The Unbearable Heart by Kimiko HahnKaya Production, 1995

Details like: the smell of garlic and how it lingers, how bedtime stories start in Japanese. Repitition of lines as one way to fragment the text, words inserted another, quotations (Barthes, Flaubert, Said) another still. Splitting the text open, splitting open sorrow: this is a book of elegies for a dead mother, and they are sometimes difficult and sometimes awkward and sometimes quite beautiful.