literature Archives - understand-culture

Sensei’s Testament

In Natsume Sōseki’s novel Kokoro, the narrator tells Sensei that he wants to learn from Sensei’s past. Sensei presses him: Anata wa hontō ni majime nan desu ka. “Are you really serious?” His past, he says, has taught him to doubt people, and he doubts the narrator too. But before he dies, he wants to trust another person, even just one.

He then agrees to tell the narrator his whole past. In his testament, he gives the reason: the narrator was serious and wanted a living lesson from life itself. Sensei writes that he is now breaking open his own heart to pour its blood on the narrator’s face.

Hats for the Jizō

In the folk tale Kasa Jizō, a poor old man cannot sell his straw hats in town on New Year’s Eve. On the way home through a snowstorm, he sees six Jizō statues and puts the unsold hats on them. There are only five hats, so he takes off his own hat and puts it on the last statue.

On the morning of New Year’s Day, the old couple find rice bales piled up at their house, full of New Year decorations, rice cakes, fish and other food. A parenting site calls it a folk tale that everyone knows, and notes that many elementary schools still use it in Japanese lessons.

Kamo no Chōmei’s Hut

Around 1212, Kamo no Chōmei completed Hōjōki, An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut. The hut he describes measured one jō, about three meters, on each side, and was seven shaku, about two meters, high.

The pillars were joined with tenons, and the walls were held with latches. The hut stood on a base frame instead of posts set into the ground. An architectural study of the hut notes that this structure assumes the building will be moved. Its materials were carried on two oxcarts.

The Soup Bowl

In In’ei raisan, In Praise of Shadows, the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō writes that he likes, above all, the weight of the soup felt in the palm when he holds a bowl of clear soup, and its lukewarm warmth. He also describes listening to a faint hum from the bowl, like the sound of a distant insect.

Learn the Pine from the Pine

Matsu no koto wa matsu ni narae, take no koto wa take ni narae. “Learn about the pine from the pine, and about the bamboo from the bamboo.” The words come from the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō. His disciple Hattori Dohō recorded them in Sanzōshi (Three Booklets).

Dohō explains what the master meant: shii o hanare yo, leave personal intent behind.

Sketching from Life

The haiku poet Masaoka Shiki called on poets to practice shasei, sketching from life. The magazine Waraku writes that his idea of shasei had direct or indirect links to Western-style painters, among them Nakamura Fusetsu, Shimomura Izan and Asai Chū.

In 1894, Shiki asked Shimomura to draw the illustrations for the haiku column of the newspaper Shō-Nippon. Shimomura declined, and the work went to Nakamura.

Opening, Development, Turn, Conclusion

Kishōtenketsu (起承転結) is a way of building a Chinese poem. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten explains it with the four-line zekku . The first line is ki , the opening, the second shō , the development, the third ten , the turn, and the fourth ketsu , the conclusion. According to the encyclopedia Nihon Daihyakka Zensho, the structure matured in China around the eighth century.

It appears in Japanese school lessons. A 2021 lesson of the Sapporo board of education for second-year junior high school students explains it this way. The first line begins the poem, the second takes it up and develops it, the third changes the scene, and the fourth brings the whole to a close.

No Longer Human

Dazai Osamu’s novel Ningen shikkaku (No Longer Human) was published in 1948. Its first notebook opens with the narrator saying that he has lived a life full of haji, shame.

Kokoro

Natsume Sōseki’s novel Kokoro ran in the Asahi Shimbun from April 20 to August 11, 1914. Its three parts are “Sensei and I,” “My Parents and I” and “Sensei and His Testament.” A young man meets an older man whom he calls sensei. In the last part, sensei leaves him a letter, a testament, that tells the story of his life.

A bookstore column calls it the work used most often in junior and senior high school Japanese textbooks.

Neither Praised Nor a Burden

Miyazawa Kenji’s poem Ame ni mo makezu (Unbeaten by Rain) ends with a wish. It describes a person whom everyone calls a dekunobō, a blockhead, who is neither praised nor treated as a burden. The poem’s last words say that such a person is what the poet wants to become.