Mom's Japanese Senryu Collection

Mom's Japanese Senryu Collection

Senryu is a Japanese form of short poetry

This is another post of mom's talents. Mom was Japanese and she enjoyed Japanese Senryu.

She was very good and a member and treasurer of the Tacoma Senryu Ginsha. This was a group of ladies that would get together and practice poetry. They would compete against each other and against other groups locally and nationally.

This was very serious business for mom. She worked hard and she was very good. She got so good, that for awhile she was barred from competing in some competitions! So what did she do?...

If any of you are Stephen King fans, you will remember when he wrote under the name Richard Bachman(Running Man, The Dark Tower, Thinner, etc). Immediately fans were not fooled and knew it was him.

Well...thats what mom tried to do, write under a pen name. And Immediately they knew it was her. So eventually they made her an honorary judge and she was able to compete again. She wrote all the way up to early 2020, when she lost part of her vision to a stroke.

One of the issues with Senryu is, that the Japanese doesn't always translate well to English. So although some are translated with English titles(there's one in the middle of the picture) they may not hold the same emotions or fluidity.

Last memory..even when I was younger mom had several trophies in her room. (They go back to the 1970s)...I used to show my friends and tell them, that these were her karate trophies. My friends were scared to death of her..ha ha!