WATER OF THE SKY: A DICTIONARY OF 2,000 JAPANESE RAIN WORDS
By Miya Ando
Foreword by Hollis Goodall
With Joan Halifax
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780262049863
Pub date: November 4, 2025
Publisher: The MIT Press
280 pp., 6 x 8 in, 100 color illus.
“In Water of the Sky, artist Miya Ando offers us a beautifully rich, bilingual, visual dictionary for rain. Through a collection of 2000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando describes the breadth and diversity of rain’s many expressions: when it falls, how it falls, and how its observer might be transformed physically or emotionally by its presence. The words range from the prosaic to esoteric, extending from the meteorological (mukaame, or “very fine rain that falls in spring”) to the mystical (bunryūu, or “rain that splits a dragon's body in half”) and from the minute (kisame, or “raindrops that fall off the leaves and branches of trees”) to the vast (takuu, or “blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe”).Ando’s visual interpretations of these terms are not so much illustrations as evocations, attempts to embody or imagine each rain’s precise and essential quality. The book presents 100 of these 2000 drawings of rain accompanied by the full index of 2000 Japanese words and their approximate English equivalents, presented alphabetically using a hybrid Japanese-English alphabetization rubric.”
Link to The MIT Press: Water of the Sky page
Reviews
“Miya Ando’s depictions of rain are not just visual—they are experiential. They draw the viewer into a state of stillness, inviting contemplation of the cycles of nature, the softness within strength, and the emotional resonance of water as both a physical and spiritual element. In her hands, rain becomes more than weather—it is memory, presence, and transformation.”
—Willa Blythe Baker, author of The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom
"This is the book you don’t know you need until you open it. After all, the subtitle is “A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words.” Miya Ando provides exquisite colored drawings of 100 of the words, including “Rain That Falls on New Leaves and Blades of Grass That Have Sprung Up in Spring,” “An Entire Town Is Hit with Rain and Wind,” and “Rain in the Moonlight.” No need to understand Japanese to marvel at the English translations and to be hopeful that you never get caught in the “Rain That Splits a Dragon’s Body in Half.” Shake your umbrella in gratitude to the MIT Press for publishing such a gorgeous book."
—AirMail
"Ando’s visual dictionary reveals the ever-unfolding altering, inside and outside. The wind swings, the weather moves, the light changes and changes again, in the moving mix of melancholy, euphoria, hum-drummy, all the bliss beauty and ache of a rainy day."
—Nina McLoughlin, New England Literary News Substack
"Blending meteorology, myth and poetry, Ando’s visual dictionary of 2,000 Japanese words captures rain’s countless forms – from delicate spring drizzles (mukaame, or “very fine rain that falls in spring”) to cosmic downpours (takuu, or “blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe”). Ando’s evocative art and language reveal rain’s physical, emotional and spiritual resonance, celebrating Japanese culture’s profound intimacy with weather."
—The Bookseller
“A meditative artistic practice that encourages deep reflection.”
—Kirkus Reviews
