areas where I am a complete novice and feel very much like an outsider who notices things that aren't of interest to "experts." Or maybe I'm a fourth type, since he doesn't consider people who have grown up both inside and outside, the way I have--neither fully Japanese nor Western.

Or maybe my thoughts aren't even categorizable that way, and I'm just an odd duck.

I sometimes think about returning to my study of Arabic because I'm 100% an outsider there, and it's very relaxing to know exactly what I am.

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Mar 20, 2023Liked by Leanne Ogasawara

Omg! I love this! I'm going to keep coming back to this time and time (!) again . . . Everything you've written here. I dare say that the raft of incomplete poems using the pine tree is undoubtedly a reflection of these various accountings of silence and place, silence in space, the quiet of change inhabiting the infinitesimal of the dewdrop world in the grain of a sighting tree. . . :)

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i love this so much!

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This is one of my favorite dreams of dreaming!

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