"Please feel free to write about me and about my poetry.
It would be a great pleasure for me (and my poetry)
if my readers gain something and speak about it."

Akehiro Shirai has a calm and respectful demeanor. I gather this from his response when I asked to write about the poetry he has been publishing in Tokyo since 2002. Shirai is 39 years old, with a wife and a toddler daughter. As a poet, essayist, and photographer, his schedule is packed with readings and events—for example, last February he collaborated with ceramic artist Takuya Sudo for an exhibition at the Misuzudo Gallery in Tokyo's Chiyoda district.

Shirai's mother is from Okinawa, and he grew up listening to her dialect. One day, Shirai was walking along a cape on Hateruma (the Okinawan island that forms the southernmost inhabited point of Japan), and the poems just came to him by themselves. Shirai asked a traditional print shop to do a letterpress printing of the poetry on very fine paper. Sudo, Shirai's college buddy, created pottery inspired by the themes but not meant to correspond to any one poem in particular—the collaboration was much more organic than that.

Shirai's calm demeanor is reflected not only in his speech but in his use of the kana syllabic script which produces softer visual lines and sounds than the logographic characters of kanji. Although many Japanese-speaking poets use kana, they sometimes end up sounding childish or monotonous. Shirai, however, has a sense of balance that makes his poems the finest—like a field of powder snow and a steam of water, untouched.

For The Charles River Journal, Shirai has given me permission to translate a poem from his latest collection, Kusamakura (Kashin Publishing, 2007). The title translates as “In the Sleeves”:

そでのなか (Sodenonaka)

Coming back home
after drinking on a Sunday
I noticed you being just
like you always are.

You were watching TV
and you came to me,
fixed me some salad
and a bowl of rice, asking
“Care for some kim chee?”
—bring some to me.

Today’s gonna be a fine day
I thought in my foggy mind
which was working
better than I thought.

You said to me
“Do you want to see them?”
I didn’t see the paper bags
along the wall behind us
“I will change my clothes.”
You came back and

it was a blouse;
two extra ribbon-like cuffs
curl around
the dark azure collars.

Now I noticed why I’ve felt good
since I passed the entrance.
It’s been leaking
out of the paperbag.

I put both of my hands
in your unoccupied cuffs,
placed them on your shoulder.

Shirai and his wife share a deep-rooted trust. This could be a reason why his mostly kana-based works—like this poem—are mature and sharp even while Shirai maintains his life-is-a-gift demeanor.