I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love.
A secret, if it’s kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.
They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.
Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.
A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.
And I can’t complain. After all, only woemn are able really to love.
Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.
Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.
People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.
The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.
Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.
The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings.
Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the “clear heart” of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.
Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.
From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.
A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, ’the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.
But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: ‘I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.’ The gloom only grew denser.
But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman’s existence.