Not the End of the Broken World

Tianyi considers Yuki Tanaka’s debut collection “Chronicle of Drifting.”

By TianyiMay 31, 2025

• Poetry

IN SPEAKING OF LOSS, we face the challenge of embodiment; we can only reach the dead from the side of the living. Something vanishes and the wider world continues, obliging the physical rules and habits it always has. But the lived experience of grief rarely adheres to neat borders. People have visions of their deceased family and absence obscures even the most familiar rooms. Life and the afterlife refract each other as companion shadows.

Yuki Tanaka’s debut full-length collection, Chronicle of Drifting (2025), creates a corridor between the living and dead. Written as an extension of his chapbook Séance in Daylight (2018), Chronicle of Drifting enacts a surrealist crossroads, with lexicons spanning the natural, the bodily, the alchemical, and the oracular. The myriad sources of perception belie a mind in flux, embodying a desire to reimagine the mortal veil as more capacious and mutable than it currently seems. In this way, the poems move beyond the ornamentation of songs to the hard work of channeling grief in motion. As Tanaka forges through the uncanny waters of imagination, he reckons with what it means to wander the earth while longing for a less contingent existence.

The collection’s four sections follow a speaker meandering along a path of grief: from loss to desire to listlessness and finally to recommunion with the departed. The speaker roams from scene to scene like a flaneur, but from the onset his perspective is grim. “I look out the window: I don’t know which leaves will fall first or why. / There aren’t many trees left. Not much is left of this little town,” Tanaka writes in the opening poem “Prognosis at Midnight.” Indifference in the voice reflects the indifference of a decaying hometown. Where we might expect sorrow or agony, tragedies and moments of change in Chronicle of Drifting are reported in matter-of-fact statements. The bald descriptions foreground our diminished agency: even as a town is abandoned or a brother is killed in war, there is not much to be done; the poet may only watch.

In vatic, fable-like poems, Tanaka draws tableaux of injury and transformation until it becomes impossible to delineate where the real wound ends and the imagination begins. A friend returns home with his right leg shorter. A girl in a barren field presses twilight against her throat. A brother becomes a cicada shell that lets in too much light. An elegiac fever dream, the poem “Death in Parentheses” recounts the speaker’s attempts to connect with a friend, potentially a father figure, before his impending death. First by mimicry:

When he plucked an iris, I plucked the one next to it,
and we thought of purple evening clouds.
When he killed a butterfly, he’d take off the wings first,
then crush it with his fingers and smell it.
I tried to catch one, but it flitted away.

Then by disagreement:

[…] I nodded
and pointed out all the recent deaths, how quick they were,
tomatoes not as plump as they used to be,
the maple trees discolored, their branches
like veins with no fat around them.
All this, he decided, meant we needed new things.
But I disagreed on this: why new, why not
old me

The poem veers away from narrative before any interaction can be fully resolved. Each digression seems to thwart the speaker’s efforts to connect with the man. The patchy interactions mount until the poem concludes with a fatal pronouncement:

He opened his eyes, and held my hand
for the first time, and said, Don’t push yourself, come back
alive. He was buried in his ever-vanishing land,
and I flew off into my friendless life.

Tanaka develops a layered image system, superimposing domains that are otherwise kept separate: the self and the other, the inner and the outer, the animate and the inanimate. An early poem, “Seasonal Pleasure in the Time of War” begins: “Eyes of raisins, charcoal nose. / Come, winter of broad shoulders.” The unusual pairing of raisins and charcoal with parts of the body undermines our conventional sense memories. The eyes and nose are held as both within and without, inhuman and human. Rather than enter through our physicality, Tanaka’s images demand a more flexible, protean awareness. On this imagined plane, the lyric can cross the gap between realms, allowing Tanaka to place living beings beyond their earthly bounds.

The long titular poem expands this liminality in a series of untitled prose vignettes that are stained with restlessness. By “A trip to Kyoto,” characters appear to physically merge with the scene around them: “When he wipes the window with his finger, the field enters his forehead, leaving him in a flame. I stay empty, a blue outline.”

Once again, the parlance is unembellished. It normalizes the metamorphosis of a field entering a forehead, leaving the man “in a flame.” Establishing absurdity as the presumed mode of logic forwards a central argument in the book: that the experiences of mortality, survival, and loneliness are most honestly rendered through hybrid, alloyed perceptions. Fixed against this tension, the world absorbs into a place where strangeness resides even within a finger, its uncanny essence released with the slightest gesture. The poem frames a fractured and disoriented psyche. The blended image systems enact the bewilderment of loss. From the eyes of the bereaved, every character occupies a precipice: life after death meeting in an unstable dreamscape of hope and despair.

As he fuses internal and external spaces, Tanaka draws from his poetic and linguistic heritage. Many of the great haikus and tankas involve the poet reflecting on nature as a means to enlarge their lives. See Ono no Komachi in this well-known piece reflecting on the poet’s fading youth and beauty (tr. Jane Hirshfield):

While watching
the long rains falling on this world
my heart, too, fades
with the unseen color
of the spring flowers.

