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For hours she would email with friends or draft her next tanka, a genre of Japanese poetry.

It connects the twists and turns in her life — a visit to see the Dutch masters at the Rijksmuseum leads to the discovery of tanka paintings — to her lifelong passion about justice in the world.

The TankaWanka is a form of verse that the Empress coined back in 2014, as a variation on the venerable Japanese tanka.

Alternating between tanka, a compressed Japanese form, and prose-poem obituaries addressed to various abstractions — “blame,” “privacy,” “reason,” “appetite” — Chang’s fifth collection for adults explores her father’s illness and her mother’s death.

As in the poetic form he preferred, the tanka, Miyazawa also closely observes the shifting landscape.