Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Villon's Wife by Dazai Osamu (tl. Donald Keene)
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (tl. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Every Day You Play by Pablo Neruda (tl. W. S. Merwin)
Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years by Akutagawa Ryuunosuke (tl. Jay Rubin)
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (tl. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
Return to Tsugaru: Travels of a Purple Tramp by Dazai Osamu (tl. James Westerhoven)
Encounters on a Dark Night by Higuchi Ichiyou (tl. Robert Lyons Danly)
"Where are you going?" they all began to shout. "You can't run out on us!"
"Teru, Otaka, cover for me, will you? I'll be right back." She hurried through the hallway and slipped into her shoes. Without looking back, she ran out into the street and down the alley on the other side.
Oriki ran from the house as fast as she could. If only it were possible, she would keep on going, to China, to India. How she hated her life! She never wanted to hear another human voice, or any sound at all. She needed a quiet place, where her mind could relax, where there were no worries. How long would she be stuck in this hopeless situation, where everything was absurd and worthless and cruel? Was this what life was supposed to be? She hated it! She hated it! She felt almost delirious and leaned against a tree at the side of the road. "I'm afraid to cross to the other side; I'm afraid to stay where I am." It was her song and her voice, but where was it coming from?
"I have no choice," she whispered. "I will have to cross the bridge by myself. My father fell treading it. They say my grandfather stumbled, too. I was born with the curse of many generations, and there are things I have to undergo before I die. No one's going to feel sorry for me, that much I know. If I complain about how sad I am, 'What's wrong?' people say, 'Don't you like your work?' Oh, it doesn't matter any more what happens—I haven't the slightest idea what will become of me. I might as well go on as Oriki of the Kikunoi. Sometimes I wonder if I've lost all sense of kindness and decency. No, I mustn't think such things. It won't do me any good. With my station in life and my calling and my fate, I'm not an ordinary person any more. It's a mistake to think I am. It only adds to my suffering. It's all so hopeless and discouraging. What am I doing standing here? Why did I come here? Stupid! Crazy! I don't even know myself," she sighed. "I'd better get back."
Oriki left the darkness of the alley and walked along a street lined with shops. They were all doing a lively business. If only some of the gaiety would rub off, she mused. As she trudged along, the faces of passersby seemed tiny to her. Even those of people who walked directly in front of her seemed somehow very distant. She felt as if she were hovering ten feet above the ground. She could hear the din of voices, but it sounded more like the echo of someone falling to the bottom of a well. She was lost in her own thoughts and paid no heed to the voices about her. Nothing distracted her. She passed a crowd gathered round a husband and wife who were arguing, but this, too, failed to interest her. It was as if she were walking in a great, open field laid bare by winter. There was nothing to capture her attention. She felt unsure of her step, as if she might faint. She wondered if she was losing her mind.
Troubled Waters by Higuchi Ichiyou (tl. Robert Lyons Danly)
'One cannot lose what one has not possessed.'
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.
The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz by Geoffrey Hill
Cross your hands on your knee and look at me in silence
At this hour when I can't see that you're looking at me,
Look at me in silence and in secret, and ask yourself
—You who know me—who I am . . .
Excerpts from Two Odes, II by Álvaro de Campos (tl. Richard Zenith)
The horror of another consciousness,
Like a god spying on me!
How I wish
I were the only consciousness in the universe,
So that no one else's gaze would observe me!
The living mystery of seeing stares at me
From everyone's eyes, and the horror of them
Seeing me is overwhelming.
I can't imagine myself any different,
Nor imagine this consciousness—my twin—
Having any other form, or a differently
Different content. All I see are
Men, animals, wild beasts and birds
Horribly alive and staring at me.
I'm like a supreme God who one day
Realized that he's not the only one
And whose infinite gaze now confronts
The horror of other infinite gazes.
Faust by Fernando Pessoa (tl. Richard Zenith)
The Kokinshū: Selected Poems translated by Torquil Duthie
"Huh?" said the old man. "This morning, early this morning."
"But who let you in? Fyodor?"
"Nobody," said her father. "The door wasn't locked… Fyodor found me at the station, I was sleeping on a bench."
"What were you doing sleeping at the station? What's wrong with your room?" Frosya asked angrily.
"Oh… I got used to it there," said her father. "I thought… I thought I'd be in your way."
"All right, you old fibber. But where's Fyodor? When will he be back?"
Her father did not know what to say.
"He won't be back," the old man said. "He's gone."
