Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words

Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words

Ando, Miya
Goodall, Hollis
Halifax, Joan

Hardcover

JapaneseLinguisticsIndividual Artists

Publisher Price: $34.95

ISBN10: 0262049864
ISBN13: 9780262049863
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Nov 4 2025
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.71
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.20 Depth: 8.10
Language: English
A breathtakingly elegant visual dictionary of 2000 Japanese words for rain, with 100 drawings in indigo.

In Water of the Sky, artist Miya Ando offers us a beautifully rich, bilingual visual dictionary for rain. Through a collection of 2,000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando describes the breadth and diversity of rain's many expressions: when it falls, how it falls, and how its observer might be transformed physically or emotionally by its presence. The words range from prosaic to esoteric, extending from the meteorological (mukaame, or very fine rain that falls in spring) to the mystical (bunryūu, or rain that splits a dragon's body in half) and from the minute (kisame, or raindrops that fall off the leaves and branches of trees) to the vast (takuu, or blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe).

Ando's visual interpretations of these terms are not so much illustrations as evocations, attempts to embody or imagine each rain's precise and essential quality. The book presents 100 of these 2,000 drawings of rain accompanied by the full index of 2,000 Japanese words and their approximate English equivalents, presented alphabetically using a hybrid Japanese-English alphabetization rubric.

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