Literary Critics

"Such "self-evident" one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations."

"The various positivities produced ... by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity."

"In the face of all kinds of derisions of all the many people, I still firmly believe in my mind that that unique village on the Japan Sea of which oral legend has handed down, the town where only cats' spirits live, must surely exist somewhere, in some part of the universe."

"[A]ll philosophers must surrender to the poet when they arrive at the end of their intellectual exploration. Only the universe that the poet intuits far above the common senses is the true metaphysical reality."

"The allure of travel gradually faded away from my roman. Once upon a time my heart danced just by imaging any of its symbols, a train, a steamship, towns of unknown foreign lands. Nonetheless, my past experiences taught me that travel is no more than the simple "movement of the same thing within the same space." No matter where you go, you find the same kinds of people live, repeating the same kinds of monotonous lives, in the same kinds of villages or towns. In any small town in the countryside, the merchant is fiddling with his abacus at his storefront, looking out at the whitish street all day, the public servant is smoking in his office, thinking about things like vegetables in his lunch box, as they live each tasteless, monotonous day the same way, day after day, watching their lives gradually grow old. The allure of travel came merely to project in my tired heart the image of an endlessly bored landscape like a Chinese parasol tree that grows in some vacant lot, making me feel a tasteless hatred and leeriness for human life in which identical rules repeat themselves no matter where you turn. In short, I lost interest in any kind of travel, the romance of it."

"Nothing contains a greater metaphysical mystery than the fact that a single thing presents two separate sides if you change the direction of your eyes, that a single phenomenon has a hidden "secret side." A long time ago, when I was a child, I would look at a framed painting hanging on the wall and become obsessed with the thought: What kind of world is secretly hidden behind that framed landscape? I often removed the oil painting to peer at its back. This question I had as a child remains for me, an adult today, as an unsolvable mystery."

"Darkness is like waves. On the surface of the sea where life is desolate, they roll in and break, break and roll in again. Ah waves of lust, waves of will, waves of evil thoughts that roll out and rise again. Waves, waves, waves, waves, waves of dark melancholy with nothing special to be said about it. Indeed, this lonely view always repeats its depressingly monotonous echoes on the dark surface of the sea under a cloudy sky. Let us then pass by the seashore, let us go step on the footprints on the dunes that recede into the distance. Let us meditate on the eternal time of nature, of the ocean, that reflects in the Buddha's lonely clock. Now on the surface of the crepuscular sea, watching the whitish waves of darkness that roll in and break, break and roll in again. Hearts on the beach where everything is so sad, crumbling with melancholy."

"I think of a mystery hard to solve universal life's instinct's solitary eternally eternally solitary a sentiment ever so flowery."

"[T]he octopus did not die. Even after he disappeared, he still was eternally alive there. In the antiquated, empty, forgotten water tank of the aquarium. Eternally—most likely through many centuries—an animal with a certain horrible deficiency and dissatisfaction was alive, invisible to the human eye."

"Father is eternally tragic."

"From cause-and-effect's destiny's fixed law's miserable dry plate of a landscape on which despair has frozen run away the pale shadow."

"The human lodges collapsed on the ground are asleep like huge spiders. In lonely pitch-dark nature animals tremble with fear and threatened by some Dream Demon are howling sadly pale."

"With rare words that adults do not know nature terrified us trembling like reeds we wept and shouted in the lonely wasteland. "Mo-other! Mo-other!""

"Suppose a mechanical man has a feeling? It will be nothing but boundless sorrow."

"In a field where bats swarmed I watched a pillar of crumbling flesh it trembled lonely in the evening darkness smelled raw like dead-man's-grass that flutters at a shadow and was as ugly as rotting meat with throngs of maggots crawling on it."

"Ah lukewarm as this spring night you who wander in a vermilion florid kimono you who are as gentle as a younger sister it's neither the cemetery's moon nor phosphorescence nor shadow nor truth and how simply so sad it is. And so my life and body go on rotting and in the shadow of the hazy landscape of "Nihilism" are sensuously yet stickily reclining you see."

