From the way of Go, the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which… - Yasunari Kawabata

Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?

The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers. The great sixteenth-century master of the tea ceremony and flower arranging, Rikyu, taught that it was wrong to use fully opened flowers. Even in the tea ceremony today the general practice is to have in the alcove of the tea room but a single flower, and that a flower in bud. In winter a special flower of winter, let us say a camellia, bearing some such name as White Jewel or Wabisuke, which might be translated literally as "Helpmate in Solitude", is chosen, a camellia remarkable among camellias for its whiteness and the smallness of its blossoms; and but a single bud is set out in the alcove. White is the cleanest of colors, it contains in itself all the other colors. And there must always be dew on the bud. The bud is moistened with a few drops of water.

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.