Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

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.

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.

After all, only women are able really to love.

The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.

Perhaps they don't realize where they were, so they went on living.

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?

You've always been fond of understanding people too well." "They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.

After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy.

A secret, if it’s kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.

The baby understands that its mother loves it. [...] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love.

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.

And the Milky Way, like a great aurora, flowed through his body to stand at the edges of the earth. There was a quiet, chilly loneliness in it, and a sort of voluptuous astonishment.

A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.

Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.

...he heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.

This is no world for gentle people

But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

But even more than her diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully cataloged every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks. "You write down your criticisms, do you?" "I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all." "But what good does it do?" "None at all." "A waste of effort." "A complete waste of effort," she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however. A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.

Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.

إن العمل الشائن المقترف يرتبط بمقترفه، ويحكم عليه باقتراف أعمال شائنة أخرى، هكذا تتكون العادات السيئة.

The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?

I gave myself up to my tears. It was as though my head had turned to clear water, it was falling pleasantly away drop by drop; soon nothing would remain.

Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I'm watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.

إلا أنني كنتُ في المدى الطويل ،لوحاً زجاجياً وحيداً ،كتلة زجاجية وحيدة هل هناك شخص واحد من بيننا لا يحس بالزجاج على كاهله ؟

He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.

He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached.

Here in our mountains, the snow falls even on the maple leaves.

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this." -from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night clolour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.

Long accustomed to a life of self-indulgent solitude, he began to yearn for the beauty of giving himself to others. The nobility of the word 'sacrifice' became clear to him. He took satisfaction in the feeling of his own littleness as a single seed whose purpose was to carry forward from the past into the future the life of the species called humanity. He even sympathized with the thought that the human species, together with the various kinds of minerals and plants, was no more than a small pillar that helped support a single vast organism adrift in the cosmos-- and with the thought that it was no more precious than the other animals and plants.

كيف تسنى لثدى الأنثى البشرية وحدها من بين جميع الحيوانات أن يتخذ بعد تطور طويل هذا الشكل الرائع أليس الجمال الذى بلغه نهد المرأة المثال الأبهى لتطور الإنسانية . ص 35

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.

Manusia yang tak mau gelisah, sesungguhnya dia telah mati

The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.

Los viejos tienen la muerte, y los jóvenes el amor, y la muerte viene una sola vez y el amor muchas.

When you die, there is nothing--only a life that will be forgotten." -from "Gathering Ashes

Do you think it's right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.

¿Pero cuánto durará esta belleza? A las mujeres nos entristece pensar en eso

Even if you took it as cascading snowy mountains,it was not a cool snow-white. The cold of the snow and it's warm colour made a kind of music.

She was afraid to touch the dictionary — Oki was even there. Innumerable words reminded her of him. To link whatever she saw and heard with her love was nothing less than to be alive. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.

In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a seashell.

El tiempo pasó. Pero el tiempo se divide en muchas corrientes. Como en un rio, hay una corriente central rapida en algunos sectores y lenta, hasta inmóvil, en otros. El tiempo cósmico es igual para todos, pero el tiempo humano difiere con cada persona. El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

Un dia, mientras escribia una carta, Otoko abrio el diccionario para consultar el ideograma 'pensar'. Al repasar los restantes significados (añorar, ser incapaz de olvidar, estar triste) sintio que el corazon se le encogia. Tuvo miedo de tocar el diccionario... Aun ahi estaba Oki. Innumerables palabras se lo recordaban. Vincular todo lo que veia y oia con su amor equivalia a estar viva. La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo.

Supongo que en una mujer, hasta el odio es una forma del amor.

El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die.

إذا اتفق ونمت نوماً أبدياً فلن أتذمر ص 96

It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward." -from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.

For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room seemed enormous.

A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.

Your ears are lovely, he said, but there's a kind of eerie beauty to your profile.