"Ah in this landscape that trails shadows my soul clutches an itchy terror like a ship that has come from a harbor it has come crossing the islands with wraiths in the distance it's neither wind nor rain all of it a dark fear clinging to the sufferings of love and lust and at the dull flute-sound that a snake charmer makes my crumbling shadow wept lonely."

"Where is our happiness? The more we dig the sand in the mud the deeper the fountain of sorrow becomes, doesn't it? The spring wavering in curtains' shadow has gone away into the distance, rocking on a rickshaw."

"I close my eyes and try to chew the root of some grass to suck the juice of some grass to suck the bitter juice of melancholy indeed there's no hope for anything there life's just a series of meaningless melancholies"

"ah these terrifying shades on earth in this forest of sensuous illusion I gaze at the shadow of melancholy that gradually spread and my heart flapping its wings resembles the ugly look of a bird at death ah this sensation of unbearable sensual sex ever so terrifyingly melancholy."

"I have no more hope no more honor no more future. And irretrievable remorse alone scurried away like a field mouse."

"If those who have already committed suicide and are dead were to become alive once again and speak, they would probably talk of the actuality of this. They are all regretting ghosts in their graves. I think about this a hundred times and am still terrified, and I shudder even in my dreams."

"I have made poetry for a long time but I have less and less confidence in it. Someone like me is no more than a miserable blue cat's nightmare."

"Ah what's asleep in this large city night is the shadow of a single blue cat the shadow of a cat that speaks of the sad history of mankind the blue shadow of the happiness I never stop longing for."

"Longing for whatever shadow I longed for Tokyo even on sleety days, I thought, but leaning there on a wall in backstreets, and cold, what dream is this man, a beggar, dreaming?"

"Poetry always looks down on vulgar folk, transcends the air of the age, and honors the most noble and clear spirit—that is utterly natural in its essence."

"And my heart senses tears it's the heart that always plays quietly alone the heart is lonesome the heart, early in its youthful boyhood, cast a shadow on my life the gradually enlarging shadow of solitude the shadow of terrifying melancholy grows."

"[Poetry] is the voice of a blue heron calling in the marshes of life, the sound of a wind darkly whispering over the reeds on a moonlit night."

"Poetry always stands at the head of the currents of time, and most acutely feels and touches the feelings of the coming century. That being the case, the true value of a collection of poetry should be determined at least five years, ten years after its publication. Five years, ten years later, vulgar folk in general will catch up for the first time with the position where poetry now stands. That is, normally poetry is best when it is published sooner and understood later. We poets can only despise things like pursuing fashionable thoughts and adopting ourselves to things that are favored for the moment but shallow."

"In one room of some madhouse there was a man who sat on a chair all day, doing nothing but stare at the hands of a clock every day. Here was probably the most bored human being in the world, who didn't know what to do with "time," or so I thought. But the reality was the opposite, as the director of the house explained to me. This unhappy person thinks life is constant activity. He doesn't want to waste a single moment of his life, and lest he squander valuable time, he's staring at the clock like that, every day. Say something to him, and he'll angrily bark, "Shut up! Now another second of my valuable time passes. Time is life! Time is life!""

"Now I sit in my room alone and gaze at the shadow of my fading soul its sighs are lonesome and as feeble as a fly that stays in the spring evening sun that fades quietly my life roams feebly my life staying at the windowglass heard helpless children's sobbing schoolsongs"

"Thus I make poetry. Like the moths that swarm around a lantern, deceived by the phantom of certain flowery mysterious sentiments, trying to touch the essence of invisible reality, I vainly flap, flap my wings as fragile as sponge cake. I am a pitiable fantasizing child, the sad fate of a moth."

"The Hirose River flows white. Time passes and all illusions must fade away. Wanting to catch my life, one day in the past I cast my line in the river, but ah that happiness was too far away and I didn't see tiny fish even in a flash."