Fro was silent before her father. Looking intently at a kitchen rag, the old man went on, "There was an express in the morning. He got on and set off for the Far East. 'Who knows?' he said, 'In the end I might get as far as China.'"
"What else did he say?" asked Frosya.
"Nothing," her father replied. "He told me to go back home to you and take care of you. As soon as he's got everything done, he said, he'll either return or else arrange for you to go out to him."
"Got what done?"
"I don't know," said the old man. "He said you knew all about it. Communism, maybe, or some other thing."
Fro left her father. She went off to her room, leaned a long way out of the window and began to watch the boy playing his mouth organ.
"Little boy!" she called out. "Come and be my guest."
"Yes I will!" said the harmonica boy.
He got up from his log, wiped his music on the hem of his shirt and walked towards the building, to be her guest.
Fro was standing alone in the middle of the large room, in her nightshirt. She was smiling, waiting expectantly for her guest.
"Goodbye, Fyodor!"
Maybe she was foolish, maybe her life was worth only two kopeks and there was no need to love it and care for it, but then she alone knew how to transform these two kopeks into two rubles.
"Goodbye, Fyodor! You'll come back to me, I'll wait till you come."
Her little guest knocked timidly on the main door. Frosya let him in, sat down before him on the floor, took his childish hands in her own and gazed admiringly at the musician: this man, probably, was the mankind Fyodor had told her about in such tender words.
Fro by Andrey Platonov (tl. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler + Katia Grigoruk)
Fires on the Plain by Ooka Shohei (tl. Ivan Morris)
Grass for My Pillow by Maruya Saiichi (tl. Dennis Keene)
Suicide…
When his thoughts arrived at this point, he found himself overtaken by a kind of psychological malaise. No matter how you looked at it, he reflected, to kill yourself just because you've suffered some setback required too much effort. If you've finally managed to carve some time out for yourself and flop out, you're hardly in the mood to get up and fetch a cigarette that lies just beyond your reach. Sure, you're dying for a smoke, but it remains just outside your grasp. In fact, it requires a huge effort to heave yourself up and fetch that cigarette: just like when you're asked to push a car that has broken down. That, in a nutshell, is suicide.
Life for Sale by Mishima Yukio (tl. Stephen Dodd)
As that year drew to a close, however, one after another of the young men who basked in that noonday sun received their draft notices printed on red paper. Each morning at the factory it was easy to tell from the looks on people's faces who had just received their orders. They would try to force a smile, but the dark, heavy circles under their eyes betrayed them.
'It's come,' the latest recipient would announce to everyone in a low voice, as though he were confessing some dark secret.
'When do you leave?'
'In two weeks.'
Of course, no one mouthed empty phrases like 'Congratulations' or 'Give it your best!' Sooner or later the same piece of paper would be coming their way. They all stared at the tall factory chimney. Again today the smoke from the chimney swirled straight up into the sombre sky. The scene was unchanged from yesterday or the day before. It seemed as though it would stay that way for eternity.
'When is this war going to end?' No one knew. They felt as though it would linger on and on for ever.
Whenever a new recruit left Tokyo, everyone assembled at Shinjuku or Tokyo Station to see him off. The students formed a circle on the crowded platform and sang their school song in an angry roar. They howled and leaped about, less interested in seeing off their friend than in masking the anxiety and fear that lurked in their own hearts. As the train carrying their comrade vanished from sight, looks of bleak emptiness appeared on the faces of those who had been so boisterous just a few moments before.
1945 came, and still Konishi had not received his induction notice. Around that time the enemy air raids gradually intensified. The previous November the Nakashima Aircraft Plant in Musashino had been bombed, and enemy planes appeared fifteen times the following month. Strangely, F. Factory in Kawasaki was untouched. Often the trains packed with exhausted workers at the end of the day would come to a stop with a groan. Sometimes there appeared to be an attack over the downtown area; from the train windows they could see the sky in that direction glowing a dark red. The train service was often suspended, and Konishi would have to crouch for a long while on a connecting platform at Tokyo Station, staring at the reddened sky, realizing with a start that death was all that lay before them.
The War Generation by Endo Shuusaku (tl. Van C. Gessel)
My mother constantly lost control of herself and struck me. But not my older siblings: perhaps I was a child she could vent her feelings on. She needed an outlet. Someplace to let herself go.
