Sakutarō Hagiwara Quotes

From cause-and-effect's destiny's fixed law's
miserable
dry plate of a landscape on which despair has frozen
run away the pale shadow.

If those who have already committed suicide and are dead were to become alive once again and speak, they would probably talk of the actuality of this. They are all regretting ghosts in their graves. I think about this a hundred times and am still terrified, and I shudder even in my dreams.

A person, individually, is always terribly lonely forever and ever.

[T]o me poetry is neither a mystery nor a religion. Even less is it "a life-or-death work" or "a sacred way of ascetic training." It is nothing more than "a sad consolation" for me.

My personality, loneliest in the world,
is calling loudly to an unknown friend,
my obsequious strange personality,
looking shabby like a crow,
is trembling on the corner of a deserted, winter-
withered bench.

Darkness is like waves. On the surface of the sea where life is desolate, they roll in and break, break and roll in again. Ah waves of lust, waves of will, waves of evil thoughts that roll out and rise again. Waves, waves, waves, waves, waves of dark melancholy with nothing special to be said about it. Indeed, this lonely view always repeats its depressingly monotonous echoes on the dark surface of the sea under a cloudy sky. Let us then pass by the seashore, let us go step on the footprints on the dunes that recede into the distance. Let us meditate on the eternal time of nature, of the ocean, that reflects in the Buddha's lonely clock. Now on the surface of the crepuscular sea, watching the whitish waves of darkness that roll in and break, break and roll in again. Hearts on the beach where everything is so sad, crumbling with melancholy.

The dog that howls at the moon howls suspicious and fearful of his own shadow. To the dog's ailing heart, the moon is an ominous puzzle like a pallid ghost. The dog howls far into the distance.

Suppose a mechanical man has a feeling? It will be nothing but boundless sorrow.

The air of the countryside is gloomy and oppressive,
the touch of the countryside is gritty and sickening,
when I sometimes think of the countryside,
I'm tormented by the smell of animal skin coarse in
texture.I fear the countryside,
the countryside is a pale fever dream.

Where is our happiness?
The more we dig the sand in the mud
the deeper the fountain of sorrow becomes, doesn't it?
The spring wavering in curtains' shadow
has gone away into the distance, rocking on a rickshaw.

When I think of poetry, I become teary, without meaning to, because of the wretchedness of human sentiments.

Now I sit in my room alone
and gaze at the shadow of my fading soul
its sighs are lonesome
and as feeble as a fly that stays
in the spring evening sun that fades quietly
my life roams feebly
my life staying at the windowglass
heard helpless children's sobbing schoolsongs

I have made poetry for a long time but I have less and less confidence in it. Someone like me is no more than a miserable blue cat's nightmare.

Ah what's asleep in this large city night
is the shadow of a single blue cat
the shadow of a cat that speaks of the sad history of mankind
the blue shadow of the happiness I never stop longing for.

Thus I make poetry. Like the moths that swarm around a lantern, deceived by the phantom of certain flowery mysterious sentiments, trying to touch the essence of invisible reality, I vainly flap, flap my wings as fragile as sponge cake. I am a pitiable fantasizing child, the sad fate of a moth.