Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki; Meredith Mckinney

Author:Natsume Soseki; Meredith Mckinney
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 0143105191
Publisher: Penguin Classic
Published: 1966-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

I read it through from the beginning. It is not without merit, but it seems rather too dry and dull to really convey the exalted state I’ve just been in. While I’m at it, I decide to try another poem. Gripping my pencil, my eyes stray unconsciously toward the doorway—and at this moment the door is slid open, and I catch a sudden glimpse of a beautiful shape beyond, slipping quickly across the three feet or so of open space. Good heavens!

By the time my eyes have fully turned to take this in, the door is open and the figure is disappearing. The movement is over almost before my eyes can catch it, and the shape passes and disappears in an instant. My gaze is now riveted on the doorway, all thoughts of poetry abandoned.

Within a minute the figure re-emerges across the way. Silent and serene, the woman walks along the second-floor balcony opposite me, clad magnificently in a long-sleeved formal kimono. The pencil falls from my hand. I stare across the twelve yards or so of courtyard garden, breath held, while the lone figure appears and disappears, parading gracefully to and fro at the balcony railing as the evening spring sky, already freighted with cloud, grows gradually heavier with the promise of rain.

The woman has said not a word, nor sent so much as a glance in my direction. She walks so softly that even the sound of her own silk hem trailing behind her would not reach her ears. She is too distant for me to distinguish the details of the dyed colors in the lower half of the kimono; all I can make out is the transition, where the kimono’s basic color merges into the design below, a delicate shading reminiscent of the boundary between night and day, that boundary that she too treads.

I know not how many times this figure in her trailing kimono walks up and down the long balcony corridor nor how long she has performed this strange perambulation in her astonishing clothes. Nor have I the least idea what her intention might be. It’s a weird feeling, to watch her endlessly repeating her ritual, coming and going, appearing and disappearing in the frame of my doorway, so decorously and so silently, for reasons beyond my ken. If her action is some lament for the passing spring, why should it take such an insouciant form? And why should this nonchalant pose choose to clad itself in such finery?

Is it perhaps gold brocade that makes the obi at her waist so startle the eye as this spectral shape, this hue of the dying spring, for an instant entrancingly brightens the doorway’s dark depths? Moment by moment the gaudy brocade comes and goes, swallowed now into the blue depths of evening, into unpeopled remoteness, now returning hither through those far reaches of space. The sight is redolent of the twinkling stars of spring that sink at dawn into depths of violet sky.

At last the heavens are on the verge of opening to swallow this bright shape into the realm of darkness.

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