Yone Noguchi

“ He has been accused of being an unthinking singer, who scatters his thoughts and wastes his passion on any subject; in fact, he is at home on any subject, his sudden fire and thought rising up on the spot. He is the most versatile poet of the present day; and, naturally, he has unconsciously degenerated into every excess. And it seems to me that he always lacks just one touch of distinction. The heart of Nature is sad. Beyond the sounds of the wind and the waves you will be impressed by the loneliness and beauty of silence, which is the dignity of Nature. ”

“ Harken, Genii, to the light and shade—gay prattle that is the despair of the poet's soul!—
The zealous breezes from the four corners of the universe are pilgrims unto the forest-shrine where I pray.
Confess, mortals, the deep-grounded sins of thy memory-record unto the God of the Woodland!
Ah, wonderful is the sacred remedy ensainting mortals' self-love at the forest-shrine!
Listen! The sorrowless birds rejoice at the revealing of the Perfect Day; they bend not their wishes unto titles and gold.
Enter into Paradise, mortals,—the guardian-birds of the hidden gate call thee! ”

“ The beauty of Death is in its utter rejection of profusion; it is the desire of intensity itself which only belongs to the steadfastness and silence of a star; oh, what a determination it declares! It is perfect; its epical perfection arises from the point that it will never return towards Life; its grandeur is in the pride that it shall never associate itself with life’s clatter. Oh, Death is triumph! It is the great aspect of Japanese romance of the fighting age to make the moment of death as beautiful as possible ”

“ It is not superstition to say that the poet's life is worthier than any other life. Some time ago the word loneliness impressed me as almost divine as Rikiu pledged himself in it; I wished, through its invocation, to create a picture, as the ancient ditty has it, of a "lone cottage standing by the autumn wave, under the fading light of eve." But I am thankful for Koyetsu to-day. How to reach my own poetry seems clearly defined in my thought; it will be by the twilight road of imagination born out of reality and the senses—the road of idealism baptised by the pain of death. ”

“ It is an oasis in the human desert of modern life, this little hall of the No play, where I often spend the whole day, as the performance begins usually as early as nine o’clock in the morning, and gain the thought that artistic Japan is not wholly lost; and I feel there happiness and sorrow rhythmically commingled, a human feeling already joined with deathlessness, seeing right before me the great ghost of the Past and Eternity, because the Present slips away like a mouse chased by sunlight. ”

“ Los Angeles, 5th—No one bangs the door at Schuyler’s.
The servants drop their eyes meekly before they speak.
A well-bred atmosphere circulates.
A woman over forty-five is nothing if she isn’t motherly enough to let one feel at home. Mrs. Schuyler’s silence is a smile. I loved her from my first glance. I thought I could ask her to wash my hair some sunny day. I could fancy how pleasant it would be to immerse myself in her chat—such sort of talk as an old-bonneted “how to keep house”—while I was drying my hair in the indolence of a sea-nymph. ”

“ FROM A JAPANESE INK SLAB I think that the moon, among the natural phenomena, appears as if perfectly hating even an accidental shaking of hands or all personal contacts, oh what an aloofness in her shrinking from the worldly vulgarity. (The flowers, even the saintly lotus included, on the other hand, look always as if liking human friendship.) And what a feminine sensitiveness and adroitness in evading the others; see how amiably she slips from the trees’ salutation. The mountains and hills have no power to keep her with them; the clouds are always baffled by her beautiful elusiveness. ”

“ However, it is not only an Oriental philosophy to say that the greatest simplicity is the greatest complexity, and I will say that Gaho holds both extremes. The elements of his art embrace something older than art, larger than life, something which inspires you with the sense of profundity. They give us strange and positive pulses of age and nature, and the sudden rapture of dream, for which we will gladly die. They give us the feeling of peace and silence, and suggest something which we wish to grasp. The delight we gain from Gaho is purely spiritual. ”

“ There is the garden path called roji, so to say, the passage into self-illumination, leading from the without to the within, that is to say, the tea-house under the world-wearied grayness of age-unknown trees, by the solitary granite lanterns, solitary like a saint or a philosopher with the beacon light in heart; it is here that you have to forget the tumultuous seas of the world on which you must ride and play at moral equilibrium, and slowly enter into the teaism or the joy of aestheticism. ”

“ I am an early riser then, in spite of my being a late riser in other seasons, with that morning-glory whose floral beauty or flame is born out of dews and sunlight, the colour of transparency itself out of whose heart, as it seems to me, whether it be blue or purple, red or white, all the colour has been taken. How the flower stands in relation to the breath or odour of the summer dawn would be exactly the same problem as how I stand towards it; I am glad to read myself through their presence, my own strength of impulse towards nature and song. ”

