2010-11-4
Our company’s senior managing director is apparently now reading a book called “Kenji Miyazawa as a Scientist,” by Bun’ichi Saitō, and a little while ago showed me an online photograph of the Kitakami River that looked exactly like the description in the book, and I felt that it was just like the scenery of my hometown.
As I have already written, during my boyhood, when I was suffering in the home God had given me as my first trial, I would often slip out of the house at night…and stand on the bank of a major river flowing into the sea…
On the other side stands the school I will love forever…where I spent my youth…where I had as many as 440 truly wonderful classmates…
In the distance, I could see the streetlights of the largest city in Tohoku…
Greenery stretches along both banks, just as in that photograph of the Kitakami River.
Now Feist’s ♪Past in Present♪ has begun playing in my mind…
As I write…I feel as though I might break into sobs.
True life has no end, and neither does a true book (Le Clézio)
Let us persevere and write to the very end.
As for the river on whose bank I stood in the dark of night, even the Man’yōshū celebrates the wooden crafts made from the buried wood of that river as first-rate works of their time.
Standing on the riverbank, countless times, while gazing at the full moon shining gold, I would think of what Heine must have composed while standing beside the Rhine…
A night of the full moon trembling in gold…and of poets from every age and every land who sang of the stillness of the night.
This was entirely unplanned, but…
Among my closest friends in my youth…we would visit one another’s homes…S., who was an especially close friend, would sometimes nickname me, the most handsome of handsome young men, “Full Moon”…
What an outrageous fellow…
When I was the handsome young man the high school girls across the river were all talking about (hearty laughter)