Laconic and highly sensual, former Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence Hiromi Itō's writing is surprising and disturbing, poetic and deeply moving. For decades, Japanologist and translator Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters) has been studying Itō as one of the most important voices in contemporary Japanese literature whose work transcends the confines of language and culture.

For the volume Garstiger Morgen – Texte von den Transitzonen des Lebens (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2025), Hijiya-Kirschnereit selected, translated and annotated 24 of Itō's texts – a mosaic of poetry, short essays, novel excerpts and nature writing. The collection gives German-speaking readers the opportunity to discover the many facets of this exceptional author, from her origin as a furious young poet – widely acclaimed and celebrated since her debut in the late 1970s for her cutting-edge themes and the freshness of her unmistakable style – to the present day. Itō's literary trajectory, which saw her address love and pain, birth and death, sexuality and self-assertion, betrayal and new beginnings, progressed through the 1980s in encounters with other cultures, first in Europe, then in the USA. Since the 1990s, questions pertaining to identity and influence, to the possibility and impossibility of translation, to cultural heritage and the crossing of boundaries in and through art have come to the fore in her work.

Included in the collection are texts that emerged from Itō's 2022 residence at EXC 2020, such as her concluding manifesto "Ich habe einen Traum". For the first time, the ballad "Ich bin Prinzess Anju" can be read in its entirety. Itō's contemporary feminist version of one of the most well-known medieval Japanese Buddhist legends was transformed into a dance performance of the same name in collaboration with koto player Kanoko Nishi and butoh dancer and former Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence Yuko Kaseki during Itō's second residency in 2023.

Alternating between contextualisation and close reading, between micro- and macro-analysis, Hijiya-Kirschnereit's afterword "Mit allen Wassern gewaschen – Ein Dichterleben – Extrakte aus 45 Jahren" retraces the author's extraordinary career on both an artistic and a personal level.

  

Hiromi Itō: Garstiger Morgen – Texte von den Transitzonen des Lebens. Selected and translated from Japanese, with commentary and afterword, by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin.

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