With my sister, who remembered her father, she was never sure what to do. My intellectually handicapped brother she practically idolized. And me? I was a child who didn’t know her father, a child who was all hers. A child on her own side, born not long before the one he’d fathered somewhere else. An average child, healthy, heedless, engrossed in play. Whatever the reason, I must have been her only safety valve. If a slap for dawdling set my nose bleeding, I’d receive another because she didn’t like the nosebleed. Once I hid all her rulers (or so I thought), hoping to stop her at least using them on me; for this I was again hit with a ruler, on the shoulders and the rear. I scrambled to escape these hidings, as any child would, because they hurt. But I didn’t think about why I’d been hit, and so I kept on doing the things that made her mad. All I ever learned was to fear her.
Though afraid, I was a child who instantly forgot what I was told. I couldn’t be trusted with errands, I’d leave my satchel at school, I was in no hurry to do my homework, of course, and I’d forget the time when playing at a friend’s place. My mother had ample opportunity to get angry.
She provided herself with bamboo canes the right size for my growing body. I fled her more than ever, learning to disguise awkward facts with lies. I was once clouted in front of a friend, who had come to ask me around to her place, for saying I wanted to go. Oh, so my home wasn’t good enough for me? Had I no shame? she demanded. Where was my pride?
Shameless: she always called me that. I never understood why, and I had no answer. But I no longer cried or said I was sorry, and a child who wouldn’t apologize irritated her all the more. I may not have known what she meant, but a mother’s words leave their mark. Wondering if I was shameless, I spent my free time at my school friends’ homes–anywhere but my own.
The punishments didn’t let up even when I reached middle school; in fact, as my brother died not long after that, they became more intense. She stopped raising her hand to me only after I pushed her to the floor, unable to endure it any longer. From then on, she tended to stay in her room and say nothing. And I grew distant from her; I was beyond caring about winning over this stern mother of mine. But my fear was ingrained. All these years later, I remain wary, still afraid of her.
Yet, hard as I find it to believe, she has apparently forgotten what she was once like. Perhaps I should forget, too, and feel easier around my elderly mother–or so I tell myself, but a visceral reaction can’t be changed at will. That mother was mine. A mother who hated and feared the outside world as she held her children tight, and who faced that world with disdain, adamant that no one was going to look down on her: that’s who raised me. I grew up tutored in what happened if you trusted outsiders, taught that solitude was the only weapon of defence. Though I have to say, I was a child who never made any effort to understand how my mother felt.
I slept badly myself that night. The thought of her lying awake–thinking sadly and bitterly how I must hate her to tell such a dreadful lie, yet reminding herself that I was her daughter, whom she loved–was never far from my mind.
And I dreamed that I returned her umbrella. Neither she nor it appeared in the dream, but that was evidently what I had gone to do. I did all the talking.
…I don’t want to see your blasted umbrella. You think I’m that easy to scare? I know your methods. What I can’t bear is that you’ve mixed up my troubles and yours and you won’t admit it. No, it’s no use going ‘What nonsense’ and looking sad. Just think about it: why do you trouble yourself so much over me? Why do you brood over me and fear me, yet turn to me? And why always when it rains? You hear the rain and you picture me all alone, afraid of the rising waters, my child in my arms. Trapped, unable even to weep. But that’s yourself you’re seeing, not me. You feel moved to tears and you think they’re for my sake, so you come to check up on me–not on my sister, who has a proper husband and was never entirely yours anyway. But then all you get from me are dirty looks. No clinging and no reassurances. So you’re bewildered and afraid of me. And I’m afraid of you. So afraid, I don’t know what to do.
You’ve always viewed me through your own troubles. Can you deny it? People depend on their misfortunes. We curse them, but actually we’re wedded to them, proud of them even. And you’re no exception. You’re afraid of the water that stole your husband, but all you can do is consort with it. It’s always around you. As far as you’re concerned, he didn’t die, he turned to water. What happens on land vanishes in water, and the reverse is true, too. Water is your greatest fear, but the world of water is also where your deepest prayers find a hearing. Away from that realm and its deity, you lose sight of the feelings you still have for your husband; they become lost in your feelings as a mother. And you think I’m like you. You believe that as we’re both in Suijin’s power, it’s only natural to listen together to her voice, feel her weight together. And so you leave your umbrella at my place. I know that seems far-fetched, but it’s you who puts the idea in my head, dragging that water everywhere you go. It scares me. I’m afraid I’ll go under.
And you’re afraid of me, too. Because I came bumbling along right when the Water Deity was calling your husband, and I sounded a lot like her when I wailed. And then there was his other child, so the wailing nearly deafened you. When you lashed out with a stick, it wasn’t at me. You were fighting your pain in the shape of Suijin. You weren’t seeing me, so you don’t think you ever laid a finger on me. Is that it?
