Sublime

absurdly smoky motsuyaki restaurants,

No breathing room between the buildings, which means unagi restaurants rubbing shoulders with telephone clubs, and estate agents sharing walls with sex shops. Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners. Seal-engraving businesses whose owners never bothered coming in. Video arcades that looked anything but fun.

respected Tanchiu Koji Terayama, director of Hitsu Zendo. The English translation of his book’s title is Zen and the Art of Calligraphy (transl. by John Stevens; Penguin Group, 1983).

The beauty of Basho’s prose, however, took the negative aspects of old age, loneliness, and death and imbued them with a serene sense of beauty.

Night came, settling with the heat, and cast some things in stark relief and others into shadow. The world was saturated with regret and consolation, people and things that went before.

It was said by Japan’s most famous poet, Basho, that “a poem that suggests 70–80 percent of its subject may be good, but a poem that only suggests 50–60 percent of the subject will always retain its intrigue.”

zelkova tree