Translator's Note: The poem represents the author's reaction to the collapse of the silk and textile industry in her hometown of Kiryū in Gunma Prefecture, once a major Japanese center of textile production. In this poem, Arai imagines a person swallowing a silkworm, which begins to grow and creates its own silk factory inside her stomach. The poem was inspired by the Japanese expression “Nigamushi o kamitubusu” (literally “to squash a bitter bug in your teeth”), which is used to describe someone's expression when they are making a frown or grimace. Many of the textile factories in Kiryū had roofs that zigzag up and down like the teeth on a saw, hence the phrase “saw tooth roof” (nokogiri-yane) used in the poem. Glass windows would then be placed on one side of each “tooth” of the roof to let in light. In the final stanza, Arai imagines a mini-silk factory floating in the narrator's stomach, the colored glass in the saw tooth roof illuminating the interior. The lines “roll your hands, round and round, pull your eyes flat” (kaiguri kaiguri totto no me) are from a children's game. The child rolls their hands around one another as if they are rolling up thread on their hands like a spinning wheel, then after that, they pull at the corner of their eyes. Arai creates a variation on this song, imagining that the narrator pulls her own eyes out.