For Instance Sweetheart: Forty Years of Love Songs (1970-2010)

An extraordinary love story unfolds in these pages more than forty years of a wife and husband balancing the reality of being in relationship with the truth of each their own-being through the exacting discipline of tanka poetry. Day by day they observed and concentrated their ever-shifting emotions into five-line capsules. It is not a fairy tale; all sides of love find expression here including its loneliness uncertainty and ephemerality even after decades of marriage. This record proves there is no ordinary in the everyday of human life not when it is borne witness to by poets with wide-open honest hearts. - Sonja Arntzen Professor Emerita University of Toronto translator of the Kagerō Diary and Sarashina Diary