Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

In her work, Takako Arai (born in Kiryū, Japan, in 1966) explores Japan’s history in the age of globalization and neoliberalism. Some of her best-known poems depict the textile industry’s decline in Gunma Prefecture, where her father owned an old-fashioned weaving mill. The women workers employed at the mill form the core of her avant-garde, politically engaged poems. Arai is famous for her bold, sometimes disturbing imagery, which critics have described as “wormlike.” In her poems, she skillfully uses different registers, rewriting familiar children’s songs or writing in phonetically-transcribed dialect. Takako Arai will speak about her work and read poems translated especially for the event.