Mizuta Noriko
水田宗子
The Road Home (2015)
Sea of Blue Algae (2016)
As a poet, Mizuta Noriko, has authored a half-dozen volumes in Japanese, earning the Cikada Prize in 2013. Her work is also enriched by her life as a scholar – in comparative literature, Japanese poetry/fiction, and American literature (Ph.D. Yale, American Studies) – and as a translator of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, E. Ann Kaplan, and numerous Japanese writers, collected in two volumes she co-edited with Kyoko Iriye Selden, Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction (1991) and More Stories by Japanese Women Writers (2011).
We traveled together to International Poetry Nights Hong Kong in 2015, hosted by Bei Dao (photos courtesy of IPKHK and Shinozaki Kayo).
The Road Home is available through bookstores in Japan, or though amazon.com elsewhere (purchase here). Sample translations from The Road Home are available at Poetry Kanto (2015 Edition).
Chinese University Hong Kong Press also published a small volume containing poems mostly from The Road Home, as Poem in Blue (2016) available in the U.S. through Columbia University Press. Reviewed by Joel Swan in Hong Kong Review of Books.
Several of my translations of poems from Mizuta's latest collection, Shadows and Flowers and, have been published in The High Window (Fall 2017), available here.