Some things are too vulnerable to say out loud. In Nervous Scintillations, Shoji Kaburagi writes them down instead.
These poems move through family, faith, and the isolation of carrying things unspoken: to a mother, a father, the dead. Sometimes he turns to nature: a tree, a waterfall, the land itself. The collection circles the same wounds without rushing toward resolution, pulling the reader in its emotional orbit. Amid its raw honesty, the poems reveal remarkable resilience, open but never lingering.
This is Kaburagi's first poetry collection, extending themes present in his earlier fiction. The poems move from distance into confrontation, tightening as they go. Slowly, something shifts. The final pages end in unexpected lightness, perhaps even in something closer to joy.