Living in the Margins by Trish Shishikura
I.
I go by seasons, and for a few seasons in my life, I moved back to Japan and began to observe the world and to reconnect with my father and my roots. This time was very sacred to me because this was the period of my life when I began to ground the imagery I hold onto now. Distance from the craft was necessary because I needed to document everything I was experiencing—geographic, emotional, and temporal. The distance from the privilege of being able to process topics in poetry reshaped my relationship to experience. It was during this period that I turned to photography.
Photography reminded me to delay interpretation. When shooting, I learned to take multiple frames of a single subject in motion without pausing to judge myself or my work, allowing visual logic to generate itself before meaning is imposed, but setting parameters. Like creating a sonnet, I learned that while every image begins with intention, and what happens between moments can only happen once. A photograph may be technically reproducible, but the experience of encountering it is not. This discipline of delay and the eventual selection of the hundreds of photos I end up taking in photography altered how I returned to language.
The physical recklessness that photography taught me informed my poetics. I began to apply this same “suspension” to poetry. I allow the line to unfold first, allow the imagery to connect itself, then let it sit in the narrative without explanation. This is to say that I somehow seem to resist clarifying a line before it has learned how to hold meaning. While every poem begins with intention, I deliberately withhold any interpretation or meaning upon writing it in the early stages so I am able to write in its purest iteration.
II.
While the work engages with intimacy, writing is not a means to confess. The persona, rather, allows for a transcription of lived experience—one that holds historical and psychological significance beyond the individual. Grief, in this manner, is no longer just about the poetic “I”; it becomes part of a collective consciousness.
In my earlier years, I was taught to displace the speaker to obscure truth. Returning to the work with greater distance, I learned that persona is not a mask meant to evade responsibility, but a structure that allows experience to be shaped, accumulated, and returned to with control. To replace actual hurt with poetic intent creates a boundary between the speaker and the author, ensuring that the poem remains an object rather than an event.
The persona has become my primary method of grounding and containment. I learned this from the poetry class of Nerisa del Carmen Guevara, and have since applied it to my writing. Through persona, I can engage with volatile material—domestic violence, sexual assault, psychological instability—without converting it into spectacle. Of course, to protect the truth from premature exposure, certain details would need to be replaced, and in doing so, the poem becomes its own story with realities built by its readers. Omission and replacement allow the wreckage to appear on the page without direct representation. In this sense, persona becomes an ethical decision: a way of allowing the poem to engage with truth without reenacting harm.
Having been taught how to open streams of consciousness early in my poetic journey, I rely on the suspension of meaning rather than pure, grounded realism to access emotional truth. The aesthetic foundation of my writing was heavily influenced by Hayao Miyazaki’s world-building and the dream-logic in Haruki Murakami’s novels. Nick Joaquin also played a huge role in my foundation through his ability to incorporate magical realism in narratives set in the Philippines; his writing is often laced with gothic imagery. Their collective work grants me the framework to construct a personal logic—where flowers can smother bodies, or where prisoners have stones for eyes. [1]
III.
Language in my work follows this same logic of suspension. I code-switch as a record of how my speech patterns move under pressure, to emphasize certain diasporic realities that inform my writing. Because neither language nor imagery moves in a linear manner for me, using the lexicon I have of both Japanese and Filipino, I allow these to arrive on the page as jagged fragments. The languages in my poems surface according to use, memory, and emotional necessity rather than hierarchy.
Writing from the margins of Japanese and Filipino cultures, I treat mistranslation as a condition I am born with. In “Gaps,” this is made explicit as an ongoing erosion of memory: the speaker forgets how to write her name in Kanji [2]—a mark of literacy, how to write her father’s name, and how to pronounce her mother’s maiden surname. This loss maps directly onto the Tagalog words, kanlungan and kulungan, demonstrating how safety and collapse can be easily misinterpreted for one another.
In this practice, I do not fully write in Japanese or Filipino; instead, I work in English as a language of proximity—this is a neutral language I am able to write from without struggle or shame.