I’m past hating you for it now. That was the only mother I knew growing up, so I couldn’t love any other kind. There you were, your eyes on the realm of water, never a glance to spare for anyone on land, shielding yourself with disdain.
But now that you’re getting on in years, although you’re still afraid of me, you’d like to forget the reason why. You fancy yourself as a cooing, gooey, vanilla grandmother. Don’t be ridiculous. I’d like to slap your cheeks till I get through to you. Listen, you were never an indulgent mother and you never looked out for me. I won’t have you feeling sorry for me or your grandson. You don’t get to think, If only my poor daughter would let me help her out.
You’re convinced everything would be fine if we lived together. If only we could. But you live in a world I don’t recognize. What a halcyon glow our childhood must have for you. Your eldest so capable, the little ones like a couple of playful, tumbling puppies. We came at your call and clung passionately to you. Your flower beds bloomed, and we loved to wear the sweaters you knitted us. We adored your snacks, we slept on your hand-sewn futons. Your children. You were surrounded by their bubbly laughter, their round cheeks shining with health. You were their queen. Their sweet fragrance enveloped you. Everything in sight glittered a dazzling gold. When spring breezes blew, the light streamed through the air. It was a place of such beauty. Such happiness.
You’re intoxicated with that beauty, and you believe you can regain it. But why would that idyll materialize now, when it never existed in the first place? You couldn’t even set the stage after all this time. My brother has died, my sister and I ceased to be children over twenty years ago, and even the old house has gone.
Your dream is bound to end as a dream.
That’s the way it is, sad and unfair as it may seem. So you’re better off with the dream. I can’t live with you, because the dream is all you have. You live in a fantasy. I don’t want to go bursting that bubble now.
A Dragon Palace. You’re enchanted by a Dragon Palace of your very own. That beautiful realm where a hundred days are a hundred years. A tranquil haven in the deep, suffused with a light unimaginable on land. In the years to come, that light will steadily grow clearer and stronger, the watery realm will grow more beautiful in your eyes, and you will enter that realm.
That’s how I hope it will be. Because I love you. And I don’t want to think that one day you will die.
A Watery Realm by Tsushima Yuuko (tl. Geraldine Harcourt)
Schoolgirl by Dazai Osamu (tl. Allison Markin Powell)
Tell me, just this once, if you still think of me. And let me recklessly, tenderly, tell you one more time: I love you.
Notes from a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (tl. Bonnie Huie)
In daylight, one can keep things simple and dress sedately. But the best clothing for night is showy and dazzling formal wear. The same goes for people — a good-looking person will look still finer by lamplight, and it's charming to hear a careful voice speaking in darkness. Scents and music too are still lovelier at night.
Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkou (tl. Meredith McKinney)
(I'm sure I've even read these same words before in some book.)
Really, I don't know which is the true me. What ever will I do when there aren't any more books to read, or when I can't find another role model to imitate? Probably just wither away, helpless and sniveling profusely. Anyhow, these aimless thoughts I have on the train every day don't do me much good. The unpleasant warmth I still felt in my body was unbearable. I felt I had to do something, somehow, but would I be able to fully grasp what that was? My self-criticisms seem basically pointless to me. I would start to judge, and when I'd get to my negative or weak traits, I'd immediately begin to indulge or wallow in self-pity, and then decide it's no good, why not just leave well enough alone, so I've given up on criticism. It would be best if I just didn't think of anything at all.
Schoolgirl by Dazai Osamu (tl. Allison Markin Powell)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (tl. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
Eight Views of Tokyo by Dazai Osamu (tl. Ralph McCarthy)
The Letter from the Young Worker by Rainer Maria Rilke (tl. Charlie Louth)
'… morbid anxiety, a nervous depressed condition, irritability, weakening of the memory, occasional hallucinations and a mild impairment of consciousness …'
I have not experienced any hallucinations, but I can only say that the rest of this description is dull, pedestrian and totally inadequate. 'Depressed condition' indeed! Having suffered from this appalling malady, I hereby enjoin all doctors to be more compassionate toward their patients. What overtakes the addict deprived of morphine for a mere hour or two is not a 'depressed condition': it is slow death. Air is insubstantial, gulping it down is useless … there is not a cell in one's body that does not crave … but crave what? This is something which defies analysis and explanation. In short, the individual ceases to exist: he is eliminated. The body which moves, agonises and suffers is a corpse. It wants nothing, can think of nothing but morphine. To die of thirst is a heavenly, blissful death compared with the craving for morphine. The feeling must be something like that of a man buried alive, clawing at the skin on his chest in the effort to catch the last tiny bubbles of air in his coffin, or of a heretic at the stake, groaning and writhing as the first tongues of flame lick at his feet.
