Sakutarō Hagiwara Quotes

The allure of travel gradually faded away from my roman. Once upon a time my heart danced just by imaging any of its symbols, a train, a steamship, towns of unknown foreign lands. Nonetheless, my past experiences taught me that travel is no more than the simple "movement of the same thing within the same space." No matter where you go, you find the same kinds of people live, repeating the same kinds of monotonous lives, in the same kinds of villages or towns. In any small town in the countryside, the merchant is fiddling with his abacus at his storefront, looking out at the whitish street all day, the public servant is smoking in his office, thinking about things like vegetables in his lunch box, as they live each tasteless, monotonous day the same way, day after day, watching their lives gradually grow old. The allure of travel came merely to project in my tired heart the image of an endlessly bored landscape like a Chinese parasol tree that grows in some vacant lot, making me feel a tasteless hatred and leeriness for human life in which identical rules repeat themselves no matter where you turn. In short, I lost interest in any kind of travel, the romance of it.

ah these terrifying shades on earth
in this forest of sensuous illusion
I gaze at the shadow of melancholy that gradually spread
and my heart flapping its wings
resembles the ugly look of a bird at death
ah this sensation of unbearable sensual sex
ever so terrifyingly melancholy.

Ah in this landscape that trails shadows
my soul clutches an itchy terror
like a ship that has come from a harbor it has come
crossing the islands with wraiths in the distance
it's neither wind nor rain
all of it a dark fear clinging to the sufferings of love and lust
and at the dull flute-sound that a snake charmer makes
my crumbling shadow wept lonely.

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.

Of the lukewarm unpleasantness of the sensation of a
man at such a moment a disastrous crime is born. A
heart afraid of crime is the forerunner of a heart that
gives birth to a crime.

I have no more hope no more honor no more future.
And irretrievable remorse alone
scurried away like a field mouse.

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

Nature anywhere oppresses me,
and human kindnesses make me gloomy,
rather I prefer walking in a bustling city park until I get tired,
and find a bench under some lonely tree,
I prefer to be looking at the sky absentmindedly,
ah, I prefer to be looking at the smoke and soot flowing away far and sad over the city sky,
or at a swallow flying away over the roofs of buildings, into the distance, small.

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.

I think of a mystery hard to solve
universal life's instinct's solitary
eternally eternally solitary a sentiment ever so flowery.

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.

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

This utterly unknown dog follows me,
shabby, limping on its hind leg, a crippled dog's shadow.
Ah, I do not know where I'm going,
in the direction of the road that I go,
roofs of tenements are being pelted pelted in the wind,
in a gloomy, empty lot by the road,
bone-dry grass leaves are pliantly thinly moving.

[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.

I love human beings. Nevertheless I fear human beings.