Date: 2023-12-15 Pages: 368 I partially picked up this book out of curiosity at what a book called "Japanese Death Poems" would entail. After all, I'm not Japanese (I think) nor close to death (I hope), so this perspective would certainly be different from what I think about daily. Insights are scattershot throughout the book's consistent imagery — I've read enough haikus on Fuji, rivers, and dewdrops for a lifetime — with the effect of different poems likely appealing to different people. Whatever you do read, I hope it's not lost that each little haiku was a human being's final words, a set of syllables that someone centuries ago chose to share before walking out the door. My personal favourite — not due to resonance, or any clear factor beyond its intellectual novelty — was one where the speaker, essentially, thanked his body for its service, and hoped that him dying when the body requested was sufficient repayment. I've put my body through some absurd asks (little sleep, a diet of solely bread and cheese, veganism, extended fasts, hardly drinking water, lifting heavy weights on little sleep & a diet of solely bread and cheese & very little wat- okay, you get the point). I'm grateful on a daily basis that this vessel of mine has stayed intact; more precisely, that its capacity to recover has stayed intact. And if this body is borrowed, maybe the most logical option really is to return it on time. Maybe that's absurd. But I never would have even considered it in that sense, if not for the grace of Japanese Death Poems.