I think I mentioned that when I met Aya Yuhki, just two weeks ago, at the tea with The Tanka Journal staff in Tokyo, she had already translated most of the tanka in Taking Tanka Home in the copy I had sent to her.
That had been my dream: that all the poems could be carried back to Japan in Japanese. However, I had to be content with only 15 of the 60+ poems in translation.

But now, since Aya got over the cold she caught on that day, she has translated all the poems. Just today we cleared the clouds of ambiguity that still surrounded the last 5 of them. I plan to do a second edition of Taking Tanka Home with Aya as the sole translator and with her introduction. She seems to understand my work! - another reason to be very thankful!

This means that those of you with your present copies of the books may someday have a rare book. From my calculation, only 50 copies of the first edition were printed.

I am very excited to see my dream coming true! And all the thanks goes to Aya Yuhki! May her tribe increase!