One Thousand Summers

A long time ago, what was a man thinking, when he composed this?

“ Kaguya-hime said,  ‘ All I can think is that I should certainly regret it if, in spite of my unattractive looks, I married someone without being sure of the depth of his feelings, and he then proved to be fickle. However grand a person he may be, I should not wish to marry him unless I were sure he was sincere. ’ ”

"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)

Presently, the boat passed the Uda pine woods. It was impossible to imagine how many trees might be standing there, or how many thousands of years they might have lived. The waves came up to their roots, and cranes flew back and forth among the branches. Too deeply moved to admire the spectacle in silence, one passenger composed a poem that went something like this:

The Naniwazu poem is from the beginning of a reign. [When the Ōsasagi Emperor was a prince in Naniwa, he and the crown prince kept ceding the title and not taking the throne for three years. Because of this, a man named Wani was concerned and respectfully offered a poem. It shall be said that the flowers are plum blossoms.] <...>

I remember one interesting and affecting incident from that reign [of Emperor Murakami]. A plum tree in front of the Seiryōden had died, and His Majesty was looking for a replacement. He entrusted the matter to a certain gentleman who was serving as a Chamberlain at the time. “Young people can't recognize a good tree,” the Chamberlain said to me. “You find one for us.” After walking all over the capital without success, I located a beautiful specimen, covered with deep red blossoms, at a house in the western sector. As I was digging it up, the owner sent someone out with a message. “Attach this to it before you carry it away·“ I supposed there was some reason behind it, so I took the paper along. The Emperor saw it and said, “What's that?” It was a poem in a woman's hand:

Senior Grand Empress  Shōshi  is to enter religion, it seems, and to become an Imperial Lady with the same status as a Retired Emperor. People say that she will receive the commandments at an ordination platform erected at the Hōjōji, and that other nuns are eager to come and receive them with her. When my wife heard the news, she said,  “ That is when I will crop my white head. Don't try to stop me. ”  

So his thoughts returned always to the same family. As he sank deeper in memories of Uji, of his strange, cruel ties with the Uji family, drake flies, than which no creatures are more fragile and insubstantial, were flitting back and forth in the evening light.    ‘I see the drake fly, take it up in my hand. Ah, here it is, I say − and it is gone.’   And he added softly, as always: ‘Here, and perhaps not here at all.’

The riot of threads for decking out the sacred incense led one of the princesses to remark upon the stubborn way their own lives had of spinning on.* Catching sight of a spool through a gap in the curtains, Kaoru recognized the allusion.  ‘Join my tears as beads,’ † he said softly. They found it very affecting, this suggestion that the sorrow of Lady Ise had been even as theirs; yet they were reluctant to answer. To show that they had caught the reference might seem pretentious.‡ But an answering reference immediately came to them: they could not help thinking of Tsurayuki, whose heart had not been ‘that sort of thread’, and who had likened it to a thread all the same as he sang the sadness of a parting that was not a bereavement.[*] Old poems, they could see, had much to say about the unchanging human heart. － Murasaki Shikibu  紫式部,  The Tale of Genji  (源氏物語  Genji monogatari ) Chapter 47 “Trefoil Knots” (総角  Agemaki ) *  Anonymous,  Kokinshū...

The death of Zensaiin [Shikishi Naishinn ō] left all at a loss for words. As more and more die, the Way of Poetry declines; so one feels one must try all the harder.  A year before her death, at the time of 100-po em sequences, she had composed "Do not forget me / Even you, plum tree by the eaves!" And When the following year the tree at her Ō idono residence bloomed as if in sympathy, I could not help saying to myself “This year, at least…” − Minamoto no Ienaga,  Minamoto no Ienaga Nikki 源家長日記 (Diary of Minamoto no Ienaga) Translated in Huey 2002, 87−88.   Minamoto no Ienaga  源家長 (1170 − 1234) in his memoir  Minamoto no Ienaga Nikki  源家長日記 (Diary of Minamoto no Ienaga), remembering the years after the death of  Princess Shokushi (式子内親王  Shokushi naishinnō ; between 1149 and 1152−1201; her name can also be read as Shikishi or Noriko;  her poem is included in  Hyakunin Isshu  as number 89 ).   The passage is translated by Rober...

What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.  ― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“Poets give us insights into our world. Great poets give us insights into human life.”   — Kenneth Yasuda in the foreword to H. Jay Harris’ translation of The Tales of Ise

'Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?'  'You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.'  ― Yasunari Kawabata,  Thousand Cranes

And isn’t it better really to leave things only hinted at?  — Junichiro Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles

I am nothing. You are right. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything. − Haruki Murakami,  1Q84

"You've always been fond of understanding people too well."      "They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily." ― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context. − Haruki Murakami,  A Wild Sheep Chase

"In autumn, the evening - the blazing sun has sunk very close to the mountain rim, and now even the crows, in threes and fours or twos and threes, hurrying to their roost, are a moving sight." From Sei Shonagon's "The Pillow Book". Chapter I. In spring, the dawn. .. Translation by Meredith McKinney, Penguin Classics, 2006