Voice in the Dark

Rёko Sekiguti is a Japanese poet and a French essayist, known to Russian-speaking readers for her books “Nagori” and “961 hours in Beirut.” Whatever she writes about—whether it’s the Japanese feeling of the changing seasons, a Levantine city many-faced and many-voiced, the tragedy of Fukushima, and much more—she is invariably concerned with how time is made and how a person learns to coexist with it: keeping something in memory, pushing something out, savoring individual moments and not noticing how years pass. In this small work, where diary entries, a prose poem, and a philosophical essay intertwine, time reveals itself through the human voice—paradoxically, always sounding only in the present.