Great Throughts Treasury

"My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any element of conscious criticism, and still less did I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he was concern. Whenever I tried to capture the amorphous mass of my adoration within the confines of analysis, it would already have disappeared. If there be such a thing as love that has neither duration nor progress, this was precisely my emotion. The eyes through which I saw Omi were always those of a 'first glance' or, if I may say so, of the 'primeval glance'. It was purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaseless effort to protect my fourteen-year-old purity from the process of erosion. Could this have been love? Grant it to be one form of love, for even though at first glance it seemed to retain its pristine form forever, simply repeating that form over and over again, it too had its own unique sort of debasement and decay. And it was a debasement more evil than that of any normal kind of love. Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant. Nevertheless, in my unrequited love for Omi, in this the first love I encountered in life, I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself. To say the least, while at school, particularly during a boring class, I could not take my eyes off Omi's profile. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given. As for my spirit of adoration, I never even imagined it to be a thing that required some sort of answer."

"My need to transform reality was an urgent necessity, as important as three meals a day or sleep."

"Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one's own heart."

"No human being can be so honest as to become completely false."

"No one?s words can compete with this mercilessly powerful rain. The only thing that can compete with the sound of this rain, that can smash this deathlike wall of sound, is the shout of a man who refuses to stoop to this chatter, the shout of a simple spirit that knows no words."

"No, Mr. Honda, I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae. Don?t you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was; but don?t you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? I couldn?t help thinking so as I listened to you. Why then do we know each other? And the Ayakuras and the Matsugaes must still have family registers. Yes, such documents might solve problems in the other world. But did you really know a person called Kiyoaki? And can you say definitely that the two of us have met before? I came here sixty years ago. Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here. But if there was no Kiyoaki from the beginning? Honda was groping through a fog. His meeting here with the Abbess seemed half a dream. He spoke loudly, as if to retrieve the self that receded like traces of breath vanishing from a lacquer tray. If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I. For the first time there was strength in her eyes. That too is as it is in each heart."

"Oddly enough, living only for one?s emotions, like a flag obedient to the breeze, demands a way of life that makes one balk at the natural course of events, for this implies being altogether subservient to nature. The life of the emotions detests all constraints, whatever their origin, and thus, ironically enough, is apt eventually to fetter its own instinctive sense of freedom."

"On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horse racing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter."

"Of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant."

"On reflection, falling in love for him was not only extraordinary, but rather comical. By having closely observed Kiyoaki Matsugae, he knew full well what sort of man should fall in love. Falling in love was a special privilege given to someone whose external, sensuous charm and internal ignorance, disorganization, and lack of cognizance permitted him to form a kind of fantasy about others. It was a rude privilege. Honda was quite aware that since his childhood, he had been the opposite of such a man."

"On the switchboard of my memory two pair of gloves have crossed wires - those leather gloves of Omi's and a pair of white ceremonial gloves. I never seem to be able to decide which memory might be real, which false. Perhaps the leather gloves were more in harmony with his coarse features. And yet again, precisely because of his coarse features, perhaps it was the white pair which became him more. Coarse features - even though I use the words, actually such a description is nothing more than that of the impression created by the ordinary face of one lone young man mixed in among boys. Unrivaled though his build was, in height he was by no means the tallest among us. The pretentious uniform our school required, resembling a naval officer's, could scarely hang well on our still-immature bodies, and Omi alone filled his with a sensation of solid weight and a sort of sexuality. Surely I was not the only one who looked with envious and loving eyes at the muscles of his shoulder and chest, that sort of muscle which can be spied out even beneath a blue-serge uniform. Something like a secret feeling of superiority was always hovering about his face. Perhaps it was that sort of feeling which blazes higher and higher the more one's pride is hurt. It seemed that, for Omi, such misfortunes as failures in examinations and expulsions were the symbols of a frustrated will. The will to what? I imagined vaguely that it must be some purpose toward which his 'evil genius' was driving him. And i was certain that even he did not yet know the full purport of this vast conspiracy against him."

"On the spur of the moment she decided to go and view the blossoms by herself in the dark night. It was a strange decision for a timid and unadventurous young woman, but then she was in a strange state of mind and she dreaded the return home. That evening all sorts of unsettling fancies had burst open in her mind."

"Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon."

"Otaguro's bosom heaved with an ineffable surge of joy. Every man is fighting, he murmured. Every man."

"Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed...."

"Only consciousness can transform this world. Only this and nothing else. It can transform, without changing it, you get it? If you look at the world through the eyes of the mind, you will understand that it is unchangeable, while constantly transforming. Will ask us what good is it? Man, my dear, is armed with consciousness, just to make life bearable. Animals do not need such a weapon, they do not have consciousness. But people really need something with the help of consciousness are able to turn itself intolerant of life in arms, though from it not to decrease."

"Only through the group, I realized ? 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."

"Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened."

"People who wear only ready-made clothes are apt to doubt the very existence of tailors; and this pair, enthralled though they were by ready-made tragedies, had no way of knowing that there were people who had their tragedies made to order. Etsuko was, as ever, written in an alphabet they couldn?t read."

"Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes."

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

"Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth."

"Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger"

"Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother?s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down iniquitous men, the concept of blades slashing down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai fell like the cherry blossoms, his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry. For Isao, to die purely seemed easy. But what about laughing purely? How to be pure in all respects was a problem that disturbed him. No matter how tight a rein he kept upon his emotions, there were times when some trivial thing would arise to make him laugh. Once, for example, he had laughed at a puppy frolicking at the side of the road, with a woman?s high-heeled shoe, of all things, in its mouth. It was the kind of laugh that he preferred others not to see."

"Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so."

"Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it."

"Scorching sun was hot high trimmed their necks. It was quiet, serene, beautiful Sunday afternoon. However Kiyoaki still believed that the bottom of the world, similar to the water-filled leather bag has a small hole and he hears how time is running it drop by drop."

"Sensed Kjoaqui comfort derived from peace of mind, following the loss. In deep down his heart, has always preferred the de facto impact of the loss on the fear of such a loss."

"She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?"

"Shunsuk‚ hated the preoccupation with modern psychology that judged his casual, offhand remarks or his daily actions as betraying his identity or ideas with better clarity than did his highly polished sentences."

"She drank like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. To ask for nothing means that one has lost one?s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything ? even sea water? Afterwards, however, Etsuko felt none of the nausea of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out ? she was a woman bound and gagged by her own hand."

"Someone, somewhere, had tied up the darkness, he thought as he went: the bag of darkness had been tied at the mouth, enclosing within it a host of smaller bags. The stars were tiny, almost imperceptible perforations; otherwise, there wasn't a single hole through which light could pass. The darkness in which he walked immersed was gradually pervading him. His own footfall was utterly remote, his presence barely rippled the air. His being had been compressed to the utmost - to the point where it had no need to forge a path for itself through the night, but could weave its way through the gaps between the particles of which the darkness was composed."

"Somewhere in his heart he had recognized who she was. His dominant wish, however, was to go a little longer without recognizing her. The woman?s face floating in its dark seclusion, no name yet attached to it, had the character of a mysterious, lovely apparition. It was like the scent of the fragrant olive which, as one walks along a path at night, tells of the blossoms before one sees them. Isao wanted to keep things just as they were, if only for an instant more. At this moment a woman was a woman, not someone with a name attached to her. And that was not all. Because of her hidden name, because of the agreement not to speak that name, she was transmuted into a marvelous essence, like a moonflower, its supporting vine invisible, floating high up in the darkness. This essence which preceded existence, this phantasm which preceded reality, this portent which preceded the event conveyed with unmistakable force the presence of a substance yet more powerful. This presence which showed itself as gliding through air?this was woman. Isao had yet to embrace a woman. Still, never so strongly at this moment, when he keenly sensed this womanliness that preceded woman, had he felt that he too knew what ecstasy meant. For this was a presence that he could even now embrace. In time, that is, it had drawn near with an exquisite subtlety, and in space it was only a little distant. The affectionate emotion that filled his breast was like a vapor that could envelop her. And yet once she was gone, Isao, like a child, could forget her entirely."

"Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff."

"So far as feelings were concerned, there was no discrepancy between the very finest feeling in this world and the very worst; that their effect was the same; that no visible difference existed between murderous intent and feelings of deep compassion."

"Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room."

"That which proceeds from a man?s soul shall shape his soul; that which proceeds from his speech shall shape his speech, and deeds that proceed from his body shall shape his body."

"That was mere probing; my eye was really turned on an invisible realm far beyond the horizon. What is it to see the invisible? That is the ultimate vision, the denial at the end of all seeing, the eye`s denial of itself."

"The average age for a man in the Bronze Age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty, he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live."

"The ghosts of the sea, ship and ocean voyages existed only in this bright green drop. But for each day that passed, the more abominable smells of life on earth clung to the sailor: Family smell, the smell of the neighbors, the smell of peace, fried fish, the jokes and always real furniture, the smell of household bills books and tours of end-of-week ... all the putrid smells that land men lie, the stench of death."

"The afternoon sun beat relentlessly the surface of the sea, and the whole bay er in a single, dramatic sweep of brilliance. Some clouds on the horizon stood out summer, still in silence, partially submerging in water forms sumptuous funeral, prophetic. The muscles of the clouds were as pale as alabaster."

"The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man."

"The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority."

"The blossoms seem unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has to come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy windmills; instead there were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature's free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself."

"The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids."

"The long suffering dulls people. Blunt of suffering are no longer able to question the joy."

"The lips and eyes glowed Sonoko. Beauty depressed me and awakened in me a sense of helplessness. That same feeling causes me Sonoko seem even more ephemeral."

"The intellect, far from being a harmless cultural value, I had been given only as a weapon, a means of survival. Thus, the physical disciplines that later would be so necessary to my survival could be compared in some ways to how a person for whom the body has been the only livelihood embarks on a frantic attempt to acquire an intellectual education when his youth is on his deathbed."

"The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form... . When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life; it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do."

"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."