“ The spectacle of the river reminded me of the Sumida Gawa of Tokio, mirroring the clouds of affectionate cherry blossoms which border its bank. It would be a remarkable idea, I thought, to petition the Mayor of New York for the Japanese cherry-trees to parade on this side of the Hudson. When they are in flower, I will open a tea-house under them, of course. My attire as a mistress should be a little red crape apron to begin with. My head will be wound with a Japanese towel to endow my Oriental eyes with certain better results. ”

“ What I am going to say is that it is that Beauty or, let me say, Poetry, to reveal the beauty or perfection of our material life and order; when I write my own poem, it is when I long for and adore my commonplace life whereto I hasten back. I am the lover of material order; that love grows enriched from the fact of my having the most poetical moment which, as I said before, is so dear that I hate it. Oh, let me hate and hate Poetry, because to hate it is to love it again. ”

“ I amused myself thinking that it was Oscar Wilde who said that Nature imitates art; is not the nature of Japan imitating the poor work of the Western method? Art is, indeed, a most serious thing. It is the time now when we must jealously guard our spiritual insularity, and carefully sift the good and the bad, and protect ourselves from the Western influence which has affected us too much in spite of ourselves. Speaking of the Western art in Japan, I think I have spoken quite unconsciously of the general pain, not only in art, but in many other things, from which we wish we could escape. ”

“ Not only the English poetry, but any poetry of any country, is bound to become stale and stupid if it shuts itself up for too long a time; it must sooner or later be rejuvenated and enlivened with some new force. To shake off classicism, or to put it more abruptly, to forget everything of history or usage, often means to make a fresh start; such a start often begins being suggested by the poetry of some foreign country, and gains a strength and beauty. That is why even we Japanese, I dare say, can make some contribution to English poetry. ”

“ Dear old Grandma!
“Do you know what this is, Miss Morning Glory?” the poet said, plucking a leaf from a tree by his door.
“Fig-leaf! Isn’t it?”
My Sayonara Poem in Japanese Autograph.
“Yes, my child! It is a fig-leaf. Do you know the fig tree? It is the shyest tree in the world. Classical tree, indeed! It has no blossom, being so modest of display, but it has the fruits. Remember, my young lady, its teaching of ‘Modesty! Modesty!’”
“Sayonara, Mr. Poet!”
“One minute, Uncle!” I said.
I ran into the Willow Cottage to get a cupful of water. I watered my friend Miss Poppy with love. ”

“ While I admit that the weariness is, in fact, the highest poetry of the Eastern nature, I will say that Tokyo’s weariness is a kind that has lost beauty and art; and the weariness at Kyoto is a kind that has soared out of them. That is the difference; but it is a great difference. As there is the poetry of weariness at Kyoto—the highest sort of Oriental poetry—it is your responsive mind that makes you at once join with great eternity and space; it is most easy there to forget time and hours. It seems to me that nothing is more out of place at Kyoto than a newspaper. ”

“ It gives you a strong but never abrupt thrill of the delight which is nobly touched by the hands of sadness, and lets you lose yourself in it, and slowly grasp something you may be glad to call ideal. And the same sensation you can entertain from Gaho's art, which you might think to be reminiscent of a certain artistic paradise or Horai, the blest—one of his favourite subjects—enwrapped in silent air. ”

“ But when the Japanese mind of later days began to deal with death as a state lifeless, or something hard and final, then the thought of death ceased to have a better, greater influence on life; I despise such a death or such a thought of death. Go back to the age when our ancient Japanese did not know death and shadow, or even when they knew them, did not think much of them, or scorned them, like children laughing with winds and sun. ”

“ I was glad, when I reached Atami, to find that my flower exploration was started well, though even at Atami the season was a little early for it; when the plum trees in the well-known “Plum Forest” there, a week or ten days later, began to smile up to the skies and sunlight (and to me) , I carried my world-wearied soul every day out under their shade, and talked with them in the silence that was beyond the world and humanity. I was called, when I was almost forgetting human speech, back to Tokyo again to pay life’s toll, where I was at once besieged by the same winter cold ”

“ Let me repeat again that he was sad with his brush only to make his art still sadder; when he was most happy, it was the time when he left his own studio to forget his unwilling brush and send his love imaginations under the new foliage of spring trees and make them ride on the freedom of the summer air. How he planned for future work while contemplating great Nature; he was a dreamer in the true sense. And dream was to him more real as he thought it almost practicable. I do not mix any sarcasm in my words when I say that he was a greater artist when he did not paint ”

