Words That Last

In her third memoir, Dr. Keiko Honda writes from a particular threshold: her daughter's room stands empty, her father's voice thins across long-distance calls, her mother speaks to her six times daily though she's been dead for six years. Living alone in Vancouver with her cat Pumpkin, Honda finds herself between languages, between countries, between the body she had and the body she inhabits now.

She turns to the Japanese poets who shaped her before she knew what poetry was: Matsuo Basho, w...