Wild Hearts: Literature, Ecology, and Inclusion

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest editor Anjoli Roy.

The winter edition features writing from Japan, China, South Asia, Australia, and North America, including pieces translated especially for MĀNOA.

Among the contributions are fiction by Barry Lopez, Leo Litwak, and Andrew Lam; a performance piece by South Asian playwright Manjula Padmanabhan; journal entries by Donald Richie, the preeminent American expert on Japanese cinema (and longtime expatriate); poetry by Yang Zi, of the PRC, and Arthur Sze, of New Mexico; translations of bhakti poetry by Andrew Schelling; an interview with Aaron Woolfolk, director and writer of The Harimaya Bridge, by Honolulu artist Calvin Collins; and four natural history essays by Robert Bringhurst, Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and Anna Tsing.
An essay about the late avant-garde poet Ryuichi Tamura (1923–1998) written by poet Kazuko Shiraishi—and translated for Wild Hearts by poet Yumiko Tsumura—immerses readers in the life and thought of Tamura. Originally published in a collection called Landscape of Poetry: Portraits of the Poets, Shiraishi’s essay helps us understand the mind and soul of Tamura from the perspective of an equally accomplished fellow writer.

Manjula Padmanabhan’s performance piece, Hidden Fires and Other Monologues, attempts to render the senselessness and absurdity of human violence and destruction, but ends on a hopeful note—an invocation:

In the names of ourselves, in the powers invested in us as citizens of a free nation, I make this invocation. In the names of those who have already died, I make this invocation.…
Let us be done with violence. Let those who have indulged in violence be named and punished. Let those who have died in violence be named and remembered.

Wild Hearts also features Japanese woodblock prints by artists of the Edo period (1615–1865) and Meiji era (1868–1912), courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The prints depict elaborate tattoos seen on mythical and historical heroes, kabuki theatre actors, samurai, a bandit, and a courtesan and her lover. The works included are by master artists Kitagawa Utamaro, Toyota Hokkei, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Utagawa Kunisada, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Additional artwork is by Nick Edards, Lip Kee, Minakata Kumagusu, and Jacob Lange.

Photograph of bat with baby by Nick Edards.
A black-and-white version of this appeared
with “Flying Fox: Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant,”
Deborah Bird Rose‘s essay on bats.

216 pp. winter 2010 (22:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-3558-3
Project Muse
JSTOR