By being faithful to the specific lexicon I have gathered, I am able to write the lived experience of a Nikkei[3] removed from her country of birth. The mind relies on neuroplasticity to survive trauma. The irony is that while it adapts selectively by forgetting intimate details—the shape of an eyebrow, the sound of someone’s voice, or what an ex-lover’s back looked like naked—it also preserves the exact stroke counts for terms carrying emotional gravity, like 通夜 [4] or 真面目 [5].
By refusing fluency, the work resists closure in favor of accuracy. The poems become a site where these gaps are not repaired, but documented. In doing so, this quietly solidifies my ethos as a writer who strives to explore the liminal space that my fellow hāfus [6], Nikkeijin, and Japinoys navigate.
IV.
In this manuscript, Skincare Routine in the Afterlife, grief manifests through excess rather than moderation. Images escalate and mutate not for spectacle, but to mirror the disorientation we go through in a state of loss. In “Setsunai [7],” the home is not just abandoned but overrun by an infestation of flowers; in “Where Music Could Cry for Us,” decay is displayed through a father’s nail undergoing necrosis; in “Vermillion”, trauma alters the persona’s landscape until the city becomes a cemetery under a grey-toned skyline smeared with blood against a phosphorescent sky. This series of imagery is a formal response to psychic overload brought on by intense grief, and this experience informs my craft in every way possible.
The persona is not just a witness to violence or death—she absorbs them until the boundaries between the body, domestic space, and the environment dissolve. Domestic interiors collapse into hospital corridors and hallucinations: cold tea sweats through glass, while a room smells of bleach, a red light blinks at 12:53 AM marking a departure, a woman appears with tentacular arms.
This surreal, hyperbolic logic extends directly into the visual archive of the much broader manuscript. These photographs do not illustrate the poem, nor do they function as an ekphrastic response. Instead, I’d like to think that they construct a flowing narrative. By placing image and text in diptychs or as a sequence, the photographic selection generates friction, another layer to peel off—another page to turn.
The friction becomes most acute in the sequence dedicated to my father, “Where Music Could Cry for Us.” The images embedded here are not staged editorial frames like what I do for my professional work; these are the only photographs I have ever captured of my father during his lifetime. Embedding this personal archive into the text, I grant the reader a visual opening to the precise reality of his presence and where I am writing this from—my father holding an acoustic guitar, my father holding a cigarette as he sits across from me in a jazz bar in Koiwa.
Opening this personal archive of photographs is an act of visual context and intimacy with the reader. By showing the quieter side of my photography and weaving the narrative with it, the work gives access to a reality that carries more than an aesthetic accessory posted online.
The photography grants entry to the poetry and its lived reality of different shades of grief spilling into color: phosphorescent reds and electric blues, miniature dioramas dripping with the color I associate with setsunai, a shadow of a hand hung under an object that looks like a noose. There is also friction in capturing a moment without the subject looking directly at the camera, and the lens records external artifacts of what my memories carry.
V.
If grief provides the structure, I suppose the body provides the site. When domestic violence and global catastrophe turn the home into an unstable, unsafe structure, the body becomes the site of control and discipline. The room becomes your only world.
In the title sequence, “Skincare Routine in the Afterlife,” care is not a wellness or aesthetic gesture. Instead, it is a deliberate, survival-driven labor. It is so difficult to maintain routine when mental and emotional stability erode. The obsession with micro rituals functions as a mechanical audit of the body—cleansing once with oil, again with foam, scraping dead skin, likening the self to a hardened sponge. Informed by cognitive behavioral practices of physical grounding, these tactile steps act as sensory anchors, pulling the dysregulated mind back into the physical container of the self. What happens to language when the home shows signs of distress? It retreats into these daily sequences: step-by-step lineation punctuated by forward slashes, imposing strict spatial boundaries on volatile memory so the persona does not dissolve into the room’s wreckage.
The accompanying visual archive is my direct physical iteration of this impulse to contain. Trapped indoors during the height of the pandemic in the Philippines, terrified of contracting the virus outside, I learned how to downsize the studio lighting and visual grammar of fashion photography into microscopic spaces. I began capturing different forms of liquids; I began to capture the micro details in everything I created—air bubbles trapped under acrylic sheets, backlit flower petals, objects frozen in ice. In this collection, I also realized how my shots gravitate toward people’s hands, my own hands. These micro-landscapes at the time were a form of escape from the looming threat of COVID-19, in hindsight, they were attempts to force the external threat of the global pandemic into a tactile space I could still control.
