Featuring cover artwork by Shomei Tomatsu

GHOST. My sleeves move again in dances
Of sweet remembered nights of long ago.
(She continues to dance, her song alternating back and
forth between herself and the Chorus.)

CHORUS. “No solace for my heart at Sarashina
When I see the moon
Shining down on Mount Obasute”
When I see the shimmering moon.

GHOST. No stranger to the moon,
I dally among the flowers
For these moments, brief as dew on mountain grasses…

CHORUS. Fleeting as the dew indeed…
Why should I have come here?
A butterfly at play…

GHOST. Fluttering…
Dancing sleeves…

CHORUS. Over and return, over and…

GHOST. Return, return
Autumn of long ago.

CHORUS. My heart is bound by memories,
Unshakable delusions.
In this piercing autumn wind tonight
I ache with longing for the past,
Hunger after the world I knew-
Bitter world,
Autumn.
Friends.
But even as I speak,
See how the night already pales,
And daylight whitens into morning.
I shall vanish,
The traveler will return.
(The Traveler exits.)

GHOST. Now, alone,
Deserted,
A moss-grown wintry hag.
(She watches the Traveler depart, and weeps.)

CHORUS. Abandoned again as long ago.
And once again all that remains-
Desolate, forsaken crag,
Mountain of the Deserted Crone.
(She spreads her arms and remains immobile at the shite-position)

“Someone, somewhere, had tied up the darkness, he thought as he went: the bag of darkness had been tied at the mouth, enclosing within it a host of smaller bags. The stars were tiny, almost imperceptible perforations; otherwise, there wasn’t a single hole through which light could pass.
The darkness in which he walked immersed was gradually pervading him. His own footfall was utterly remote, his presence barely rippled the air. His being had been compressed to the utmost – to the point where it had no need to forge a path for itself through the night, but could weave its way through the gaps between the particles of which the darkness was composed.”

“An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.”

“When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.”

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves. There are no doubt all sorts of reasons—climate, building materials—for the deep Japanese eaves. The fact that we did not use glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.

And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose. The storehouse, kitchen, hallways, and such may have a glossy finish, but the walls of the sitting room will almost always be of clay textured with fine sand. A luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light. We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them. We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. And so, as we must if we are not to disturb the glow, we finish the walls with sand in a single neutral color. The hue may differ from room to room, but the degree of difference will be ever so slight; not so much a difference of color as in shade, a difference that will seem to exist only in the mood of the viewer. And from these delicate differences in the hue of the walls, the shadows in each room take on a tinge particularly their own.

If you fail to come,
Must I lie alone and bear the sound
Of the bamboo grass
Sighing deep within the mountains
As it rustles in the frosty night?

Since first they first flowered,
The mountain cherries have seemed to be
The white cascades
Of a celestial waterfall that streams
From the distant cloudland of the sky.

Here it is, yes here,
Where these set forth and those return
And others come to part-
Both friends and strangers meet together
At the Barrier Post of Meeting!

Worn out with living,
I had thought this mountain village
To be a safe retreat-
But it casts too searching a radiance
In a cloudless sky, this midnight moon.

O winds of heaven
Blow a barrier of clouds across the path
By which they came,
That for a moment I may keep in view
The forms of the Maidens of the Sky!

Remember well!
Whose promises of love were they
That bring my end?-
Mere clouds of yesterday blown away
At the first cold breath of the mountain wind.

My love for you
Is as unvarying in its color
As the needles of the pines
Waiting on the hillslopes of the the moon
To come and bring the splendor of the night.