June 4, 2015Michael Mejiafrom Salaryman (A Certain Sorrow)

“Salaryman is a sequence of brief prose poems attached to candid photos of Japanese salarymen and -women I took during a recent trip to Tokyo, where I was researching a work of fiction. After a few days of watching these ubiquitous figures of contemporary Japanese business culture heading resolutely toward some destination or other at all hours, I began to envision a sequence of 36 views, echoing those of ukiyo-e artists Hokusai and Hiroshige, their images of Mount Fuji, bridges, and famous places in Edo. Though lineated, I conceived, and still think of the texts as prose. I didn’t intend these pieces to hold to the ‘rules’ of haiku. Rather, they appropriate the form’s concision and often its dicta concerning seasonal references.”