MIYA ANDO

The MIT Press

Pre-order available August 4 2025

Book release date: November 4 2025

Hardcover
**$29.95**
ISBN: 9780262049863
Pub date: November 4, 2025
Publisher: The MIT Press
208 pp., 6 x 8 in, 100 color illus.

Water of the Sky

A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words

By Miya Ando

Foreword by Hollis Goodall

With Joan Halifax

A breathtakingly elegant visual dictionary of 2000 Japanese words for rain, with 100 drawings in indigo.

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.