essay by RYOKO SEKIGUCHI Japanese poet and writer Ryoko Sekiguchi began publishing in 1988. She moved to France in 1997 And has been writing in French since 2003. Presented here in an excerpt, her journal Ce N’est Pas Un Hasard (Éditions P.O.L., Paris, 2011) was written in the days following the March 11, 2011, tsunami and nuclear disaster, reflecting on themes such as the ephemeral nature of life in Japanese culture. In her most recent book, L’Appel des Odeurs (The Call of Odors, 2024), the narrator keeps a notebook documenting how smell influences our relations with space and memory. March 13 The Japanese poet Tatsuhiko Ishii arrives in Paris. Exhausted. He’s come to give a few talks and participate in a roundtable discussion on March 15, where I’ll also be present. His flight was confirmed, but since the airport shuttle seemed out of service, we thought until the…