Like snow, like poetry. Words encountered during a stroll.
When I look up at the still-dark sky, the stars are twinkling.
Being in the tense, frozen air, my fingertips suddenly grow cold.
The forecast said it would snow, but there was no sign of clouds in the early morning sky, and I thought it might not snow today.
I finish my chores and get ready to go out.
Feeling that it was somehow dim outside the window, I looked out and saw snow dancing on the wind.
Already, the soil in the field is thinly covered in white.
As I headed toward the station with my umbrella, a passage from a book I had been re-reading last night came to mind.
There are about a hundred reasons why I love winter, and all of them, from one to a hundred, are "snow." That is how single-minded and pure my feelings for snow are. Why do I like snow? Because it is white, because it is pure, because it is quiet, because it melts, because it disappears.
Translated by Tomoyasu Hashimoto
From "Larger Than the Universe"
When I read this passage, I couldn't help but whisper, "Me too."
Born and raised in the mild plains of Kyushu, I didn't have much to do with snow when I was a child.
That is precisely why my longing for the rarely seen snow grew so strong, and even now as an adult, when it starts to snow, I cannot leave the window for a while.
I understand that I can only admire its beauty because I have never experienced the harshness of winter life in snow country, but for me, snow is something that simply draws my heart for no reason at all.
*****
The day I encountered that book, it was midsummer despite being October, and I walked through the intense sunlight toward the bookstore.
Escaping the heat and catching my breath, I looked at the display table, and one book was wrapped in the serenity of winter, as if it knew nothing of the heat outside.
From Akira Kusaka's paintings, one can feel an atmosphere filled with silence,
and looking at them calms my heart.
When you turn the pages, poems that the poet Han Jeong-won loves are scattered here and there.
Octavio Paz, Paul Celan, Fernando Pessoa... a number of poems like jewels of language spun by poets born in different places and eras.
Each one is like a letter from a close friend, written in essays with a soft tone, and it felt like a waste to read them all at once, so I read one chapter each night.
Among them were poems by Misuzu Kaneko and waka poems by Minamoto no Nobuaki included in the Shui Wakashu, and it was a book that made me feel the joy of running into someone I know on the street.
*****
When I got off the train and reached the ground, snow was falling heavily from the dark sky.
I had a destination, but before that, I decided to walk through the city as the mood took me.
What Han Jeong-won loves as much as poetry is walking. Remembering the book, I thought I would try walking too for the first time in a while.
That is why every time I return from a walk, I am a different person than I was before. It does not mean I become wiser or kinder. "A different person" is similar to one line of poetry overlapping with the next.
Even when I look north while crossing the bridge, the scenery is hazy, and the mountain range that is usually visible is blurred.
If I look down, there is a large river flowing as if it were cold.
When I walk with an empty mind, various colors and lights, such as the scenery by the river where I often walked as a child or the sparkle of the sea I saw on a trip once, float up in my heart and then disappear.
*****
The moment I saw the green of the roadside plantings lightly dusted with snow, a waka poem suddenly came to mind.
On the light and dark green young grass of the field,
the patches of snow still visible.
The color scheme of green and white brings the next season, the early spring fields, to mind.
Of course, what the teenage Kunaikyo was looking at when she composed this poem was likely not a small roadside planting in the city, but fields stretching far into the distance.
But since it was a poetry contest at the Retired Emperor Gotoba's court where themed poetry was popular, perhaps she composed it while looking at the palace garden, imagining the green of the fields she had never actually visited. Thinking in this way, I ponder the mystery of living in the same land where she lived so long ago.
When you walk, passages of poetry you have encountered in the past, which you rarely remember in your daily life, surface on the water of your heart, don't they?
The paths you can actually walk on your own feet and the distance you can cover during your lifetime are limited.
However, with poetry as a medium, your heart can fly infinitely anywhere, transcending time and place.
Having engraved the sights I saw where I flew into my being, am I a "different person" than I was just a moment ago?
*****
I look up at the sky, which is still cloudy, though I can feel signs of it clearing.
White grains spilling down from the gray sky.
As I gaze at this gift from the sky—which loses its form the moment it touches my skin, leaving behind only the tiniest, barely-there droplets—a quiet voice resonates.
I am the type to welcome cloudy days with a gentle heart. The hazy light, the objects seen in a blur, the scent that spreads with a heavy weight. On cloudy days, everything quietly reveals its existence. Even the language and non-language within me are still. The world is so calm and fulfilling that I find myself wishing to stay there forever.
This is a passage written about cloudy days, but I think the same can be said for snowy days.
Days filled with a stillness where all sound, color, and light seem to be absorbed into that whiteness.
As I walked, layering the scenery before me with the world inside the book, I felt a transparent silence spreading through my heart.
Taken facing north from Shijo Bridge.
It cleared up in the afternoon, so
it was a sight I could enjoy for only a few short hours.
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