Poets From Japan

"One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate — disgusting behavior! (p. 46)"

"A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything. (p. 44)"

"It is a loose book, impressionistic, hardly coherent as a continuous narrative. It is full of descriptions of court life, and the retelling of court gossip and descriptions of fashionable shrines and how to get there by the most elegant means. It is a piece of writing replete with those typical Japanese wistful and melancholic evocations of ephemerality. It was written a thousand years ago almost exactly to the year the film was made, and it was written by a woman. To be literate a thousand years ago in the West was pretty uncommon; to be literate and a woman, very unlikely; to be literate, female, and quite brilliant, a well-nigh Western impossibility."

"Sei Shonagon feels modern, almost a proto-feminist in such a paternalistic age that women at court stayed, for the most part, silent and still and available indoors all their lives. She said much, and she said two electrifying things from the still darkness of her domestic prisons. She said them of course very much in her own way, but she said there were two things in life that were absolutely essential, and life would be unbearable without them: the sensuous body and literature. My crude summation would be sex and text. Both have the X factor. She said them with longing and her longing stayed with me."

"The thief left it behind: the moon at my window."

"You must rise above The gloomy clouds Covering the mountaintop Otherwise, how will you Ever see the brightness?"

"In the scenery of spring, nothing is better, nothing worse; The flowering branches are of themselves, some short, some long."

"In this dream world We doze And talk of dreams — Dream, dream on, As much as you wish"

"The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again. If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself, Then the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way."

"The village has disappeared in the evening mist And the path is hard to follow. Walking through the pines, I return to my lonely hut."

"Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places? Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your own hearts."

"I have nothing to report, my friends. If you want to find the meaning, Stop chasing after so many things."

"The water of the valley stream Never shouts at the tainted world: “Purify yourself!” But naturally, as it is, Shows how it is done."

"When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.”"

"This world A fading Mountain echo Void and Unreal"

"The winds gives me Enough fallen leaves To make a fire"

"It's a pity, a gentleman in refined retirement composing poetry: He models his work on the classic verse of China. And his poems are elegant, full of fine phrases. But if you don't write of things deep in your own heart, What's the use of churning out so many words?"

"Who says my poems are poems? My poems are not poems. When you know that my poems are not poems, Then we can speak of poetry."

"Easily moved by beauty—such is my nature. I take a few phrases and they just turn into poems"

"Cling to truth and it turns into falsehood. Understand falsehood and it turns into truth. Truth and falsehood are two sides of the same coin. Neither accept one nor reject the other."

"Late at night, listening to the winter rain Recalling my youth — Was it only a dream? Was I really young once?"

"We are still fighting", Kuribayashi radioed on March 22. "The strength under my command is now about four hundred. Tanks are attacking us. The enemy suggested we surrender through loudspeaker, but our officers and men just laughed and paid no attention."

"The battle is approaching its end. Since the enemy’s landing, even the gods would weep at the bravery of the officers and men under my command. … [My] men died one by one, and I regret very much that I have allowed the enemy to occupy a piece of Japanese territory."

"The enemy may land on this island soon. Once they do, we must follow the fate of those on Attu and Saipan. Our officers and men know about “Death” very well. I am sorry to end my life here, fighting the United States of America, but I want to defend this island as long as possible and to delay the enemy air raids on Tokyo. Ah! You have worked well for a long time as my wife and the mother of my three children. Your life will become harder and more precarious. Watch out for your health and live long. The future of our children will not be easy either. Please take care of them after my death."

"The US is the last country in the world we should fight."

"You must not expect my survival..."

"Do not plan for my return..."

"All officers of Chichi Jima, goodbye from Iwo"

": James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers, p. 245."

"We are sorry indeed we could not have defended the island successfully. Now I, Kuribayashi, believe that the enemy will invade Japan proper from this island. … I am very sorry, because I can imagine the scenes of disaster in our empire. However, I comfort myself a little, seeing my officers and men die without regret after struggling in this inch-by-inch battle against an overwhelming enemy with many tanks and being exposed to indescribable bombardments. … I would like now to apologize to my senior and fellow officers for not being strong enough to stop the enemy invasion."

"Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work."

"His devotion to bushido (the "way of warriors"), sacred monarchy and ascetic Buddhist traditions coincided with a media-savvy, role-playing, club-hopping hunger for celebrity that could have had Andy Warhol kowtowing in homage. With Mishima scarcely the wafer breadth of an antique sword-blade separated high art from screamingly high camp."

