Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words, by Miya Ando, published last fall, is an artist’s book that attends to mono no aware in the natural world: “an empathy for the pathos of transitory things,” as she puts it. Ando has collected and illustrated 2,000 Japanese terms for rain. One hundred of the illustrations are presented in the book, although the second half enumerates all 2,000 words for rain.
Raised between “two cultures, languages, and geographies,” Ando grew up partly in her family’s Buddhist temple in Japan. In collecting words for rain she paid special attention to “Buddhist rain sutras, rain deities, and Amagoi (prayers for rain),” as well as “Heian-period women poets frequently sidelined in mainstream literary culture.” Her mother’s role as teacher of the Urasenke school of tea ceremony also influenced her selection. Many of these words are now archaic, and Ando sees part of her mission as stewarding nearly lost words for a new generation.
Ando’s drawings are made using graphite, micronized pure silver, and a traditional natural indigo dye, which, as she notes, “functions as a type of clock” – the longer a material is in it, the darker the hue. The resulting colors range from palest watery blue to nearly black, and she is able to evoke skies and landscapes across the full range of meteorological conditions, from hint of rain to violent tempest. There is an interplay between density, void, and a kind of foaming ephemerality that evokes Mahayana Buddhist notions of emptiness in form. Her work at times borders on abstraction alongside descriptors for rain that are minutely and elaborately specific.
Browsing these almost absurdly evocative words for rain is one of the joys of this book. It is difficult to limit quotation to just a few examples. They range from the improbably poetic (Amaochi Byōshi - Rhythm That Mimics the Raindrops Falling from the Roof, Used When Learning Shamisen) to the playful (Yōseibaiu - Whimsical Rain That is Changeable and Could Be Raining Buckets One Moment and Sunny the Next); the descriptively precise (Kataburi - Raining in One Place but Right Next to It is Not Raining) to the New England familiar (Yukigeame - Spring Rain That Melts the Snow); the gentle (Koame - A Tiny Little Light Rain) to the ferocious (Bunryūu - Rain That Splits a Dragon’s Body in Half); and the primal (Shigure no Somuru Yama - Mountain-Dyed Rain) to the elliptical (Ringaiu - Rain Falling Outside the Forest).
Ando is especially drawn to writers who describe their surroundings “with encyclopedic specificity and hyperlocal awareness of the changing micro-seasons.” Water of the Sky is an exercise in acute attention – to language, world, experience. It would be impossible to spend time with it and not have one’s perceptions of rain – of landscape and sky and water and sound – multiplied a thousand-fold. Why, after all, do we not have words for “Rain That Falls on Lilac Flowers in a Cold Region near the Sea,” or “Sharing an Umbrella with Someone / Romantic Rain”? We are alerted by these phrases to lexical voids in our own language and therefore perhaps in our experience, voids that are both flagged and filled by Ando’s work of translation, curation, and art. It is a browser’s delight, opening up worlds with every page.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.