"[T]o me poetry is neither a mystery nor a religion. Even less is it "a life-or-death work" or "a sacred way of ascetic training." It is nothing more than "a sad consolation" for me."

"[S]ome of my poems generally belong to a sensory melancholy, while certain others belong to a meditative melancholy. But, whichever it may be, the rhythm that I really want to convey is not it. It is not these "sensory things" or "idealistic things." Those things are no more than the costumes of my poetry. The essence of my poetry—that fragrant throb of my heart pulsing that becomes the motive of my poetry-making—lies above all else in the charm of the tender sound of the fife. It lies in the pitifulness of yearnings with no apparent cause for the world of reality. Thus I breathe into the fife's mouth hole, trying to play a mysterious and sensuous life."

"This utterly unknown dog follows me, shabby, limping on its hind leg, a crippled dog's shadow. Ah, I do not know where I'm going, in the direction of the road that I go, roofs of tenements are being pelted pelted in the wind, in a gloomy, empty lot by the road, bone-dry grass leaves are pliantly thinly moving."

"The air of the countryside is gloomy and oppressive, the touch of the countryside is gritty and sickening, when I sometimes think of the countryside, I'm tormented by the smell of animal skin coarse in texture.I fear the countryside, the countryside is a pale fever dream."

"Nature anywhere oppresses me, and human kindnesses make me gloomy, rather I prefer walking in a bustling city park until I get tired, and find a bench under some lonely tree, I prefer to be looking at the sky absentmindedly, ah, I prefer to be looking at the smoke and soot flowing away far and sad over the city sky, or at a swallow flying away over the roofs of buildings, into the distance, small."

"My personality, loneliest in the world, is calling loudly to an unknown friend, my obsequious strange personality, looking shabby like a crow, is trembling on the corner of a deserted, winter- withered bench."

"Of the lukewarm unpleasantness of the sensation of a man at such a moment a disastrous crime is born. A heart afraid of crime is the forerunner of a heart that gives birth to a crime."

"Behold all sins have been inscribed, yet not all are mine, verily manifest to me are only phantoms of blue flames without shadows, only the ghosts of pathos that fade off over the snow, ah painful confession on such a day what shall I make of them, all are but phantoms of blue flames."

"I want to nail my own gloomy shadow into the moonlit earth. Lest the shadow follow me forever."

"During the long illness and pain, spiders have covered his face with webs, his body below the waist has faded like a shadow, a bush has grown above his waist, arms rotten, body all over, truly messed up, oh, today again the moon is out, the daybreak moon is out, and in the opaque light like a lantern a deformed white dog is howling."

"Body half buried in sand, still it's lolling its tongue. Over this invertebrate's head, pebbles and brine rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle, flowing, flowing, ah so quietly as a dream flowing."

"The dog that howls at the moon howls suspicious and fearful of his own shadow. To the dog's ailing heart, the moon is an ominous puzzle like a pallid ghost. The dog howls far into the distance."

"I love human beings. Nevertheless I fear human beings."

"When I think of poetry, I feel its fierce human suffering and its joy."

"Poetry is the intellect's product of one second. A certain type of sentiment that one ordinarily has touches something like electricity and for the first time discovers a rhythm. This electricity is, for the poet, a miracle. Poetry is not something anticipated and made."

"Poetry is neither a mystery nor a symbol nor a demon. Poetry is nothing more than a lonely consolation for the owner of a sickly soul and a man of solitude."

"If you’ve ever heard a physicist trying to explain to a mere mortal the meaning of quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity, you’ll understand our state. Some waves or other of time overlapping so as to create time splashes that broke off from their substratum into supratime and could be controlled – that’s all I got out of Lyova’s lectures and the popular articles written by my fellow journalists. But in the long run I wasn’t too upset about it. We use electricity without knowing a thing about electrodynamics, and I have yet to see anyone who was too bothered by that fact to go on living."