“The fundamental nature of reality is that all constituent forms that create the universe are temporal and impermanent. All things are impermanent. So the depiction of that in rain, I just thought, rain is so overlooked.
It's just so everyday, and yet it's really wondrous if you start looking really, really, really closely at it.” - Miya Ando.
In Water of the Sky, artist Miya Ando offers us a beautifully rich visual dictionary for rain.
Through a collection of 2,000 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 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”).
The book presents 100 of these 2,000 drawings of rain accompanied by the full index of 2,000 Japanese words and their approximate English equivalents.