This April, my husband gave me tickets to Japan for my birthday—tucked inside a book, like a folded promise.
Japan had been in the back of my mind for years. Not just as a destination, but as a way of seeing: attentive, composed, inward-looking. That gift nudged something open. Almost instinctively, I reached for a book that had been on my family’s shelf for decades—A Branch of Sakura by Soviet journalist Vsevolod Ovchinnikov. Written in the 1970s, it’s a quietly brilliant portrait of Japanese culture and ways of seeing and thinking, shaped by the years he lived there.
My father returned to it often. He never travelled, never saw Japan—but in his own way, he got close. Books were his passport. The Branch of Sakura became a kind of shared map between us.
I wanted to pass that experience on — to my husband, and eventually to others. But, to my surprise, the book had never been translated from Russian into English.
So I began translating it myself.
Soft Copy is a weekly letter built around that process. Every Saturday morning, I send out a translated chapter, a few photographs and cultural references, and a short personal reflection. It’s not a literal translation, but a lived one — shaped by the rhythms of attention, and the pleasure of moving slowly through ideas that still hold.
It’s a way of staying in conversation — with the book, with the two men who brought it into my life, and with anyone drawn to thoughtful, steady things.
Season One runs weekly until November — ending the same week we fly to Japan. And then begins again, somewhere else.
Subscribe to follow along, one chapter at a time.
— A.
