japanese

I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.'This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

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A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

The Japanese do not fear God. They only fear bombs.

Japanese architecture is traditionally based on wooden structures that need renovating on a regular basis.

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate.

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

From the girl who sat before me now...surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations__here you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science.

Those who hurt others will also hurt themselves.

Yes," I continued, "I discovered this model recently and her style never fails to be mathematically perfect. She seems to come by it naturally. As if she were born resonant. I notice Japanese models tend to do this. Like I said, they seem to have resonance somewhere deep in their culture. But Yuri Nakagawa, she's the best I've ever seen. The best model, with the most powerful resonance. I need her to probe deeper into this profound mathematical instinct, which I call resonance.

Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

I had a dream about you last night. In this dream we were walking down the beautiful Japanese streets of Florida. Fukuoka is nice in the summer.

I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, __f only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she__ be so much further along!_ But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They__e blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can__ make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I__e seen my share of people like that. At first you think they__e amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you__e overwhelmed. you think, __ could never do that in a million years._ But that__ as far as they go. They can__ take it any further. And why not? Because they won__ put in the effort. Because they haven__ had the discipline pounded into them. They__e been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they__e been able to play things well without any effort and they__e had people telling them how great they are from the time they__e little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They__l take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they__e put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required or character building. It__ a tragedy.