“ One who lives, for instance, in Chicago or New York, can hardly know the real beauty of night and silence; it is my opinion that the Western character, particularly of Americans, would be sweetened, or at least toned down, if that part of the beauty of Nature might be emphasised. Oh, our Japanese life of dream and silence! The Japanese poetry is that of the moon, stars, and flowers, that of a bird and waterfall for the noisiest. ”

“ If I fail to make me understood by the present Japanese, that might be from the fact that they are less Japanese, or I am, in truth, more Japanese. How remote they are, being “un-Japanese,” from me as I hope to put myself side by side with the old centuries (though I am not sure what century) who better controlled principle and flame for the unity in complexity; always think it is perfect nonsense to say that the older time was simplicity. The older age well understood how to collect the passion and force, to use another word, to put colour into the time’s mind. ”

“ I am sure that to associate Buddhism with something of grief and tears is not a proper understanding at all. (See Gaho's pictures of the Buddha and Rakans, the Buddha disciples. They do not inspire any awfulness.) Tenderness and joy, with a touch of sorrow, which is poetry, are the road toward the Nirvana. For Gaho, silence meant the highest state of peacefulness. The sad joy, which is the highest joy, is an evolution which never breaks the euphony of life, while tears and grief are rebellious. His art inspires in us a great reverence, which is religious, and it is always justified. ”

“ And my ideal garden should be silent. I am sure you will regard the voice as a piece of vulgarity when you are acquainted with the sweetness of silence. So a few trees I will have in my garden. But there must be a somewhat fantastic shape of stone under any circumstances. And one stone lantern, perhaps? The garden must be a poetry whose voice is suggestion or memory itself; and I will try to gather there the meaning fit for my own fancy. But when shall I have my ideal Japanese garden?—Oh, my garden dark-robed and silent as a Buddha priest. ”

“ At such a moment I feel as if all Nature belonged to me alone in the whole world, and I alone held her secrets and her beauty; I am thankful for my illness, as it has made me thus restful in mind and allowed me to carefully observe Nature, and build my many future plans. I can promise you that I will whistle my adieu to the commissioned work, all of it, when I grow stronger again, and become a real artist, the real artist even to satisfy you. ”

“ And not the beauty but the ugliness knows better about its own worth. It is true that beauty is false, or more apt to be false; we see more ugliness in beauty than beauty in ugliness, It is not my new discovery, but it is the fact old like life and the world. And it seems to me that we are slowly but steadily approaching the day when justice shall be done for anything. It is not too much to say that our life finds a solid support or life’s nourishment in the beauty that is distilled through ugliness ”

“ We at once see the tremor of the ghosts of old history or tradition, the ghosts of reminiscences, in the thrill of whiteness in their petals, we might say, like something of an angel’s smile or like a rim of eternity; if there is an unmistakable beauty in the plum-blossom, it is in your own mind, Well, after all, where is beauty if not in your imagination? ”

“ I have heard many people could not understand why the plum-blossom must bloom at such an early season, when it even trembles on the naked branch, and why the maple leaves must turn red, like the showy kimono of a gay daughter in carnival, before they enter into wintry rest; but anybody's heart of hearts always awakens at once when he sees the cherry-blossom in bloom, indeed, the spring of his soul and the spring of the flower call to each other. ”

“ Japan, at least old Japan, succeeded in teaching to everything, human or unhuman, a proper amount of etiquette, the first principle of which is to understand your own place; the manner which the little Japanese fire-box is pleased to express is most admirable, It would not dare to step up on to a tokonoma or raised place of art in the drawing-room, or even attempt to approach it too closely; I can imagine a gentle talk of Japanese women in the circumspect burning of its charcoals under the ashes silken-soft and grey. ”

“ I like the Summer heat, you understand, not from the fact of heat itself, but from the reason we have to thank its presence for the sweetening of the shadows of trees, where I will build, white looking at the delicious white feet of passing breeze, my own kingdom with sighing, to speak plainly, dream old Kamakura of the Middle Age, that is, of art and religious faith. ”

“ You have to abandon yourself to imagination only to create the absolute beauty and grandeur that make this our human world look so trifling, hardly worth troubling with; it is the magical house of Faith where the real echo of the oldest song still vibrates with the newest wonder, and even a simple little thought, once under the touch of imagination, grows more splendrous than art, more beautiful than life. ”

“ I should say that the man who is able to hate poetry is far better qualified even as a mere reader to become the true lover of poetry; how tired I am to hear one say that he loves poetry with all his heart and soul. That only sounds to me as a jest at the best. I think there is a deeper truth in one’s saying how he hates poetry; and since I know that the true love comes forth from the true hatred, and the love and hatred are twin brothers or sisters, I regard the hater of poetry as my real friend. ”

