詩 Uta (Poem) – Tadao Sawai (1983)
“Several months before writing this piece, I read Ishimuro Michiko’s autobiographical novel, Memories of the Camellia Sea. I’m not a well-read person, however my wife likes books, and around the bed and in the toilet, books are piled up, so that when I can’t sleep or am bored in the toilet, I pick up a book in my vicinity and gradually read them. The book I mentioned before, Memories of the Camellia Sea also came into my hands this way, but I continued reading it. The beauty of the composition made it impossible to put down. Sometimes I even took it away on trips. This beauty from the beginning of the first chapter tempts the reader’s spirit with its tenderness. The tempted spirit then begins to float comfortably in the book’s moving descriptions. Also at the end of the book is a commentary by ‘oka Shin which is brilliant.”
“In the novel there is a paragraph that one could say was just like a verse of a prose poem. It came to life with its realistic description. It had in short the essence of the ‘poem’. I read the Japanese word for ‘poem’ as ‘uta’ and borrowed this character for my piece.” – Tadao Sawai