"There you go again. If you doubt me that much, then I'll have to spell it out for you." [She said.] "See this glorious grass? These trees? They have blood and passion. They're hot beneath the sun's red light, and the earth is warm like skin. The light penetrates the bamboo grove, and the blossoms are without shadows. They bloom like fire, and when they flutter down unto the water, the stream becomes a red lacquered cup that slowly floats away. The ocean is blue wine, and the sky . . ."
She turned the white palm of her hand so it was facing upward.
"The sky is like a green oil. Viscous. No clouds, but still murky and full of dreams. The mountains are stuffed like velvet pillows. Here and there, the heat waves shimmer like thick coils of smoke rising fragrantly into the sleeves of a kimono. The larks are singing. In some faraway vale, the nightingale is calling, 'Isn't life a pleasure?' It has all its needs, and not a complaint to make. On a bright sunny afternoon like this, you close your eyes and right away you're drowsily dreaming. What do you think?"
"I don't know what I think." He looked away from the brightness of the spring day that her words had conjured. He focused on her.
"What are you feeling?"
He didn't answer.
"Are you having fun?"
"Fun?"
"Are you filled with joy?"
"Joy?"
"Do you feel alive?"
"Do you?" he countered.
"No, I feel sick, just the way I did when I saw you for the first time."
The wanderer sighed and took back his walking stick. Grabbing it with both hands, he held it near his knees, as if punting in the sea of love. Then he folded his arms and found himself staring at her.
--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 124-25.
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