Thank you for Dylan Thomas’s words, and for the passage from the Bible I hadn’t known. Truly inspiring.

I first encountered Dylan Thomas through Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. When I watched it for the first time and Anne Hathaway started talking about “love” at a moment when a serious decision had to be made, I remember thinking, “oh come on, is this woman out of her mind?” But lately I’ve begun to realize that what I write may already be circling around things like love and guilt, something almost spiritual. Maybe I’m out of my mind too when I stand under the cherry trees.

When it comes to sakura, there is an unmistakable East Asian context. I wrote that piece while thinking of my friends from Korea and China, and my childhood friend who is Zainichi. While researching, I learned that Japanese communities who migrated to South America in the early 20th century also planted cherry trees in the countries where they settled. In Japan, the history of Japanese immigrants in South America is rarely discussed. I found myself imagining what those cherry trees must have meant to them.

There are still things I am too afraid to touch. Maybe this is just a starting point. It ached to write it, but I’m glad I did.

I was also thinking about Endō Shūsaku’s Silence while writing. Masao Maruyama, toward the end of his life, spoke about Japan in a tone not so far from Endō’s. Maruyama called it “古層” (koso). I hope to write about that someday.

And thank you as well for those lines alongside In Search of Lost Time. They really hit me 🐈‍⬛