Machi Tawara

Machi Tawara is a Japanese poet and educator whose debut collection Salad Anniversary (Sarada kinenbi, 1987) sold over three million copies in Japan — a commercial phenomenon for a volume of poetry — and became one of the defining cultural events of Japan's late-bubble era. Written in the classical tanka form of thirty-one syllables, the poems reimagined the ancient form as a vehicle for the ordinary emotional textures of contemporary urban life: convenience stores, television, the daily increments of love.

The collection's accessibility made it a gateway to Japanese poetry for an entire generation of readers and restored public interest in the tanka tradition. Tawara has continued to publish poetry and has worked as a translator and scholar of classical Japanese literature.