Pathway to Japanese Literature

Kalokagathia

“The universe is merely the shell of Ta’aura.” (Gauguin)

One and night.
The storm’s howl descended.

In this lake, a steamship had been sunk.

Morning.
I saw.
Only the masts remained—like two hands raised above the lake’s surface.
They resembled my own pair of hands: having exhausted their futile thrashing against emptiness, they had returned to a weary solemn stillness—such was their aspect.

That day too at the lakeside—like one pursued—glancing right and left, I pursued my thoughts.
The two masts summoned a faint breeze and cast two ripples upon the lake’s surface.
Beneath them, the steamship chased an elusive sky while devouring azure slumber.
What I sought in resemblance lay far beyond reach.
What could it ultimately have been?
Vainly trembled—palms and fingers.
A day was consumed in thought’s wandering.

The lake’s eye held nothing beyond these two masts.
It resembled a theodolite summoning mystery.
From here, I saw a clear Dead Sea within your eyes.
The Kalokagathia within your palm!
Those things lay immeasurably distant.
Cruel, elusive distance!
But perhaps a single turn of thought’s plow would rather strangle than excavate the mystery buried within this commonplace world.
The commonplace lay hidden within universality like gold ore.
If that mystery were to lie sleeping within the globe...

In the sunset sky, several rivers trailed their tails.

The masts were swallowed by dusk.
Upon the lake crowned with Venus.

Now there are no words, nor any tidings.
Only an unwavering, blameless moment.
Knees sinking into fine grains of sand perceived the soil's profundity beyond the lake's depth.
That would be a bud of mystery sprouted on the tree of the commonplace.
This knew neither who would prune it nor who would trample it—no such cares remained.

There, abundant commonplace light!

And, oh!
The sprouting of mystery!

Greek Cross

The sun stood at noon.
――Open thy hands like wings.
And thus tread.
The Greek Cross shall cast its shadow.

★

While circling the holy gate, be it night or day, O bees.
Someday the gate was closed in a cross, and the flowers froze with frost.
O bees.
No matter how your wings may open to golden radiance, there remains only hollow shadow-deep sorrow—unable to unfurl, devoid of fragrance's art.
At this hour, come forth, O bees—if there be a God, let Him raise a lantern.

★

At the gate, the ache of a verdigrised latch.
The stigma of sin's obstructions crucified...

★

The holy water font exuded its fragrance.
In the predawn gloom.

A star shaped like a Greek Cross.
Lever Star.
Jasmine flowers and music.
The conclusion of a distant pantomime.

From below that, the first suburban train scattered a lullaby.

★

Scars.—Voices of song swarmed around them.
A song of resplendent pain.
Sagittarius climbed into song, Gemini.
From there, night descended.

A giant windmill spins like Alcogel.
Then, winged time scatters from above with invisible swiftness.

Priest of Beauty, O Night.
I concealed myself within You.
Immediately, the scars were beautified!

★

The sea's awakening.

In the pure dawn clad in light, the whispers of moth-eaten prayers rose.
One night, they who had leaned against the door of evil returned to holy awakening—all while murmuring incantations in unison.

Lethe

Storm Petrel and Year

From the fresco-like snow of New Year’s morning emerged a postman bearing snow like a magpie, who said to me, “Congratulations.”
He dropped a bundle of letters into my palm and moved on.
In the New Year’s card from F.F. in Banko, a poem titled *Linen Moon* was printed.
That poem was plagiarism.
And one storm petrel resembling a star.
The storm petrel seemed to have been copied from Mr. Man Ray’s cinepoem.
The storm petrel sang like music.

Autointoxication

On the sand, a torso and its single eye lay scattered.
The eye was completely festered by virulent toxins {autointoxication}.
No matter how one looked, it remained blurred like a lamp in broad daylight.
Far more cruel than a stone's expression.
Thereupon it must have been born.
A single cherry-blossom-colored butterfly fluttered nonchalantly through my field of vision as though by miracle.
Scattering glittering particles of light as it went.
......