"In the highly conformist culture of Japan, Yukio Mishima stands out. He was, for example, a homosexual — who thought it his duty to marry and breed. He is also Japan's most renowned novelist whose very Japanese industry produced 40 novels, 20 volumes of stories and many essays in only 22 years of writing. But Mishima is most famous not for his life, but for his death by ritual suicide, or hara-kiri... Mishima's final act was a political protest against the liberalisation that has continued, slowly, in Japan. It was also a deep and dark aesthetic deed. Mishima was a narcissist, and wanted to beautify his body in death."

"The author is very young in years. I prefer not to disclose just what sort of person he is, for I believe it best not to. For those who insist on knowing, I will say only that he is one of us, a youthful version of ourselves. That young men like this are emerging in Japan is a joy too great for words. And for those with no confidence in our national literature, his advent will come as an overwhelming surprise. But there is no cause for surprise: the truth is that this young man is heir to Japan's everlasting history. Though far younger than we, he emerges fully mature. And it is from ourselves that he is born."

"Yukio Mishima is one of my favourite authors. It's not his suicide I'm obsessed with. We've got enough reference points there. I like the fact that he was coming to the end — he knew that he was working on his last novel. He knew that was the sum of everything he'd ever done. I like the fact that he saw the end of the road. I like to feel that you do follow your years out and you do get your answer in the end."

"It is a wretched affair for one to speak to Jietai men in circumstances like these. I thought that the Jietai was the last hope of Nippon, the last stronghold of the Japanese soul. But Japanese people today think of money, just money. Where is our national spirit today? The politicians care nothing for Japan. They are greedy for power. ... Japan is reveling in economic prosperity and has become spiritually empty. ... If the Japanese do not rise up, if the Jietai does not rise up, don't you understand that there will be no such thing as an amendment to the constitution? Don't you realize that if there is no amendment you will merely be American mercenaries? ... Is there not one person among you who will rise with me now? ... I know now for certain that no one else will rise for the constitutional amendment. My dream for the Jietai is gone. ... Long live the emperor!"

"Japan was to be married, not to Hitler, but to the German forests; not to Mussolini, but to the Roman pantheon. It was a pact joining German, Roman, and Japanese mythology: a friendship among the beautiful, masculine, pagan gods of East and West."

"The purest evil that human efforts could attain, in other words, was probably achieved by those men who made their wills the same and who made their eyes see the world in the same way, men who went against the pattern of life's diversity, men whose spirits shattered the natural wall of the individual body, making nothing of this barrier, set up to guard against mutual corrosion, men whose spirit accomplished what flesh could never accomplish."

"As a man grows older the memory of his youth begins to act as nothing less than an immunization against further experience. And he was thirty-eight. It was an age when one felt strangely unready to say that one had lived and yet reluctant to acknowledge the death of youth. An age when the savor of one’s experiences turned ever so slightly sour, and when, day by day, one took less pleasure in new things. An age when the charm of every diverting foolishness quickly faded."

"Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of death."

"How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier."

"Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors."

"The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in."

"I had no taste for defeat — much less victory — without a fight."

"Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to excessive stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself. Many people will express disbelief that such a process could already be at work in a person's earliest years. But that, beyond doubt, is what happened to me personally, thereby laying the ground for two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press ahead loyally with the corrosive function of words, and to make that my life's work. The other was the desire to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all."

"In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid."

""I'll be going now," she said. Shinji made no answer and a surprised look came over his face. He had caught sight of a black streak that ran straight across the front of her red sweater. Hatsue followed his gaze and saw the dirty smudge, just in the spot where she had been leaning her breast against the concrete parapet. Bending her head, she started slapping her breast with her open hands. Beneath her sweater, which all but seemed to be concealing some firm supports, two gently swelling mounds were set to trembling ever so slightly by the brisk brushing of her hands. Shinji stared in wonder. Struck by her hands, the breasts seemed more like two small, playful animals. The boy was deeply stirred by the resilient softness of their movement. The streak of dirt was finally brushed out."

"That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardour, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication..."

"The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian’s martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway..."

"The black and slightly oblique trunk of the tree of execution was seen against a Titian-like background of gloomy forest and evening sky, sombre and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of the tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth’s nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins..."