My favorite thing about having published Bells is the connections it has brought. Nakayama Hiroyuki, the Dai-Anraku priest who appears in the book’s first chapter, called those links between people ‘kizuna’. He described relationships as a kind of web of light that draws one person to another.
It gives me great pleasure to read how other people interpret the concept of time
This year the filmmaker Cordelia Alegre finished a short to promote her mother Victoria Paradilla Canet’s wonderful translation of Bells, which the Madrid publisher Capitan Swing brought out in 2022. Cordelia sourced footage of Daibo’s coffee shop, and spliced together newsreels from the Pacific War and the modern city.
She has created her own work of art, which I celebrate.