Lethe

H.H., descending from the mountain with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder—snow powder dusting his hunting gear—paraded an earnest display of thrushes, sandpipers, and a pheasant resembling a mountain dove hung around his waist, approaching with a Redowa dance step that awkwardly fused 2/4 and 3/4 time signatures.

He whispered to me thus:
“This hunting rifle never shot any birds.”
Now that he mentioned it, both the thrushes and small pheasants had completely discolored corneas, frozen solid.
These specimens likely passed through the hands of a merchant from the Bird Trade Association branch office.
He whispered to me boastfully about how his wife’s bird-eating habit bordered on obsession, and how he’d recently procured a whitebait waterfowl from the Nice area before taking his leave.
I wonder why that is.
From his retreating figure, a suspicious white river swiftly began to flow.
Huh.
This might, if things go badly, lead to his premature death.
And so, I had no choice but to provisionally believe this to be the River of Forgetfulness, “Lethe.”

Purification

He expounded alchemy while chewing caramel.
He was a man who had now attempted suicide three times without success.
More than three of his suicide notes were in my possession.
In them he stated that suicide was not a sin—rather, it was an act that drew from an ancient alchemical tradition aimed at catharsis.
How much terrifying trouble his alchemy and suicide notes' catharsis must have caused me!
He brandished Aristotle and eerily gestured as he expounded classical tragedy—its catastrophe—to his listeners.
However his actions themselves had not escaped the vestiges of comic opera.

Recently, he declared his intent to drown himself in the deepest part of the Mediterranean, but refused to even mention that the scheduled date—December 25th—had already passed.
Did he comprehend Epicurus's theory of chance?
I suppose someone like him was hidden by metaphysical smokescreens.
He was likely among the rarest breed of "death's alchemists."

Sublimation

The barber shop owner smiled bewitchingly and informed me that chromatic illusions in the mirror sublimate through dialectical forms. In some recess of my mind surfaced then vanished *The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea* by that Russian novelist. At once the Caspian's tidal surge swept me away. Saffron scent saturated everything. Around my skull's core, metallic flowers bloomed from silver scissors—...

I was first to succeed in summoning the calm spring winds and waves of the Indian Ocean across the mirror's entire surface. Cirrus clouds arriving from beyond the Cape of Good Hope were combed through hazel branches as an airship's silver belly cast round shadows passing overhead. The sea spread in the hue of a blue shark's sanded hide, while through gaps between waves grazing the sky flowed a holy ship song. Beneath it sank a cocoa-colored speedboat. Tracing a watercourse as it vanished went an edict-stele resembling a pyramid. The moment those images clashed within my mind's ear, I tumbled from the barber shop's high chair like a bouncing ball.

The barber shop owner smiled bewitchingly and kept repeating his explanation.
And then—the moment I thought chewing tobacco had been forced between my teeth—why this happened I cannot say—I went tumbling down into boundless darkness, into vertigo’s fathomless abyss.

Chrysanthemum

When I closed the door's knob behind me and glanced back at him in the room, a flash of blue chrysanthemum concealed him. He was a foremost archaeologist—a man translating Polynesian ancient astrology—yet always covered his desk with velvet the color of the sea, upon which he placed his chrysanthemum-like face.

He immediately proceeded to tell me that his wife was a woman arrested late at night on New Year's Eve in the outskirts for soliciting. While adding that this woman was also a pathetic adherent of Brahmanism's Vedas, he praised its ambiguity, then laughed like an idiot.

He was a fine epigone in Polynesian classical studies.
Moreover, it occurred to me: his mind was fresh!

Fragments of Song

Ah, Auriga shines at the celestial zenith
Ah, this night my spirit soars through silver celestial seas like the fish tribe
Ah, blue chrysanthemum flowers bloom fragrantly upon the lonely celestial throne

Ah phantom needle drawn from vestments
Ah, resplendently buffeted by baleful gales
Ah, to transfix the firmament!