“ I was a song itself which grew out from my confession, Such was my first impression on finding myself in Daibutsu’s ground, the haven of peace and heavenly love all by itself, soon after I returned home from my long foreign sojourn, that is quite many years ago now; but it seems it was only yesterday that I, like a thousand waves hurrying towards the Yuigahama shore of Kamakura, buried to Daibutsu with my own soul of wave-like song of prayer; can our human souls ever be more than the wave of the sea? ”

“ It is only the modern note to make the most of literature and life; it is, I dare say, from the hidden desire to value the no-literature and death more than the literature and life themselves.
We must not lose our insularity, although it needs a strength of consciousness; what we want is intensiveness, the art of distillation of our thought, which only comes from the true pride and real economy of force. Universalism is often a weakness itself. We do not need, in our Japanese literature, any long epic and song, because they are touched more or less by pretention. ”

“ There are many people who think that modern personality is more or less a creation of audacity; I have a reason or two to think it a burden. Permit me to say that to have no personality at all in the present age is really to have a great personality.
Truth is that we Japanese lack in curiosity; therefore we are not inventive, creative, but merely imitative.
Present Japan is a sad mixture of bad action and good intention as if we say bad painting and good purpose for art. We are fooling ourselves when we’ say that we are having the best age of long history to-day. ”

“ HIBACHI My antipathy to the Western stove, even to the old-fashioned English fireplace, may arise from its looking too clearly conscious of its own worth, ever so proudly assuming the first place in a room (what an egoist, indeed, looking as if it felt all the responsibility of the universe) , Then I reflect on a hibachi or Japanese wooden fire-box, whose single-minded humbleness is the creation of no other country but Japan. It makes its own lifework to follow gracefully wherever you go in the house as a heaven-born servant, serving most beautifully in its small capacity ”

“ Indeed, it is the very hour of autumn evening at Kyoto where Nature presents the varied aspect by which you can judge the exact time. By the mountain, Rai means Higashi Yama; by the water, of course, Kamo Gawa. It is the happy old city, this Kyoto, whose poetical heart exchanges beauty and faith with Nature. It is only here, even in Japan, that Nature is almost human, like you and me. ”

“ It is for ever the man’s city, if we can call Kyoto the city of women for the sake of comparison; in consequence, it is apt to be naked, bizarre and often arrogant, but there is no other city like Tokyo, which is honest and simple. As a piece of the art the city is sadly unfinished; in its unfinishedness we fee! a charm, as I said before, the charm of weariness that rather breaks, in spite of itself, an artistic unity. Consciousness of perfection is unknown to the city ”

“ How docile they are! Their docility is like that of the most beautiful and sweet of women. If you hear a voice composed of sky and light, in silk, laces and jewels and curls, certainly you will see in the chrysanthemum gowns the true lyric and song of the sun, the earth, man and life, above all, of Autumn.
Besides the puppet show, this Dangozaka, like the gardens of Counts Okuma and Sakai, is famous, too, for the real chrysanthemums. Oh, what a wonder of the flower corridors! ”

“ I once read in an old Chinese book that there was in ancient time a poet who prophesied war when he heard a voice of the cuckoo at a certain bridge at midnight. Who, I like to know, can foretell the future of Western art by the voice of an English thrush?
I overheard the other day some young man exclaim: “Friend, you reason too much!” That remark made me think for a while, and then I exclaimed to myself: “Why! Have Japanese come already to reason too much?” Only forty years ago we were said to be barbarous; and now we are too uncomfortable under the burden of knowledge. ”

“ I see the sorrow at once universal, with no particular shape, commingled with the whisper and sigh of days and nature in quite a picturesque accentuation, in his early work, as if in my poetry of youth, at the moment when he might have thought, again as in my case, it was a spiritual flight to lose his own nationality, and that the imitation in the best sense or the joining to one indomitable general mood of youth was a poetical passport ”

“ The first thing we feel from reading his work is an uncompromising pride in his art, and the mysterious dash into a world where only a strange intellect knows how to enjoy the material warmth and human softness. It is perfectly outrageous to call him a materialist; he made himself able, through the very virtue of material, to enter straightway into the heart of spirituality; it is more proper to say that he alone found the right meeting ground of spirit and material. He never could think anything spiritual apart from form and colour; the form and colour were divine themselves in his thought. ”

“ To call my own way suggestive often leads people to misunderstanding; if I have any artistic significance or merit in my attitude, it is my understanding of how to leave the space in the picture, nay, the tokonoma where the vase for the flowers stands, or to speak more poetically, how to cover up the space of that tokonoma with the most graceful nothing; therefore my tokonoma has no stupid vacancy. You might call it a Japanese art if you will; but I believe that the true art has no East or West as it is always bom from nowhere. ”