Mass is defined by the second law of motion
And is in inverse proportion to acceleration when acted upon by various objects of the same size
But what universal law governs
That elusive object known as the soul . . . ?
I had read exactly that far when
The earthquake came

Pandemonium seeping from an article on the page of the morning news containing all the shocking news
Women’s sobbing leaking between the lines of the story
War cries filling the table of events

Voices packed tightly within the letters
In the voices, there is only breath
Only emptiness discreetly returned to silence

NOTES [1] This section is quoted from a song handed down from generation to generation at Aso Shrine, near Kumamoto. The song is chanted in the Onda Festival, which takes place each year as maidens clad in white bring food and sustenance to the god of the shrine. [2] Leaves of language (koto no ha): This is an ancient expression that means “words”. Here, it is used metaphorically in conjunction with the image of a forest. Land of roots (ne no kuni): An underground world where some believed that the dead would go. [3] Red mountain (akayama): The name Rothenberg means “Red Mountain”. Death mountain (shide no yama): An image from a death poem by the seventeenth-century poet Shiyō. Sheol: The Jewish underworld. Visionary fish: This image is from a Tanikawa Shuntarō poem entitled in the English translation, ‘Notes for ‘“Starvation”’. The phrase is in the eleventh section ‘Law’. [4] This section is narrated from the point of view of Izanami, one of the earliest goddesses of Japanese mythology. She appears as a major figure in the eighth-century Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), which recounts the mythological creation of the world through the history of the first emperors of Japan. [5] Monthly visitor (tsuki no mono): An old-fashioned way of referring to menstruation. Diorama: A reference to the diorama in the Mt. Aso Museum, which shows the ancient volcanic activity that created the region. [6] This is a quotation from a medieval French letter from Héloïse to her lover Abelard. The Japanese translation is by Hatanaka Naoji. [11] This is a quotation from the Ryōjinhishō (Songs to Make the Dust Dance), a medieval collection of songs. It appears in the section ‘Miscellany, 86 poems’. [16] This is a quote from Nihon ryōiki (An Account of Miracles in Japan), a collection of tales with Buddhist themes from the early Heian period. The narrator of this passage is a spirit talking about the sins she committed over the course of her life. [20] This section refers Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s story ‘Kumo no ito’ (The Spider’s Thread). In it, Buddha lowers a thread from paradise into hell so that the sinners there can climb out of their torment. A robber attempts to climb up the thread, but at a certain point part, he looks back at all of the people following him, and with this, the thread breaks, and he falls back to hell. [21] This section is a slightly modified quotation from the Kojiki. (See the note above for section four.) After the goddess Izanami died, her partner, the god Izanagi, went to visit her in the underworld, only to find her body infested with maggots. As he fled, she chased after him, and so he placed a boulder in a mountain pass to block her path. At that point, she cursed him, saying that she would take the lives of one thousand people each day form his land. With this legend, the ancient people of Japan accounted for the death of their people. [23] Hiragana: The phonetic syllabary used primarily for writing indigenous Japanese words. Katakana: The phonetic syllabary used primarily for writing transcriptions of foreign words. Kanji: The characters borrowed and adapted by the Japanese from China. Raptor: The Japanese refers to a specific kind of raptor, namely a kite (Milvus migrans). The translation uses the more general category of bird to avoid potential confusion with the child’s toy. [24] This passage refers to a chigayakuguri, a bunch of branches woven together to form a large circle used in Shinto purification rites. One sometimes finds these circles in the grounds of Shinto shrines so that visitors can walk through and purify themselves. [25] 840 million thoughts: This is a reference to the Jōdō Bosatsu Sutra, which states that this many thoughts visit a person over the course of a single day. Perfect circle: The eighteenth-century monk Shisui, when asked to write a death poem by his followers, grasped his brush and wrote a circle in ink as he died. [26] This passage is from a Haida Indian song collected in the northwestern part of the North American continent. The Japanese translation is by Kanaseki Hisao and appears in the book Mahō toshite no kotoba: Amerikan Indian no kōshōshi (Language as Magic: Oral Poetry of the American Indian). [27] Kettle: According to Japanese folklore, tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs), were tricksters who could change their shape and deceive people. One disguise particularly favored by tanuki was that of a tea kettle. If a person were to ladle water out of a tanuki-turned-tea kettle, the water would never run out. Folklore also states, however, that tanuki are rarely able to transform themselves completely. Usually there is some place that remains undisguised; for instance, at the back of the tea kettle, one might find a tanuki tail. [30] Koko: Pronoun meaning “here”. Asoko: Pronoun meaning “over there”. The small nouns crying faith: A quotation from the poem ‘Psalm’ by the American poet George Oppen.