Ah, upon the olive tree's graceful treetops—white stardust scatters and weeps
Ah—wandering thoughts glitter upon the starry night's brow
Ah, the night lies sleepless beneath the azure exhalations of a galloping celestial horse
Ah, my spirit—colder than ice

Ah—glitter

Ah—Canis Major does indeed glitter in my rifle sight.
For now, the battle at dawn.

—Now is the time to commence slaughter. Muneharu.

I could no longer bear to look.

From the direction of Koaos's antennae, night descended.

What a sly and rare night this was.
Today too, the eclipsed supper drew near.
Georg Grosz's Flowers of Evil.
Upon the comic lay wings of cold air.

How many nights have I counted?
How many times must I have drunk the blood of endurance?

In the post-rain darkness, the seat of the captive's head glowed.
The flower of boredom filled the space.
Then the flower flowed and buried me.
Someday only my transparent thought will flounder in agony within it.
Wait—it is not only I who flounder in agony.
It is only my transparent thought.

For now, the battle at dawn.
But dawn must lie far away.
Infinite nights stretch beyond like lead weights.

For a moment, it was as if dead.

…………

……

Glass Architecture

Glass Architecture

I

Tell me.
Time had nothing left to steal from me!
A capricious Bohemian song upon the Zazen chrysanthemum.
While being toyed with by the spouting mist, the poet sang.
"The light vanishes from the sky, joy departs from the heart."

II

Merdz drifted across colonial maps.

A single red tree swayed in the wind.

The delta sneered.
The deformation of the Greek Cross.

The Mediterranean Sea is only shells.

III

Thou, before clasping thy hands, clasp thy crane-like legs!

IV

A modest collection of classical texts upon the pulpit.
This was less a missal than a wave-flipping-style flat inlay mirror.
Less a monk than a freakish manifested Buddha.
Something like haphazardly arranged slumbering bricks.
——

V

The Lord declared.
With thine index finger, place it within the shadow.

VI

On the backs of tilted hands, a flat night rested.
The scent of fresh jasmine.
A slurred étude.
Splendid!
The miracle that was no miracle came crumbling down.
It bore the semblance of ancient murals flaking away.

VII

At some point he wrote it down in a notebook.
Do you know these words?

Meng.
Layered Hemp Lacquer.
Fish-roe ground.
Chasing-engraved inlay.
And festival battlement.

VIII

The gods beckon.
Oh, perfectly symmetrical peace!

IX

Long live humanity.

Parabola of the human body!

The quintessence shall overflow everywhere.
O gods.

X

A selection from a certain Russian virgin primer.

｟Women are transparent entities.
Especially virgins are glass architecture……｠

The penguin on the cover of the virgin primer.

Dawn beneath the ice.

Common Merganser.

Glass architecture's menses!

Glass architecture's enamel!

Republican Mores

Republican Mores

In Arles.
—Oh, a fly.
(Lunaal)

＊

Then a dove descended onto the lawn.

September's virgin.

A rainbow formed from white wine.

To the bouquet within the letter, bees returned.

Whenever Kakuketsu coughs, where does that crimson musk scent come from?

＊

A goose lived on a plate.

Mouse bone.
Twilight snow.

＊

Akanthos's One Night.

The narrator discussed with Ku Hung-jan, the library director, about the Alcuin Bible.

That day's diary.

"I saw copies of thirteenth-century British miniatures.
A section of the commentary was interesting."

September.
—Plow, sowing, harrow, stone roller, bamboo stilts.

"I copied these down for future reference."

＊

The chicken foraged among the spaces between mirrors.
Above it spun the century restlessly like a butterfly hinge.
At that sound I turned around.
Listen—I must make this perfectly clear.
The tragedy lies in my not being an artist.
I mustn't grow vain over cultivating this goatee.
What an endearing goat.
You there—serpentine one with cobra eyes.