ربما ليس هناك بوذا للعجائز لكى يبتهلوا إليه لكن فتاة عارية جميلة يضمونها بين أذرعهم ذارفين دموعا باردة غارقين فى شهقات قوية منتحبين , فتاة غافلة عن كل شىء ولن تستفيق مطلقاً تمنحهم حريتهم المطلقة فى الندم حريتهم المطلقة فى النحيب دون أن يشعروا بأى ندم أو طعن كبريائهم أفلا يمكن إذا إعتبار الجميلات النائمات من هذه الوجهة إلهات مثل بوذا ونابضات بالحياة فوق ذلك ؟ أليست رائحة فتاة شابة وبشرتها تكفيراً للعجائز التاعسين وتعزية لهم !؟ ص 91

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain.

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen.

What seemed strangest to me when I found this diary was that I have no recollection of the day-to-day life it describes. If I do not recall them, where have those days gone? Where had they vanished to? I pondered the things that human beings lose to the past" -from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain.

The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.

It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice...

En el mundo había gente tan parecida entre sí que se los podría tomar por padres e hijos. Pero difícilmente existieran muchos en el mundo. Tal vez hubiera un solo hombre que pudiera corresponderse con una muchacha y una sola joven que combinara con un hombre. Solo uno para algún otro; y tal vez en todo el mundo una sola pareja posible. Viven como extraños, sin suponer ningún tipo de lazo entre ellos y hasta ignorantes de la existencia del otro. Por casualidad suben a un mismo tren, se reúnen por primera vez y probablemente nunca vuelvan a encontrarse. Treinta minutos en el curso de toda una vida. Se separan sin decirse una palabra. Habiendo estado sentados uno al lado del otro, sin mirarse, sin darse cuenta del parecido, se alejan siendo parte de un milagro del que no tomaron conciencia. Y el único admirado por la rareza de todo eso es un extraño que se pregunta si, al ser un accidental testigo, no estará participando de un milagro.

One can’t stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one?......When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained....

if you wanna be somebody be yourself dont try to be anybody your not

Οι γέροι έχουν το θάνατο ενώ οι νέοι έχουν τον έρωτα, ο θάνατος έρχεται μια φορά, ενώ ο έρωτας έρχεται και ξαναέρχεται πολλές φορές.

Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad.

Сякаш някакво друго сърце размаха криле в гърдите на стария Егучи.

Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.

My novel has found a beautiful soul. How shall I write it? Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

But love flowed into the apology, to coddle and mollify the guilt.

She could not say why these rather inconspicuous green slopes had so touched her heart, when along the railway line there were mountains, lakes, the sea at times even clouds dyed in sentimental colors. But perhaps their melancholy green, and the melancholy evening shadows of the ridges across them, had brought on the pain. Then too, they were small, well-groomed slopes with deeply shaded ridges, not nature in the wild; and the rows of rounded tea bushes looked like flocks of gentle green sheep.

Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections.

My head hasn’t been very clear these last few days. I suppose that’s why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine could be as clean as they are. I was thinking on the train—if only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off—well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. ‘Do this up for me, please,’ you’d say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or a week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming.

Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket. And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.

As it became clear to Shimamura that he had from the start wanted only this woman, and that he had taken his usual roundabout way of saying so, he began to see himself as rather repulsive and the woman as all the more beautiful

But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi. Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life, the image of Komako as the mother of another man’s children suddenly floated into his mind. He looked around, startled. Possibly he was tired.

The bonds between men and women predate language, and while the words we have used to express those ties may have grown exceptionally subtle and refined since language first arose, they are still just words. Words make our loves richer and more complicated, yes, but much has also been lost on their account - shrouded in the trappings of the age, drunk on the vacuity of artificial thrills. The progress of language is both a friend to love between the sexes and its enemy. Such love abides, it seems, in the mysterious depths where language cannot reach. Perhaps it's a slight exaggeration to say that the language of love is a stimulant, a drug; but whatever led us humans to create such a language , it was not life itself - which is the root of love - and therefore that language cannot engender the life that is the root of all else.