My Deepest Desire
By Hara Tamiki
Translated by Liza Dalby
Illustrated by Sandy Walker
New Village Press (2026)
ISBN-13: 978-1613322956
Review by Thomas Caffrey
This new release of Hara Tamiki’s My Deepest Desire, originally published posthumously in 1951, is a curious thing. Translated by Liza Dalby, whose credentials include the historical fiction The Life of Murasaki (2000), New Village Press’ edition is ostensibly a collectible in the vein of recent Murakami releases like Super-Frog Saves Tokyo: a single (very) short story is accompanied by sufficient images to justify a hardback publication. However, here the similarities end. This book is stark and elegiac. There is no fun or magical realism to be found in Hara’s final artistic statement, which is a gentle portrait of mental and emotional descent.
Hara was a Hiroshima-based writer. His life, defined by losses both personal (his wife died of illness in 1944) and collective (the following year, Hara was present at the bombing of Hiroshima), was brief, cut short by his suicide in 1951. His fiction has since been anthologised in nuclear literature collections like The Crazy Iris (1985), edited by Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe.
My Deepest Desire is Hara’s final work before his suicide. In the author biography appended to this edition, Hara is positioned as a poet and this work as a short story. However, My Deepest Desire resembles more of a series of remembrances than a story at all; the piece has a gently hallucinatory and languid quality, with little in the way of sustained external action. If there is movement to be found here, it is internal. Across the pages of this book, Hara considers stillness, the natural world, and the impermanence of earthly life.
The edition is smartly translated, adopting a deliberately simple and direct style that is well-suited to the emotional sparseness visible here. There are moments at which the words recall the work of later, more well-known icons of Japanese literature: the speaker attempts to ‘silently call’ (p. 21) out at one point, a twist on the same idea found in – or a potential inspiration for – Kenzaburo Oe’s The Silent Cry (1967). This is a novel that likewise engages the traumatic postwar moment in a Japan still attempting to rebuild in the wake of existential upheaval.
Hara’s prose poetry finds suitable accompaniment in Sandy Walker’s ink drawings. These dance upon the fine line between unbridled chaos and reservation, violence and subtlety: large, emotive splashes of black ink are suggestive of forms and shapes, often nearly coalescing to fixed images. A startling rendition of an explosive force (p. 16) is especially striking; Walker’s foreground is utterly dominated by an overwhelming oblivion that threatens to devour the scant fixed details he provides. The art is reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy in its expansive and suggestive brush work and ensures that this short work of fiction is one worth returning to again and again.
The book is not-for-profit; all proceeds will go to the Western States Legal Foundation, a public interest organisation for the abolition of nuclear weaponry. With nuclear weaponry, it is easy to focus on widescale destruction, referring at large to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the stately anxieties of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023). But the release of this book, alongside the now publicly available memoir Hiroshima, 8:15 from Hiroshima-based priest Tanimoto Kiyoshi, refocusses the lens of nuclear discussion. Yes, cities are demolished and flattened, but so too are individual lives. The destruction is not bound to one moment in time, it is continuous and inescapable. In the introduction to Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (1990), Richard H. Minear writes that Hara killed himself in part due to President Truman’s 1950 declaration that nuclear weaponry would likely continue to be employed. Let Hara’s work stand as testament that atomic weaponry ought never reappear on the battlefield.