＊

Night deepened.
O Lord!
I become a single flute; beneath the moon, I meet a green moth.
Oh—a wind-blown crow was over there, just one.

＊

This psychiatric patient saw me and sneered.
He delivered some sort of recitation in a voice resembling a Kiyomoto-style narrator, then spoke as follows.

“I, fallen to naught but a crow—”
“This foolish traveler’s fifth day since fleeing the inn finds him subsisting on—(here he pantomimes slapping his shoulder bag)—these mountain ants, yonder wasp nests, then longhorn beetles and woodlice, supplemented by sorrel and mountain udo—how could this serve as daily fare?”

I struggled to assess his nutritional intake.
Then, at the very moment of encounter, the gardener who had returned from the mountain responded.

“Your paralysis has progressed quite severely.”
“Don’t tell me it’s that guy?!”

No sooner had he spoken than he spat vehemently toward the Himalayan cedar.
In the water basin, while submerging a dust-blown magnifying glass.

＊

I hadn't known such things actually existed.
The entire lakeside area was riddled with mole workings.
The preacher gazed up at the small spire and let out a curse-filled cry.

“Thou ill-mannered subway tunnel diggers! Hmph, you swinish half-rebels who dug holes beneath your very feet! Gaze upon the sun! Hark!”

＊

A bridge was extravagantly overgrown with ivy.
This—!
There was a family under the bridge!

＊

Already, the horsetails were monuments.
The turtle dove's call was at the tower.

＊

How rude.
Children so pessimistic even katydids would sneer!
A dirty foot fell.

＊

"A tin ring on the goldfish's tail fin."
"Run, run," thus it was commanded (A Collection of Analogous Proverbs)

What this country had too many of were misshapen lunatics and hunchbacks.
And collections of analogous proverbs steeped in rule-bound pedantry and such.

＊

A certain moonlit night.
From the pitfall where I misstepped, I saw the moon’s far side in its entirety.
A certain person said the nickel-made lake water appeared to glitter.
Asuho's astronomy.
In any case, a baseless topic.
A tram descended the slope while singing hymns and prayer songs.
Last evening within that, A-Meng.

＊

Strangle Aphrodite to death.
The cold oil of the volcanic lake flowed along the river of his spinal cord.
For the elimination of sin.
The most literary lettuce’s MENS.
Now then, stick out your tongue and show me!

Erudite automaton.
This contraption’s only eloquence lay in its hand dances.
The song it mainly sang was 『Kyrie Eleison…』

＊

At the National Zoo.

The spectacled peacock displayed an affected gait.
A mischievous young vixen was straddling a camel.
Behold.
The chameleon had contracted intense cyanosis.
The Rareguru monkey was hopping.
｟Substitute leaping athlete!
But these became clearly nothing more than fashionable displays of the times.

The conclusion of my memorandum.

"Receiving the director's humble salute, I departed from here like a crane."

Archaic

The Box of Disregard

By rotating that monotonous sound,

To me, from within that wire-mesh box,
it taught the quietness and loneliness that endurance possesses.
You, white mouse diligently turning the wheel,
how long would you keep turning that wheel with such perseverance?
With those endearing vermilion-tinged soft hands and those feet,
but O my friend,
(O small 'actor' who offered passive 'endurance'—)
thinking that you must be lonely too, I worried.
——Round and round went that wheel,
for the day proved too trivial to spend turning it.

“From the ‘Gate’”

Pastoral

Ki-ki-ki—listen!

Baa baa baa—the pastoral sung by goats

Ni-ni-ni-ni—two or three of them bleating

Ka-ka-ka-ka—the cricket in the still night

Ka-ka—behind the hearth

Here Komomakura's Mamamama—Mashiu Aanordo-sensei

Ka-ka-ka-ka—happiness in the corner
Se-se-se-se—Seraphim’s Hymn

Yo-yo-yo-yo-yo—All is well.

The cat glided through these pastoral landscapes.

Snow.

