Book “My Deepest Desire” by Tamiki Hara/Sandy Walker/Liza Dalby~A poetic work about being free from the burden of loss and tragedy

04/14/26

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• A poetic work about the yearning to live and love fully, free from the burden of loss and tragedy

   

  My Deepest Desire is a new translation of Japanese poet Tamiki Hara’s final work accompanied by full page ink drawings of American artist Sandy Walker. Hara’s writing offers surprising magazine Gunzo after Hara’s tragic suicide in 1951. articulation of the feelings that affected this revered writer who lived through both the loss of his beloved wife and the bombing of Hiroshima. It was first published by the Japanese literary

  Hara’s prose poetry and Walker’s art make a grippingly moving meditation on the desire to live a different, fuller life, free from pain, isolation, and the intrusively haunting experience of tragedy. It is a demonstration of how dreams, memories, and traumatic despair intertwine inside a person’s psyche. Liza Darby’s English translation coupled with Walker’s art is followed by the original Japanese text, as well as closing calls for peace from the president of Mayors for Peace and the director of Western States Legal Foundation.

  

  My Deepest Desire, by atomic bomb survivor Tamiki Hara, is based on his story first published in Japan in 1951. A short yet grippingly moving meditation on the desire to live a different, fuller life, free from pain, isolation, and the intrusively haunting experience of tragedy, it is a demonstration of how dreams, memories, and traumatic despair intertwine in a person’s psyche.

  All royalties from the book will be donated to Western States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public interest organization founded in 1982 for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

  Tamiki Hara

  Author Tamiki Hara (原民喜 Hara Tamiki) (1905–1951) was a Japanese writer and poet. Born in Hiroshima, he lived through the atomic bombing in 1945. In the years preceding his death, Tamiki Hara wrote about the destruction he witnessed in autobiographical short stories and poems, making him a known figure in the atomic bomb literature genre. The anniversary of his death has been designated as Kagenki (花幻忌,lit. “flower vision mourning”), and literary admirers hold an annual memorial at the Tamiki Hara monument in Hiroshima.

  Sandy Walker

  Artist Sandy Walker is a painter, printmaker and visual artist. He is the recipient of the prestigious Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Visual Design, and his work is in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. A catalogue raisonné of his woodblock prints was published by Cicero Books in 2026. Walker lives and works in Oakland, California.

  Liza Dalby

  Translator Liza Dalby is an anthropologist specializing in Japanese culture. Her nonfiction books, Geisha and Kimono, have become classics, and her best-selling historical novel, The Tale of Murasaki, has been translated into nine languages. Dalby’s memoir, East Wind Melts the Ice, is a gardener’s diary and an enlightening excursion through cultures east and west. Dalby lives in Berkeley, California.

  Western States Legal Foundation (WSLF)

  Beneficiary Western States Legal Foundation (WSLF) is an NGO founded in 1982 for the abolition of nuclear weapons. WSLF recognizes that nuclear weapons affect the environment, the economy, the role of violence in society, and democracy itself.