One Thousand Summers

"Taichiro hailed a taxi in front of the tea house, and Keiko got in with him. He remained silent as they drove across the city out to the Nisonin Temple in Saga. Keiko was silent too, except for asking if she could open the window all the way. But she  p ut her hand on his, fondling it gently with her index finger. Her smooth hand was a little damp. The main gate of the Nisonin Temple was said to have been brought from Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Castle in the early seventeenth century. It had the imposing air of a great castle gate. Keiko remarked that they seemed to be in for another hot day. ‘This is my first time here,’ she said. ‘I’ve done a little research on Fujiwara Teika,’ Taichiro told her. As he climbed the stone steps to the gate he looked around and saw the hem of her kimono rippling as she followed nimbly after him. ‘We know Teika had a villa on Mt Ogura called the “Pavilion of the Autumn Rain”, but people claim three different sites for it. You can’t tell which it really wa...

“ Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Live a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way. As Otoko approached forty she wondered if the fact that Oki remained within her meant that this stream of time was stagnant, rather than flowing. Or had her image of him flowed along with her through time, like a flower drifting down a river? How she drifted along in his stream of time she did not know. Although he could not have forgotten her, time would at least have flowed differently for him. Even if two people were lovers, their streams of time would never be the same. . . ”   ―  Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness   Kawabata Yasunari  川端康成  (1899−1972) 美しさと哀しみと Utsukushisa to kanashim...

“ ...he had always read  The Tale of Genji  in the small type of modern editions, but when he came across it in a handsome old block-printed edition it made an entirely different impression on him. What had it been like when they read it in those beautiful flowing manuscripts of the age of the Heian Court? A thousand years ago  The Tale of Genji  was a modern novel. It could never be read that way again, no matter how far  Genji  studies progressed. Still, the old edition gave a more intense pleasure than a modern one. Doubtless the same would be true of Heian poetry.”   ―  Yasunari  Kawabata ,  Beauty and Sadness   Kawabata Yasunari  川端康成  (1899−1972) 美しさと哀しみと  Utsukushisa to kanashimi to Translated by Howard S. Hibbett (1920 −2019)