Brenda LOZANO

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Brenda LOZANO

Participating Project	Institutional Recommendation Program
Activity Based	Mexico
City	Tokyo
Period	2018.3 - 2018.3

Purpose of the residency

Twin poems - Project for a Novella

The project I aim to develop while in Tokyo is a reading, twice removed, of a poem and chronicles by Juan José Tablada, a famous Mexican poet from the early 20th Century. The narrator, a woman, travels to present-day Japan in order to follow the scholarly work that her mother, an academic, had done on Tablada's forays into the Japanese life and world of 1900. As the narrative unfolds, present-day Tokyo is juxtaposed with two previous pasts, that of the narrator's mother and that of Tablada himself.

In a way my visit to Tokyo centers on a sort of field work, where writing will be combined with visiting the sites and the places that Tablada described in his poem and in his chronicles of Japan in In the Country of the Sun, such as the paintings of Hiroshigué and Hokusai, the tea ceremony, Yoshivara, Yasukuni, Yanaka, see Noh theater, and also to visit some of the places that interested the mother of the protagonist, who finds notes and marginalia in Tablada's books, such as Jimbocho, Shinjuku's Gyoen National Garden, Ueno Park, Harajuku, among other spots, clues that will help the protagonist draw a clearer portrait of who her mother was. I'm also interested in exploring the relation between Tokyo and Mexico City from the Japanese point of view, and to be able to compare it with how Japan is imagined in Mexico.

Plan during the residency

- Writing.
- Reading with research purpuses.
- Visiting some places with research purpuses.

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