Tanaka applies this strategy to stranger territory. In Chronicle of Drifting, external occurrences don’t just instigate a reflection but also become participants in the speaker’s internal dialogue. The further the speaker falls into metaphysical rootlessness, the less distinguishable psychology and the material world become: “I watched the huge teeth of the horse, brownish, they said, from eating too many apples. Clack clack. I wished I could clack clack to wake my family up at night, to be noticed. Clack clack to wish the storm away.”

The Japanese surrealists wove evocative images directly out of the subjects of their inner life. Shūzō Takiguchi, first translated into a full-length English collection by Tanaka and Mary Jo Bang in A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems (2024), ascribes an angel-like form to youth:

On an alabaster night
everlasting youth
closes and opens like wings

A dream thundered in
and twigs lost the stability of stars

Binding human emotions to natural objects, Chronicle of Drifting similarly seizes the attar of the speaker’s interior. The vignette “The first haircut in months” nests repressed feelings into both a boat ride and a cup of light—the former representing an unsaid connection between two characters and the latter used to prompt the hairdresser’s unspoken feelings about going home: “Before she goes, I want her to look into my head like a crystal ball. I’d say, ‘There is a boat and we are in it.’ We’d linger a little, drink sake and compose poetry. ‘Here,’ I’d say, ‘is a cup of evening light. Articulate your feeling at sunset.’”

Nothing can stop time’s ongoing trudge. The speaker in the titular poem often imagines an absurd degree of transformation, and perhaps a persistent imagination is the only force that can bear the pace of mortality. “A doctor with horn-rimmed glasses” ends: “Loveless, I buy a hard persimmon at the grocery store, hoping it will soften overnight when I’m imagining sweetness.” And “The funeral of an uncle”: “Wanting softness, I leaned on the snow and let my body freeze, my eyes growing cold as winter eggs.” Or “I eat hot pot with my novelist friend in Shibuya”: “On my way home, I ask the sky to come down and keep me company, but the sky prefers its own boundlessness.”

The speaker’s desires grate against their implausibility: a persimmon will not ripen just because one thinks of sweetness, a person will not soften by touching the snow, and the sky will not come down at one’s request. Even as verse allows the self to touch the other, or the living to see beloved ghosts, the outcomes remain the same. Chronicle of Drifting is a tragedy that refuses to quit dreaming. We are unnerved by the speaker’s fanciful expectations for change, but we are also moved. The ultimate disappointment never compromises our willingness to run toward wonder with the speaker. We share his hope that magic will happen though we know it will not. We wish for a different future though we know it cannot be.

The result is not a life wasted on hope, but rather a life filled with séance and visitation, light-footed interruptions that cannot quite change the reality of present life. “Ghost in Waiting,” the first poem of the fourth section, at the peak of bleakness, finds the speaker amid an otherworldly presence. “He watches me through the oleander bush,” Tanaka writes. “We are not separate.” Afterlife animates this final section: we see evidence of how life manages to continue after death and how the dead can live on past their own lives. In “Discourse on Vanishing,” Tanaka surveys his speaker’s arc, noting in the middle that although the “world at the end of pain” is the same: “Now, life can swerve, leaving the afterimage / of its absence: an old wine bottle and behind it, / the arm of a woman, green sky flickering.” He proceeds to describe the new lives one finds in a boy’s “posthumous” dream: “This is an end in view, beginning / over and over. People spring to life, / watching the breath of a wounded animal.” At the end of the poem, Tanaka declares: “The earth stays still again. / This is not the end of the broken world.”

By now, the speaker is far enough from the constraints of mundane logic and perceptions that he is able to reconnect with the dead, albeit through a variety of artifices including the body, totems, and dreams. Notice the shifting of the speaker’s positionality and the scale of the interior in “Séance in Daylight”:

I was cold. I snuggled against her like a tall cat.

When she put the petals of a hydrangea on my eyelids,
I heard rain pattering behind them,

and I was a window from which she saw her friends
return: lights lit inside them, now alive, now burning,

moths in a struggle to escape their own wings
edged with fire. She waved at them and spoke

through me, fogging my skin with words I couldn’t hear.

Tanaka recognizes that though the departed have no foyer in the physical world, they can exist in the musculature of language: the poet becomes a room where deceased friends reprise, bodies are made of glass, and indeed, skin is fogged by words. Throughout the book, companionship has eluded the speaker, but in this moment of séance, we get the clearest portrayal of intimacy and hope: “I wasn’t cold anymore, her breath so warm, her cheek / pressed against the fragile glass, which was my body.”

The desire for the other to live endures. No poem or imagined universe can fully satisfy our deepest longing for the real thing, for the dead to return to us alive. What the poem can do, Tanaka shows us, is host a theater of our grief. “Evidence of Nocturne,” the final poem and the only sustained direct address, asks: “Whatever is singing above, come down. […] // This pile of wood wished to be a stairway / but couldn’t. Will you pretend to climb it.”

This is pleading but it offers a partial, waning salvation, one that must ultimately coexist with our imminent devastation. Tanaka writes poetry along the well-worn border between life and afterlife. However, his debut makes a field of that border, surfacing unforeseen paths of transformation. By the end of Chronicle of Drifting, we find a still-wild corner of the deep dream, a private room that continues the conversation, a hidden pasture where the river flows beyond its final boundaries. However implausibly, we long for such unified sites of being, only proving, of course, that we are still alive.