Translator's note by Malinda Markham

In Japan, Kawata's work is noted primarily for its stark, vivid depictions of life -- not so much life as lived by a specific person, but more the sense of "living-ness." To the Japanese eye and ear, Kawata's poetry cuts through to the "overwhelming mysteries" that lie beneath everyday activities, and it does so with necessity. Hers are aggressive poems that look frankly at what it means to be a Japanese woman both inside Japan and away. Although she uses traditional natural images such as skylarks and lilies, her work is permeated just as often with elements of the body. Constant images of blood, ovaries, and physical decay, combined with a sensibility that verges on surrealist, undercut the typically quiet, "submissive" exterior that we usually associate with the public persona of Japanese women.

Time of the Sky is comprised wholly of very short poems reminiscent of tanka and haiku. In an interview, Kawata states that when she was writing the book, she chose an abstract title because she couldn't connect language with the concreteness of actual experience. Although she expected never to be able to write longer poems, Kawata expanded into free verse and short prose poems after moving to Italy. Her writing style began to include Western images, especially of art and cityscape, although primary themes of isolation and anger, and images of objects bursting into flame, remained. One of the challenges of translating her shortest poems is expressing the feeling of accretion that arises when reading a whole body of her work. Certain emotions and images occur so frequently that they gain power and connect closely enough that I decided to group three short, numbered poems under one title, chosen by myself. The individual poems and the numbering remain true to her work in Selected Poems, published by Shichosha Publishers in 1994.