Outside the shoji, the whitish dawn sifted down.

Scattering fine powder, the blizzard quietly subsided.

A crane was crying…

“From the ‘Gate’”

Lakeside Collection

Lakeside Collection

Part One

On the walking path.
——What was mistaken for flour upon the millstone proved to be frost.
Onto that frost came fluttering a gossamer-winged butterfly…
When seen clearly, this gossamer-winged butterfly revealed itself as but a single linden leaf.
Looking upward revealed a bullfinch singing in the linden tree.

A winter lake, distant from the mulberry fields.

Part Two

At Takashima Island on the lake.
——

While crossing that winding Ant Gate Crossing, I triumphantly hummed O CARAMIA through my nose.
Why then did a phantom swarm of hymenopterans materialize midair like sculpted relief?
Yet as I passed by singing, the divine punishment manifested instantly—stumbling—and my spirit scattered from the crag's summit into those lake waters.

That must have been the proof.
Since then, my poetry turned archaic.
I made the lake my homeland.

Part Three

In Shichijūninchō.
——

At that marionette show, I was overwhelmed by the torrential tears of a yawn.
What vulgar performances!
This so-called International Lyric Puppet Exhibition—all pompous title and no substance.
Yet as I scrutinized the displayed puppets, what made me pause was the Moran-esque "Flower Battle" featuring a pair of Persian cats.
The astonishment didn't stop there.
Beneath the placard reading "The Parting of Lord Kusunoki and His Son at Sakurai Station," a burlaku-alloy parrot that had crawled out from a puppet kept tapping a celadon plate—but when I walked past, the thing shrieked with desperate vigor.

“Wait, my child!”

Part Four

Sakuramaba’s resplendent cherry blossom shade…

That I possessed a family more refined than those cherry blossoms—this I secretly pruned.

When spring came, receiving the salute of cherry blossoms arrayed in ranks, I would exit through the gate like a general, arching my spine in haughty curvature.

Part Five

In summer, something invisible crosses the lake, coolly brushing past the shade of Dutch evening glories as it passes.
Night rings with the song of edible frogs.

I came to know through my dream pillow those evenings when I ate frogs and sank into deep slumber while listening to their songs—each night bearing health into the mosquito net. A sleep of particular calculation.

Part Six

Early autumn.
The pale crimson of crape myrtles fell one after another like pages of a calendar.

Part Seven

In winter, at the young dentist's mixed grove garden—a day fit for warblers.

Gracefully, the Higanzakura cherry blossoms added their unseasonal blooms.
When mercury-colored long-lying snow began spilling forth and freezing upon them, it was already the year's end.

The calendar stood stripped bare.

Part Eight

At Lake Heart Pavilion.
——

A flock of little grebes and wrens with their rustic songs.
The albatross's voice was folded into the night wind toward the lake.
It must have been a place like this that compelled Zhang Ji to compose that ambiguous "Maple Bridge Night Mooring."

Under the bright moon, a kite-colored giant catfish cruised across the lake surface, sending up three-meter sprays as it patrolled.

Waves that tilted the lake formed a rainbow over its western shore on a frost-hazed morning.
Below，they were scooping into the hibernation mansion while doing so.

Part Nine

A willow cast its shadow on the blue-green algae of the canal.
There, as in the Kokinshu, warblers did not come.
But wild geese lined up like first graders flew back across that canal.
In turn, a tailcoat that had swallowed mud came flipping lightly through the air in a somersault.

To this street performer, the rainy-season-drenched district stretched longer than a sash.

Part Ten

Cafés and temple towers row upon row.

A town where freight trains that had brought snow from Hokuriku paused for breath.

Part Eleven

In the spring of 1929 came to me the radiance of a day resembling reincarnation.
As if it were that of dawn.
Lakeside life waned as the guidepost pointed east.
Having arrayed myself in full regalia at once, I achieved transmutation.
From human to insect!
Like a swallow abandoning the lake.