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A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.

~ Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima Classics Existence Freedom Japan Japanese Japanese Classics Japanese Lit Japanese Literature Mishima Thirst For Love Yukio Mishima

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

~ Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki Aesthetics Beauty Far East Intercultural Japan Japanese Literature Light And Darkness Shadows

Why can’t people get along without criticizing one another?” Urashima shakes his head as he ponders this rudimentary question. “Never have the bush clover blooming on the beach, nor the little crabs who skitter o’er the sand, nor the wild geese resting their wings in yonder cove found fault with me. Would that human beings too were thus! Each individual has his own way of living. Can we not learn to respect one another’s chosen way? One makes every effort to live in a dignified and proper manner, without harming anyone else, yet people will carp and cavil and try to tear one down. It’s most vexing.

~ Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai Care Dazai Osamu Humanity Humans Japanese Literature

Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened by that voice, infused with unexpected life: the western sky, streaked with bands of pale gold and purple; the two houses, standing gray and disconsolate against that sky; the clusters of trees casting deep black shadows here and there across the ground. The same voice that brought everything suddenly to life also drew them into another, much deeper world—a world that was normally hidden, a world that stretched out into eternity. Yusuke, who had at first looked on with a sense of distance as everyone else sat listening, their faces intent on the music, found himself being gradually drawn in as well, forgetting the moment and the place, lending his ear during that unworldly stretch of time as if entranced. No one spoke. The singing could not have lasted ten minutes, but when it ended he found the darkness all at once grew deeper.

~ Minae Mizumura

Minae Mizumura Fiction Gothic I Novel Japanese Literature Novel

She's still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn't have electricity until she started elementary school, and she'd never seen a train until the tracks of the Koumi line were laid in Saku. It's exactly as if she were born in the Edo period. These days, you only have to drive for five minutes to find a sparkling clean convenience store, with bright lights above shelves stocked with everything you could possibly need. Land that used to be fields of mulberry bushes is now crisscrossed by smooth, wide roads lined with video rental stores and fast food restaurants.I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By the inside of her head I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed.

~ Minae Mizumura

Minae Mizumura Fiction Gothic I Novel Japanese Literature Novel

Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Sōseki Natsume Japanese Japanese Culture Japanese Literature Words Words Have Power

He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

~ Doppo Kunikida

Doppo Kunikida Grief Japanese Literature Kunikida Doppo Melancholy Ocean Sadness Waves

I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny , as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.

~ Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima Japanese Literature Travel

I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Sōseki Natsume Japan Japanese Japanese Literature Loneliness

…Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning—something different from what he had before, at least a different world.

~ Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima Japanese Literature Suicide

When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.

~ Ryū Murakami

Ryū Murakami Japan Japanese Japanese Literature Suicide

If you're going to give up so quickly, I don't think you'll last long but you should try telling yourself you won't ever give up. Nobody can say how this will turn out but you should try the hardest you've ever tried in your life so you'll have no regrets

~ Hitori Nakano

Hitori Nakano Japanese Literature Young Adult

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don't understand, he thought. They don't realize that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

~ Ryū Murakami

Ryū Murakami Crime Thriller Horror Japanese Literature Psychological

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

~ Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima Existence Existential Japanese Japanese Classics Japanese Lit Japanese Literature Mishima Yukio Mishima

I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. Most of all I dreaded paying a bill-my awkwardness when I handed over the money after buying something did not arise from my stinginess, but from excessive tension, excessive embarrassment, excessive uneasiness and apprehension.

~ Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai Anxiety Feeling Japanese Literature

Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.

~ Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai Dark Japanese Literature Unhappiness

Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Japanese Literature Sleep

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Hell Japan Japanese Japanese Literature Torture

Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as clearly as if He were viewing pictures in a peep-box.

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Hell Japan Japanese Japanese Literature

Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond.

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Hell Japan Japanese Japanese Literature

They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.

~ Ryū Murakami

Ryū Murakami Horror Movies Japan Japanese Japanese Literature Murder

I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Fire Japan Japanese Japanese Literature

The pale whiteness of her upturned face as she choked on the smoke; the tangled length of her hair as she tried to shake the flames from it; the beauty of her cherry-blossom robe as it burst into flame: it was all so cruel, so terrible!

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Fire Japan Japanese Japanese Literature

Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks!

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Death Fire Japan Japanese Japanese Literature

Still more horrible was the color of the flames that licked the latticed cabin vents before shooting skyward, as though - might I say? - the sun itself had crashed to earth, spewing its heavenly fire in all directions.

~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Fire Japan Japanese Japanese Literature

…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

~ Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima Egoism Guilt Japanese Literature

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward.

~ Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami Existentialism Japan Japanese Literature Postmodernism

Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Sōseki Natsume Art Existentialism Floating World Japanese Literature Modernism Philosophy Poetry

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Sōseki Natsume Art Existentialism Floating World Japanese Literature Modernism Philosophy Poetry

I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and now, wouldn't exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The present world wouldn't exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist—just as this world would no longer exist for him.

~ Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami Existentialism Japanese Literature

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

~ Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata Civilization Development Japan Japanese Literature Love
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