MIYA ANDO

RAIN

Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Words for Rain is a visual and linguistic archive I created over the course of the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project comprises 2,000 Japanese terms related to rain, each paired with a drawing I executed using natural indigo, micronized silver, and graphite on paper. Ultimately published by The MIT Press in 2025, the work transforms a dictionary into a perceptual system: an index capturing rain’s multifaceted physical, emotional, and temporal dimensions.

I selected rain for this project because of its profound ability to evoke impermanence and mono no aware, concepts central to my entire artistic practice. Water of the Sky thus serves as a direct extension of my ongoing exploration of transience, material transformation, and the subtle rhythms of nature.

Drawing on historical sources, including Heian-era literature, Buddhist texts, and calendars, my interest lay in revealing a subtle precision in observing natural phenomena often absent in English. Through my translations, I sought to explore these lacunae: lexical gaps that reflect cultural differences in perception. This inquiry suggests how language encodes cultural values. When something is valued, it is given a name. Informed by my bicultural background, my work reflects a perspective shaped by cultural displacement, hybridity, and the navigation between languages and worlds. For me, translation is a perceptual act that aims to bridge Japanese and English, revealing what each language may embrace, omit, or find difficult to express.

The terms range widely: from the meteorological (mukaame, “very fine rain that falls in spring”) to the mystical (bunryūu, “rain that splits a dragon’s body in half”), and from the delicate (kisame, “raindrops that fall off leaves and branches”) to the vast (takuu, “blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe”). These words serve as titles for my drawings. Each is an effort to perceive, render, and imagine the unique quality of a specific kind of rain.

Link to purchase book.

The following are ten entries from the rain dictionary.