What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.