Yone Noguchi

“ SPRING IN JAPAN It is the Japanese imagination to make the world-large laughter of flowers out of the December snow; it is our fire of imagination that we build a land of Spring fairies already in Winter's heart of frost, and of wind too solemn even for speech. We flatly object to recognise the existence of Winter; we are happy to think that we have only three seasons in the year. I always think the Japanese mind is most wonderful where it leaves behind the Chinese thought, finite, hard, like the Greek thought, whose consciousness to ethics ever thought a Vision frivolous ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ With us appreciation of it is most natural, while often forced art in another place. And you can make on the spot, if you wish, a story or tradition, of heavenly thing or human being, to suit the cherry-blossom and also your own whim, and even imagine it to be partly your own creation. It is remarkable that any story or tradition, provided it is beautiful, will be found fit for it. I know some flowers of whom I can fancy an ugly thing; but your imagination will soon be disarmed if you start with hostile intention towards the cherry-blossom. ”

“ Oh, what a difficulty to draw its silence, solitariness and independence indeed! And I thought in those days it was rather an easy thing to draw; it is true that there is nothing hard for a boy. Oh, I wish I could return again to my boyhood days. It is not bad to enjoy the true harmony or music of nature; but to appreciate its silence, solitariness and independence is the true test of human culture. I know that education is always mischievous in wrong-doing; it makes us astray from the path true and free. ”

“ It is like the Japanese tea-master wrapped in cold silence, But the cherry-blossom is in temperament like love, generous enough like love to make a poet believe his work is good; but in truth he always fails, again as in love. ”

“ My Spring thought, which started more objectively, slowly entered in subjective appreciation, and my psychical quality of mind is strangely evolving in April, when I see not each shape of Spring, but the one big Vision or Imagination of all Spring now appearing, now disappearing, as one big mist, into whose seen or unknown breath my own existence will be lost; by losing myself I know I shall get a greatest joy of life. ”

“ Why has she to haste when we all wish her to stay longer? I would like to think that we who come like the cherry-blossom shall go again like it. Our human lives are, indeed, beautiful like that flower, and its sigh under the nights wind is ours. It is quite commonplace to say that the life of a flower is short. But it is most wonderful to observe what a gusty energy is put into that short life of the cherry-blossom ”

“ Art and Life are quite different things in Japan.
I put nearly everything good and true in my poetry; when my poetry is done, I hasten to the stupidity and plainness of Life. I am indeed amused to be told then: “How tired you look from having too much poetry! What a prosaic life you are now having!”
Failure is more true, more real, more sane, than success; to get the real failure is a great triumph itself. Iam a worshipper of failure; by the true power of failure I wish to reach the success. ”

“ Our Japanese mind, I believe, through the hereditary sense of hearing which is suddenly awakened by the shrill of a ghost in tune of this samisen, the three-stringed instrument, not wild to us, but suggestive, not primitive but quite complex, will soon become impassioned into imagination; I dare say that we shall feel even a physical pain from love that the tune inspires, the love intensified into a feeling of sensuality. It is at such a moment when we forget the world and life, and pray to enshrine ourselves in love ”

“ The moods are everything; for the sake of the high soar of my moods, I ask the women, wine, music, flowers, and birds to make their own sacrifices, It is from the moods that the clouds fly, and the rains fall. We need not attempt to restrain our moods, but should let them take their own natural course; when they are bad and worthless, they are bound to die, without waiting for your force to be used. And there is always hope and passion when they grow and live; the things that grow and live are ever divine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How often I found myself with those pilgrims muttering the holy words in Daibutsu’s valley where the nature, not alike that of the former October of rest, was in all its spiritual asceticism with repentance and belief; the gigantic divinity in bronze, of folded hands and inclined head in heavenly meditation, over whom time and change (Summer heat, of course) have no power to stir its silence, is self-denial itself. Oh, let my heart bum in storm and confession like the hearts of a thousand cicadas whose songs almost shake the valley and trees ”

“ It bears flowers impregnated through and through with the thoughts and will of man; flowers already human, so to speak, and, if the vegetable world is some day to reveal to us one of the worlds that we are awaiting, perhaps it will be through this flower that we shall learn the first secret of existence, even as, in another kingdom, it is probably through the dog, the almost thinking guardian of our homes, that we shall discover the mystery of animal life. ”