NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

LAST RAYS OF LIGHT is a collection of 100 Tanka. The author was born in 1913. She married Satarô Satô in 1938 and was widowed in 1986. These tanka were written between 1955 and 2000.

As her translator writes

The soul cannot count. It does not cast a shadow of thirty-one — or any other number of — syllables. Rossetti found it in "a cup of three", many haiku poets find it spread out in sixteen or eighteen petals and Satarô's soul sometimes cast thirty- or thirty-two-petalled shadows; nor does Shima's soul calculate what effect a tanka ought to have in translations down the line. Her tanka are already translations of her soul, the English becoming a translation of a translation and thus at three Platonic removes from reality. She would concur that we readers and translators (and writers) should not lose sight of the soul for the syllables.

Here are a few for today

	The ocean
	off the vast beach
	of Oristu roars
	exactly
	as an ocean should roar

		Whenever I come
		to the restaurant
		of the department store
		I observe others like myself
		dining alone

	Scads of magnolias
	loomed and lingered
	until
	at last
	autumn came

		From the hill
		the gale I thought raging
		turned out to be
		the sea's
		roaring

	Having still
	something to fret over
	goes to show,
	at least,
	that I'm not in my dotage.