Yone Noguchi

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now I should like to know if our lives are not one long roji where, if you are wiser, you will attempt to create the effects or atmosphere of serenity or poetry by the mystery of silence. There are many great tea-masters who have left us words of suggestion how to beguile and lead our minds from the dusts and ruin of life into the real roji mood that is the blessing of shadowy dreams and mellow, sweet unconsciousness of soul's freedom ”

“ 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 have a word which is much used carelessly in the West, but whose true meaning is only seldom understood, that is the word of suggestion. I have an art; that is the art of suggestion. What suggestion? you might ask. I will point the way, if you are given a right sort of artistic susceptibility, where the sunlight falls on the laughter of woods and waters, where the birds sing by the flowers; again I will point, if you are able to read the space between the lines, to the pages of the Japanese seventeen-syllable Hokku poems, the tiniest poems of the world. ”

“ When we feel the beauty of the monotony of the No drama that is gained by the sacrifice of variety, I think that our work of appreciation is just started. I cannot forget the impression carved on my mind, which was then roughened, stiffened, by the toss of Western life of quite many years, when I first entered Hosho’s No house some ten years ago. It was the month of October, with maple-leaves and passion-flowers fallen, with birds and love flung away, whose gray heart was in perfect accord with this No performance. ”

“ When one knows that the things useless are the things most useful under different circumstances (to give one example, a little stone lazy by a stream, which becomes important when you happen to hear its sermon) , he will see that the aspect of uselessness in poetry is to be doubly valued since its usefulness is always born from it like the day out of the bosom of night; you cannot call it, I trust, merely a Japanese freakishness or vagary if we appear to you in the matter of poetry to make much ado about nothing. I dare say we have our own attitude toward poetry. ”

“ I do never mean that the Hokku poems are lyrical poetry in the general Western understanding; but the Japanese mind gets the effect before perceiving the fact of their brevity, its sensibility resounding to their single note, as if the calm bosom of river water to the song of a bird. One of the English critics exclaims from his enthusiasm over Hokku: “That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. ”

“ I know that the mask is made to reserve its feeling, and the actors wonderfully well protect themselves from falling into the bathos of the so-called realism through the virtue of poetry and prayer; and when I realise it is from the same old humanity that tears and smiles, brothers or sisters by blood relation, spring forth, their difference being only a little shade of colour, the mystery that the No hall performs on our human minds will be explained to a great measure. ”

“ Not only from garment or eyes, but from anything or anywhere, indeed, even from a cough, our ancient deities, it was supposed, had such a power or magic to produce anything and everything by their free will, and they inspired their own personalities into the things they created. All the phenomena thus exhibited were, in our ancient Japanese mind, nothing but the symbol of life’s active spirit; the great reverence of our forefathers toward the deities or gods was only fierce adoration or praising expression toward the power or strength which overflows from the bosoms of mighty personalities. ”

“ He is a too open singer; his voice sometimes drops even into bathos. Suggestion, the spirit of atmosphere should be properly valued; and we do not attempt to hold back the poet when he flies into the clouds. Iwano’s imagination shows great variety in wealth and colour without depth, like a summer cloud which haunts the mountain peak. Questions in philosophy and reflection are not his own field; but his speculation in thought and passion makes one of ten wonder and gaze. His poems themselves are his personality. ”

“ It is my opinion that the real test for poets is how far they resist their impulse to utterance, or, in another word, to the publication of their own work—not how much they have written, but how much they have destroyed. To live poetry is the main thing, and the question of the poems written or published is indeed secondary; from such a reason I regard our Basho Matsuwo, the seventeen-syllable Hokku poet of three hundred and fifty years ago, as great, while the work credited to his wonderful name could be printed in less than one hundred pages of any ordinary size. ”

“ The main concern is how to regulate and arrange Nature; before arranging and regulating Nature, you have to regulate and arrange your own life. The thoughts of life and death, let me say, do not approach me; let me live in the mighty serenity of the Eternal! By the virtue of death itself, life grows really meaningful; let us welcome death like great Rikiu who, being forced to harakiri by his master’s suspicion, drank the “last tea of Rikiu” with his beloved disciples, and passed into the sweet Unknown with a smile and song on his face for the very turn of the page. ”

“ The real poet in the Japanese understanding is primitive, as primitive are the moon and flowers; the voice of a wind we hear to-day is the same voice which echoed, let me say, to the ears of Adam and Eve through the valley and trees. ”

“ And again the Hokku poem is a bell helpless, silent, when with no reader to cooperate; when I say that the readers of Japanese poetry, particularly this Hokku poem, should be born like a poet, I count, I should say, their personal interest almost as much as that of the writers themselves. Therefore in our poetry the readers assume an equally responsible place; and they can become, if they like, creators of poems which in fact are not their own work, just as if one with a bell-hammer did create the bell in the real sense. ”

“ When I say the best Hokku poems do never know their own limitations, (remember, they are only seventeen syllables) , that is because they are of the most essential of all the essential languages, which is inwardly extensive and outwardly vague; a severe restraint imposed on one side will be well balanced by the large freedom on the other. As in any poem of any other country, the Japanese poet’s work also rests on the belief that poetry should express truth in its own way; by that truth we Japanese mean Nature; again by that Nature the order of spontaneity. ”

“ Who are the old man and woman? The ghosts of the trees are nothing, but the old man and woman singing the age of golden and happy life. Among some three hundred plays now in existence, there is no other like “The Robe of Feathers” that gracefully carries the delicate, statuesque beauty of composition and sentiment. It is the play of a fairy whose feather-robe was stolen by a fisherman at Mio’s pine-clad shore, while she was bathing, and was finally given back upon her promise to dance. Not to go to extremes, even in sadness, is taught in Japan to be the height of cultured manners ”

“ I think it is time for them to live more of the passive side of Life and Nature, so as to make the meaning of the whole of them perfect and clear, to value the beauty of inaction so as to emphasise action, to think of Death so as to make Life more attractive, although I do not insist upon their conforming themselves, as we Japanese poets, with the stars, flowers, and winds.
We treat poetry, though it may sound too ambitious to the Western mind, from the point of its use of uselessness ”

“ As literature, they are things apart from the aristocratic writing encouraged by the Kyoto court in the former age, being democratic in sentiment, though not in the style of the lines and phrases, which are in truth the noblest expression of poetry, and might be compared with the magnificent dresses of stiff brocade the actors wear as they move along to the deep cadence of music; there are no better examples of epic poetry in our Japanese literature than the No plays ”

“ Such was the last song of this great spirit; when you compare it with the Japanese songs of a later age, you will see that our ancestors, even at the moment of death, were never taken, to use the modern words, by the thought of pessimism or sentimentality; they were the singers of life and joy, not of death and tears.
They knew the world was never made for weak body and mind; they never exercised pity and compassion upon any form of weakness ”

“ When we remember that the simplicity and archaism of the so-called tea-ceremony grew out of the purism of the Zen monastery or priest hall of meditation, it will be clear enough that the No drama must have an equal connection with Buddhism; in fact, there is no play among those three hundred plays in existence which has no appearance of a priest whose divine power of meditation or prayer invariably leads the ghost of a warrior or a lady, or a flower, or a tree into the blessing of Nirvana. To call the No the ghost play has no real meaning, any more than to call it a priest play ”

“ Those who wished for a deeper colour and variety of diction than Shimazaki’s, and showed a fatigue at his monotony, open their arms to welcome Kyukin Susukida. Susukida enshrined Keats in his heart; like him he is a poet of Youth and Beauty, to whom Nature appeared as a background. ”