Ryoko Sekiguchi

Ryoko Sekiguchi (b. 1970, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese poet, essayist, and translator who has lived and worked in Paris since 1997, and writes in both French and Japanese. She publishes in France primarily with P.O.L.

Her work ranges across poetry, essay, and an inventive form of writing that uses food, culinary memory, and sensory perception as lenses through which to examine language, time, loss, and cross-cultural experience. Nagori: La nostalgie de la saison qui vient de nous quitter (P.O.L., 2018) — translated into English as Nagori: The Sense of a Season Passing — centers on the Japanese concept of nagori, the bittersweet awareness of the last taste of a seasonal food and of everything that passes with it, extending this into a philosophical meditation on impermanence and memory. Her poetry collections — Heliotropes (P.O.L., 2008), Calme et tranquille (2010), among others — move between the Japanese and French lyric traditions without belonging to either exclusively. She also works as a translator between Japanese and French, and contributes to the gastronomic and literary culture of Paris through collaborations with chefs, institutions, and publications. Her work has been translated into several languages.