Passages from Kusamakura

Delicate spring air conceals the scent of far-off blood.

My old host volunteered in his nephew’s place to let me understand that the youth was destined to leave for Manchuria in a day or two. I had thought that there was only feathered songsters to listen to, only flowers to see fall, only hot spring to warble forth in this dreamy land of poetry in a mountain bosom, in peaceful Spring. Alas, the living world had come crossing the sea and mountain and oozing into this home of a forgotten tribe, and the time may come when a small fraction of blood making a crimson sea of bleak Manchuria may flow from this youth’s arteries. This very youth is sitting next to an artist who sees nothing worth seeing in human life but dreaming. He sits so near that the artist may hear his heart throb.

Some flowers look beautiful until you notice what they are saying.

A huge tree stood over my new position of vantage, screening me from the sun and making me feel chilly. Near the water’s edge, on the other side of the pond, was an overhanging camellia tree in full bloom. There is something very heavy and dull in the green of camellia leaves, even when seen in the sunshine, and I would have never known this particular plant but for its blood red flowers, which are never attractive, though fiery and striking. I never look at camellia flowers in a deep forest or mountain without wishing that I had not seen them; their red is not a common red, but a red with something weird in it like a she-demon in a fair woman’s mask, who fascinates you with her black eyes and beauty and breathes poison into your pores before you know it.

What spring does to a mind that has forgotten it has a soul.

But the lark! It was Spring—Spring, when the whole creation feels blasé to drowsiness; cheerful to ecstasy. The cat forgets to pounce on the mice. Men become oblivious of being in debt; so oblivious, indeed, that they even fail to locate their own souls. But they come back to themselves, when they see a distant field waving with a golden sea of flowers, such as I was looking down upon in the valley. And they may locate their souls when they hear the lark. The lark does not sing with his throat; but it is his whole soul that sings. Of all creatures, of which you hear their soul’s activity in their songs, none is as lively as the lark. It was, indeed, joy itself, and as I thus thought, I became joyful, and thus, was Poetry.

A mountain disappears into rain, and only the rain seems to move.

By the time I had come to this decision, the sky began to assume a doubtful aspect. A bank of clouds of indistinct foreboding had no sooner mounted overhead than it went tumbling and overspreading until the whole space seemed to turn into a hanging expanse of dark sea. From the sea soft Spring rain began to fall. I had long since gone past the golden rape blossoms and was now toiling along between two mountains; but the threads of rain being so fine as to appear as mist, I could not tell how distant they were. Now and again, as the gusts of wind blew asunder the high drapery of cloud, a grey ridge of mountain showed itself to the right as clearly as within reach of a hand: probably the range ran on the other side of the valley.

What it feels like to become a field of daffodils for a moment.

I do not say that the poet’s joys consist in giving oneself exclusively over to one thing, or surrendering ourselves solely to another. He may, at one time enter and become a solitary flower, or turn into a butterfly at another. Or like Wordsworth become a field of daffodils, with his heart thrown into confusion by the wind. Sometimes again he becomes lost in a scene and is unable clearly to tell what is it that has captured his heart. Some people may call this being possessed by nature. Others may describe it as the heart listening to a music of an unstringed harp. Still others may see in it a lingering in boundless regions or wandering in a limitless expanse, being unable to know or to understand. Say what they like, they are perfectly free to do so.

Why artists complain on the road and glow about it afterward.

Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common people, idiots, lunatics—whatever be their qualification in their daily life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit subjects for their canvas or for their pen. But they betray not even a shadow of grievance when they tell others of their experiences. They not only narrate gleefully the things they enjoyed and were delighted with, but are enthusiastic over events that once tortured them but now come back as sweet memories. Not that they mean to deceive themselves and others; but the truth is that when out on the road they see and feel as ordinary mortals do, but they become poets when they talk of their past. And this accounts for their inconsistencies.

A mosquito net is a thin defense against an ocean that roars all night.

That night, the rustling of bamboos robbed me of all my sleep. I slid open the front paper screen and found myself looking over, in the clear Summer moonlight, a grass-grown garden, which had no boundary hedge or fence, but stretched into a weedy elevation, beyond which the great ocean roared with its tumbling breakers, menacing the world of man. I passed the whole night nervously awake, imprisoning myself in an apology of a mosquito net. My lot that night might be, I thought, a page from some weird story book.

The case against people who make a ceremony out of a cup of tea.

Tea? The word called up before me a picture I am not very enthusiastic about. In fact it made me shrink back. I am persuaded that there is no refined idler that so unwarrantably puts on airs as the frothing tea imbiber. He almost suffocatingly narrows the wide world of poetry and does things most self-importantly, most over-studiedly and most hair-splittingly. He drinks of foamy froth in altogether unnecessarily abject humility, and finds himself in the seventh heaven of joy. Such is the tea man. If there be any pleasure and interest in this intricate tangle of rules, then the denizens of the regimental barracks at Azabu must have joys and pleasures knocking about their nose. The “right-turn!” and “march-on!” lads must be all great tea men. Pshaw!

Beauty under the blue sky still needs a mosquito net.

I am at any rate, a living block of humanity, and however fond I may be of unhumanity, my love of it cannot go so very far. I do not suppose that even Tao Yuan-ming had his eye on the Southern hill, year in and year out; nor is it imaginable that Wang Wei slept in his bamboo jungle without a mosquito net. In all likelihood Tao sold his chrysanthemums to a florist after keeping what he wanted, and Wang his bamboo sprouts to a greengrocer. I myself am not unhuman enough to live under the blue sky in the mountain, just because the lark and golden rape captivate my fancy.

A whole valley turns the color of rouge and then disappears into haze.

The embankments had disappeared, the riversides being now almost level with the surface of the stream. The rice growing lowlands on either side, which had not yet been ploughed, had turned into a sea of rouge, with the wild red milk-vetch in full bloom. The pink sea stretched limitlessly till it was swallowed up in the distant haze. The eyes that followed up the haze, saw a high peak, halfway up which, a soft, dreamy cloud of Spring was issuing.