From images of a hand wading in pool water to a figure standing before the ocean—grounding himself in prayer before paddling out, these movements function as a somatic retethering of the mind to the body. Routine becomes vital structural scaffolding, particularly within a neurodivergent practice navigating sensory overload. This routine is built explicitly for someone in grief. For when walls cave in, the routine of self-care reminds us how to return to the present—like muscle memory practiced over a lifetime.
VI.
After a long pause in writing in my twenties, I returned to poetry to record grief as I have witnessed it in myself and others. Not to relive it, not to remain a vessel for grief, but to be able to honor that grief. Today, poetry exists in the same cosmos as my photography. My current creative aim is to place both in the same book.
I write as a long-term practice of perseverance. Underlying this work is the tension of a life well-lived—a life worth documenting, remembering, photographing. I began writing again as a way to express the photographs I could not produce after my father suddenly passed away. What seemed like a craft I had left behind in the past came back rushing to me so instantly the moment I started typing, after six years of not writing.
Many writers and artists have an affinity for what remains unresolved in life. In this vein, I used writing to process my father’s death, and in a way, writing my book answered all the questions I had.
My debut collection, the end comes on without a gasp (published by Ateneo de Manila University Press earlier this year), surveys grief across larger landscapes—divorce, familial loss, migration, identity, romantic failure, sexual deviance, and sociological and ecological collapse. The poems in this little red book of mine carry an archive of my poetry for over a decade. I started writing it when I was twenty years old, and I am thirty-three years old today.
Poetry and photography are how I can vividly hold onto fragments of life, of history, of people’s stories and memories. The ambitious, multi-sensory aspect of my current work is an area for both me and my readers/viewers to imagine beyond the poem—to experience the poetry with photographs that have their own unwritten narrative.
Skincare Routine in the Afterlife, on the other hand, operates more on the tactile aftermath of grief—what the emotional dysregulation can do, how hallucinations might arise while undergoing psychosis, and how the body quietly deals with the wreckage grief has left. When I first wrote this paper, I mislabeled it ekphrastic. Yet, upon closer examination, the poems and photographs work together as a flowing narrative to deliver a cinematic narrative where neither element overpowers the other.
After publishing my first book, I realized that my poems now function on their own, outside of me. Since its release, several readers have reached out to me with their thoughts on the book, and some even mentioned how it became their everyday companion through their own mourning (one lost a friend; one lost a father). The poems in my first book have now become a record of something shared, something communal—a record of survival, and a heavy reminder that the poems are what the self leaves behind to be understood.
index
[1] I am referencing the poem, “An Other Country,” from my book, the end comes on without a gasp.
[2] nikkei: Japanese diaspora; Japanese emigrants and their descendants, including people of mixed ancestry.
[3] kanji: Chinese characters used in Japanese writing.
[4] hāfu: Japanese slang for a person who is half-Japanese.
[5] pronounced as tsuya: an all-night vigil.
[6] pronounced as majime: a term called for someone serious or sincere.
[7] 切ない or setsunai: a deep emotion that stems from a yearning or longing, closest to the feeling of sad nostalgia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trish Shishikura (born Patricia Mariya Shishikura) is a Tokyo-born, Manila-based poet and photographer. She won First Prize for Poetry in English at the 71st Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards and the Ophelia Dimalanta Award at the 27th Gawad Ustetika. Her writing has appeared in Mekong Review, Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Softblow, and Tokyo Poetry Journal. Her debut poetry collection, the end comes on without a gasp, was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2026.
She has produced macro photography for Vogue Philippines, portraits for Condé Nast Japan, and editorial features for Cosmopolitan Philippines and Nylon Manila. Her commercial portfolio includes digital campaigns for luxury brands such as Versace, Coach Blue, and Louis Vuitton. Her recent exhibitions include Bloom, thereafter, and a solo digital exhibit for Make It Makati’s 10 Days of Art. She is currently represented by Artists & Company Manila.