Death. A dry, slow death. That is what lurks behind that clinical, academic phrase 'a depressed condition'.
Morphine by Mikhail Bulgakov (tl. Michael Glenny)
Farewell... This is the only world that your ancestors were able to leave you.
Please...forgive us.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (tl. Charlie Louth)
Of the pallid horizon,
Come pull me out
Of the soil of anxiety and barrenness
Where I thrive.
Pluck me, a forgotten daisy, from my soil.
Read in my petals I can't imagine what fortune
And strip them off to your satisfaction,
Your cool and quiet satisfaction.
Excerpts from Two Odes, I by Álvaro de Campos (tl. Richard Zenith)
Time has passed and much has happened, much has changed; and I can only remember a little of all that passed that night, a little of all we said and did in the deep tenderness of love, a few moments of clear awakening from the deep sleep of love's weariness. That night, however, for the first time since my downfall gave me back the unrelenting radiance of my own life and made me recognize chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of the divine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opened. There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller and as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the world of imagination and be immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for the progress of every human life?
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (tl. Basil Creighton)
"I feel more vulnerable in the spring than in the fall. That's why I'm so damp. This isn't sweat. It's something the sun has wrung from my heart. Not pain, not distress. More like blood being squeezed from the tips of a tree's tender leaves, as though my bones are being extracted and my skin is being melted. Yes, that's the perfect expression for times like this. I feel like I've turned into water, as though what's been melted of me will soon disappear, and that there will be tears—though neither of sadness nor of joy.
"Sometimes you cry when someone scolds you. Other times you cry when someone comforts you. But on a spring day like today, your tears are of this latter kind. I suppose they're sad. Yet there are different types of sadness. If fall is the sorrow of nature, then spring is the anguish of human life.
"Those people you see out there working in their fields—when fall comes they brace themselves, each doing his best not to be overwhelmed by melancholy. There's still strength in those dispirited legs. But in spring the strength is stolen away. They float up, as if they've been turned into butterflies or birds. They seem anxious, don't they?
"Invited by a warm, gentle wind, the soul becomes a dandelion blossom that suddenly turns into cotton and blows away. It's the feeling of fading into death after seeing paradise with your own eyes. Knowing its pleasure, you also understand that heaven is heartless, vulnerable, unreliable, sad.
"And when you cry out, is it because of sadness? Or is it just another indulgence?
"I feel as though I'm being sliced into pieces, as if my chest is being torn to shreds. It's neither painful nor prickling, more like a peach blossom in the sunlight, scattered to pieces, placid, serene, beautiful, and at the same time sad, as unreliable as a sky with no clouds or a green field turned into a sandy plain, like a previous existence, like what's before your eyes, like wanting to say what's in your heart but not being able to, something frustrating, regrettable, disturbing, irritating, more like being pulled into the earth than being lifted into the air. And that's why I had to lie down."
One Day in Spring by Izumi Kyouka (tl. Charles Shirō Inouye)
Among Animals and Plants by Andrey Platonov (tl. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler + Olga Meerson)
What had happened to me? Here I stood facing the image that millions worshipped as the symbol of their faith, the image that had, indeed, been the object of my own infatuation—and all that I could see was a gory carcass being forced down by gravity. What dismal change had occurred within me?
I lay down in the dust of the floor and wept. Why, when after all these years I had again been stirred by religious feelings and even been drawn by them to this village, should I have been forced to see only the mangled corpses of my fellow soldiers and the tortured body of Jesus painted by some unskillful artist? Was it fate that had contrived this cruel jest, or did the fault lie within myself?
Fires on the Plain by Ooka Shohei (tl. Ivan Morris)
"These stiffs are getting out of hand," muttered the soldier at the front end of a piece of corrugated iron.
"If only we'd been born in a country, not a damn-fool state," said his companion wistfully.
That exchange was the only human sound I heard there. The body on the improvised stretcher lay in a tight huddle, a Pinocchio with every single pin removed…
All unconsciously, I had started murmuring the "Sermon on Mortality" to myself. Hiroshima was no more…. Yet who could have foreseen that its end would be of such horror as this?
Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji (tl. John Bester)
Homecoming by Dazai Osamu (tl. James O'Brien)
Putting Granny Out to Die by Dazai Osamu (tl. James O'Brien)
'No, I'm fine,' he mumbled, his eyes fixed on the floor. 'I only feel pain in the winter when it is cold. When spring comes, I am fine again. That is the way it always is.'
Old Friends by Endo Shuusaku (tl. Van C. Gessel)
Eight Views of Tokyo by Dazai Osamu (tl. Ralph McCarthy)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (tl. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
The Rebirth of Wujing by Nakajima Atsushi (tl. Nobuko Ochner)
One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji by Dazai Osamu (tl. Ralph McCarthy)
The Letter from the Young Worker by Rainer Maria Rilke (tl. Charlie Louth)
Spinning Gears by Akutagawa Ryuunosuke (tl. Jay Rubin)
The Flowers of Buffoonery by Dazai Osamu (tl. Sam Bett)
Vanitas no Carte by Mochizuki Jun
Return to Tsugaru: Travels of a Purple Tramp by Dazai Osamu (tl. James Westerhoven)
Notes from a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (tl. Bonnie Huie)
I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly, wrapping my eyes
All around you, O great and banal, useful and useless things,
Triumphal Ode by Álvaro de Campos (tl Richard Zenith)
"Oh, yes, ready with all my heart," I cried in my misery.
"Of course! When it's question of anything stupid and pathetic and devoid of humor or wit, you're the man, you tragedian. Well, I am not. I don't care a fig for all your romantics of atonement. You wanted to be executed and to have your head chopped off, you lunatic! For this imbecile ideal you would suffer death ten times over. You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. The devil, but you shall live! It would serve you right if you were condemned to the severest of penalties."
"Oh, and what would that be?"
"We might, for example, restore this girl to life again and marry you to her."
"No, I should not be ready for that. It would bring unhappiness."
"As if there were not enough unhappiness in all you have designed already! However, enough of pathos and death-dealing. It is time to come to your senses. You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. More will not be asked of you."
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (tl. Basil Creighton)
The Kokinshū: Selected Poems translated by Torquil Duthie
それでも私たちはなぜか積み上げ続ける。それが生きている証しであるから。
吉本ばなな『SINSIN AND THE MOUSE』
Vertigo by W.G. Sebald (tl. Michael Hulse)
Suddenly, a phrase from a poem came back to me, a poem I had read in some magazine when I was a boy: "Oh worm, friend worm!" it began. There was more in the same vein: "Rend the heavens, burn the earth, and let men die! A brave and moving sight!"
Fool! Did the poet fancy himself an insect, with his prating of his "friend" the worm? How idiotic can you get? He should have been here at 8:15 on August 6, when it had all come true: when the heavens had been rent asunder, the earth had burned, and men had died. "Revolting man!" I found myself announcing quite suddenly to no one in particular. "'Brave and moving' indeed!" For a moment, I felt like flinging my bundle in the river. I hated war. Who cared, after all, which side won? The only important thing was to end it all as soon as possible: rather an unjust peace, than a "just" war!
Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji (tl. John Bester)
The following afternoon, Shigematsu went to inspect the hatchery ponds. The aiko were coming along well, and in a shallow corner of the larger pond some water weed was growing. Shōkichi had probably planted it there; he must have got it from the Benten shrine at Shiroyama. Its oval, shiny green leaves dotted the surface of the water, and from their midst rose a slender stalk on which a small, dark purple flower was in bloom.
Shigematsu looked up. "If a rainbow appears over those hills now, a miracle will happen," he prophesied to himself. "Let a rainbow appear—not a white one, but one of many hues—and Yasuko will be cured."
So he told himself, with his eyes on the nearby hills, though he knew all the while it could never come true.
Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji (tl. John Bester)
It was a strange, bright afternoon. An afternoon in which something gigantic had been misplaced, a spring afternoon that felt empty and full of light.
Hanio had decided to give himself a break, yet here he was again, getting entangled in another bizarre situation. The world seemed so full of multiple twists and turns. No way could the earth be described as a perfectly neat globe, he thought. One moment, the land is pitted with sinkholes, the next moment a plateau suddenly rears up into a perpendicular cliff.
To say that human life had no meaning was the easy part. But Hanio was struck all over again by the huge amount of energy required to live a life filled with so much meaninglessness.
Life for Sale by Mishima Yukio (tl. Stephen Dodd)