Leza Lowitz (born December 29, 1962, San Francisco) is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Biography
Lowitz grew up in San Francisco and Berkeley, and attended Berkeley High School, from which she graduated in 1980. She was accepted into the first year of NYU's School of Dramatic Writing at age 18, and attended NYU for two years before transferring to U.C. Berkeley. She received her B.A. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984 and her M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1988, where she briefly taught before moving to Japan. She studied with poets Stan Rice and Robert Hass.
During the 1990s, Lowitz helped to bring many modern Japanese poets and fiction writers into English for the first time. She was editor and co-translator with Miyuki Aoyama and Akemi Tomioka of the groundbreaking anthology: A Long Rainy Season: Contemporary Japanese Women’s Poetry (1994), which introduced Western readers to the haiku and tanka (waka) of Fumi Saito, Yuko Kawano, Machi Tawara, Akitsu Ei and thirteen others. Lowitz and Aoyama later published The Collected Tanka of Akitsu Ei (AHA Poetry Press.)
A companion volume, Other Side River: Free Verse (1995) featured contemporary Japanese women free-verse poets in translation. It contains the work of three dozen Japanese women writers, including well-known poets as Shiraishi Kazuko, Ishigaki Rin and Ibaragi Noriko, who appeared alongside emerging Korean-Japanese (Zainichi) poets Chuwol Chong, Kyong Mi Park and Ainu poet Mieko Chikapp, among others. The two volumes, A Long Rainy Season and Other Side River, reflect a variety of literary styles and present an astonishing political and social awareness of women in a still male-centered society. Western readers are offered a new perspective on the lives of contemporary Japanese women. In 1993, she collaborated with the shakuhachi master Christopher Yohmei Blasdel on a series of readings and musical performances from these anthologies throughout Northern California.
In 1995, Lowitz edited Manoa: Towards a Literature of the Periphery, another anthology of translated Japanese literature, with fiction by Kyoko Murata, Hiromi Itoh, Yoshiko Shibaki, Teru Miyamoto, and Ango Sakaguchi. In 2001, she edited Manoa: Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War, which contained essays by Donald Richie and Ishii Shinpei, last letters of kamikaze pilots (first-time in translation), testimonials from Taiwanese comfort women, voices of student nurses from Okinawa ordered to commit suicide, and war-related fiction and essays by Mishima Yukio, Hayashi Kyoko, Dazai Osamu, Kijima Hajime and Yōko Ogawa. The book also contains manga from Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa (translated by Frederik Schodt et al.), poetry by Tamura Ryuichi, Ayukawa Nobuo, Ko Un, Sagawa Aki, Ishigaki Choko, and war-related fiction by Mary Yukari Waters and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
In 2003, she and Hisako Ifshin translated the prison-camp haiku of World War II internee Itaru Ina, which appeared in Modern Haiku and later in the Emmy Award-winning documentary film From A Silk Cocoon, directed by Satsuki Ina. Lowitz, Ifshin and with Ralph McCarthy also translated the poetry of pop sculptor cum cultural icon Yayoi Kusama (Violet Obsession) in conjunction with Kusama's solo exhibition touring the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1998/99.
In 2004, Lowitz edited The Japan Journals 1947-2004 by Donald Richie. From the former curator of film at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the leading Western authority on Japanese film, The Japan Journals include post-war encounters with Yasunari Kawabata, D.T. Suzuki, Yukio Mishima, Toru Takemitsu and Bando Tamasaburo.