Komorebi
Photo by Kiwihug / Unsplash “Komorebi” — whose titular Japanese word closely translates to “dappled sunlight” — is an exercise in nature writing. It stretches the short story form in the way it documents environmental degradation, in the way it implicates the personal within the universal, and in the way it draws on emotional and material ways of knowing the world and writing about it. The sentences are kaleidoscopic; the nostalgic mixes with the prosaic, and the very personal loss of home is sublimated into grief for a world that may soon be lost too.
Written by Tanmayi Gidh and appearing first in The Kodai Chronicle, “Komorebi” turns climate into a narrative voice, a voice that may have verged on resignation if it weren’t for its intertwining of nature and the human. This thread, at once luminous and damning, dangles the promise of a saving grace as it dapples an otherwise dismal world with light.
— Raaza Guernica Global Spotlights