In a YouTube clip from February 2011, Hiromi Ito begins a reading of an excerpt from her narrative poem "I Am Anjuhimeko (Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru)" at the Museum of Modern Aomori Literature by banging the palm of her hand loudly and repeatedly on the desk in front of her. She sits down, squares her shoulders and launches into a recital that at first borders on frantic but soon escalates to a point that would be hard to describe otherwise. Her voice portrays urgency, confusion, panic and a desperation to convey a complexity of ideas at a rate that's nothing short of alarming:
none of that really matters anyway, but that's not what father says, he says let's try burying her in the sand and waiting three years, mother was willing to just go along with that, that was a big disappointment, but, well, here's the problem, I'm just a newborn who can't even see, and I can't even utter a word to talk back, so I was wrapped in my mother's silk underclothes and buried in a sandy spot near a river
"I Am Anjuhimeko" is based on an oral text passed down for more than 2,000 years in the northeastern countryside of Japan. In this gruesome story, the titular infant is maliciously disposed of but rises from her would-be grave and sets out on a journey of preposterous abuse and hardships to find her missing parents. Ito is not merely retelling the ancient tale, she is finding a place within herself where she can channel the spirit of Anjuhimeko (and at times in the poem, the girl's mother). She is offering herself up for possession to past mythical souls and the generations upon generations who have kept these stories alive. She is experiencing the horrors of the long-ago journey transcendentally first-hand. Hence the urgency, panic and desperation.