Sakutarō Hagiwara Quotes

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.

Some people say my poetry is sensual. It may be that some are like that. Still, a correct view opposes it. Nothing "sensual" can be the motive of my poetry. It is a chord over the keynote. Or an ornament. I am not a man who can get intoxicated on the senses. What I truly try to sing of is different. It is that atmosphere—the sound of a fife you hear on a spring night. It is not the senses, not a passion, not an excitement, but simply the nostalgia of a cloud that quietly drifts in the shadow of a soul. It is a tearful yearning for a reality far, far away.

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.

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.

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.

[A]ll philosophers must surrender to the poet when they arrive at the end of their intellectual exploration. Only the universe that the poet intuits far above the common senses is the true metaphysical reality.

Why can't one love with one's body those whom one loves with one's heart?

The past is a painful memory to me. The past was an ominous nightmare of frustrations, inaction, and a suffering body and flesh.

Since my tender boyhood I've been tormented by my soul's nostalgia with no apparent cause. My night bed was whitishly wet with tears, when the day broke the intestines of my sentimentality were scratched apart by the rooster's voice. For days I ran around the edges of the spring field aimlessly in love with a member of the opposite sex, hugging a tree trunk alone, singing "The One Who's in Love with Love."

In the face of all kinds of derisions of all the many people, I still firmly believe in my mind that that unique village on the Japan Sea of which oral legend has handed down, the town where only cats' spirits live, must surely exist somewhere, in some part of the universe.

[T]he octopus did not die. Even after he disappeared, he still was eternally alive there. In the antiquated, empty, forgotten water tank of the aquarium. Eternally—most likely through many centuries—an animal with a certain horrible deficiency and dissatisfaction was alive, invisible to the human eye.

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.

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.

Father is eternally tragic.

Poetry is the intellect's product of one second. A certain type of sentiment that one ordinarily has touches something like electricity and for the first time discovers a rhythm. This electricity is, for the poet, a miracle. Poetry is not something anticipated and made.