The thesis Does the shadow have a color? is a poetic and essayistic experiment created from the notes of an observer facing unfamiliar cultural practices. This glance at foreign habits and changing seasons guides the research, which has as its main question what is Japanese poetry?, and is confronted with various answers. The prose afterword and especially the account in poem format are built using everyday life as raw material to narrate the shift from autumn to winter through the voice of a foreign student in New England whose research focuses on East Asian culture. In addition to notes in the first person, the poem also brings unidentified voices in conversations and overhead talks.