The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro

Blue Sky

215 Blue Sky One afternoon in late spring, I was sunbathing on top of the embankment that follows the village road. Huge clouds hung motionless in the sky. Their earthward facing sides had taken on a dark lilac hue. There was a vague sense of boundless pathos in those clouds, with their colossal volumes and lilac shading. The place where I sat was at the edge of what is considered the broadest expanse of level ground in the whole village. Views in this village consist almost entirely of mountains and valleys; wherever you look, it’s impossible to find land that doesn’t slope. The landscape is under constant threat from the laws of gravity. On top of that, constant shifts of light and shadow have endowed the valley people with perpetually restless emotions. Nothing in this village calmed the mind so much as the sight of that level ground where the high sun beat down between the valleys all day long. To see it soaking up sun all day long evoked in me a mood of nostalgia close to sadness . A land forever afternoon where the lotus-eaters dwell: that’s how I imagined it. The clouds reclined above the thickly wooded mountain that marked the furthest edge of the level ground. From the woods came the constant cry of cuckoos. At the mountain’s base a water mill glittered, but nothing else moved to stir the eye: just a quiet sense of languor pervading the 216 Kajii Motojirō fields and mountains as they caught the rays of the balmy late spring sun. It almost seemed as if the clouds were lamenting the misfortune of their idleness. I shifted the direction of my gaze to the valley. Just below me, two valleys that had been sundered by the peninsula’s central mountain range mergedintoone.Onemountainstoodlikeawedgebetweenthetwovalleys, while another mountain blocked the unified valley from further progression as if it were a folding screen. Between the two mountains, smaller hills repeated themselves in layered pleats upward along the single valley like a woman’s ceremonial robe. At the valley’s far end soared a single mountain with a huge withered tree at its peak, the vision of which engendered even greater emotional intensity. Every day the sun crossed the two valleys and sank behind that mountain, but today the early afternoon sun had barely crossed one valley, and the side of the mountain that stood between the two valleys, facing my way, struck me as particularly tranquil in its deathly shadow. Around the middle of March, I often saw smoke arising from the cedar woods that covered the mountain, as if there were forest fires. On sunny days when the wind blew, when humid conditions and temperature were just right, the whole woods became a swirling haze of pollen. But the season was over now, and a brownish equanimity had settled over the woods. The greenness of zelkova and oak trees was once a smoldering cloud of young shoots, but now it took on the restfulness of early summer. Each ripening leaf had acquired its own shadow, and the dreamy cloud was gone. Only sweet acorn trees, growing thickly in the valley, had sprouted so many times they seemed coated with yellow powder. The scene was a delight for the eyes, and when I saw the constant welling up of pale clouds so transparent you could still make out the blue sky above the cedar-covered mountain that separated the two valleys, I found myself unconsciously drawn into them. Cloud came forth, endlesslyspreadingingiganticbillowsinthesky ,andglisteninginthesunshine. The clouds rotated slowly, from their point of never-ending creation until their wispy edges dissolved unceasingly into blue sky. As I watched, nothing could evoke the inexpressibly deep emotions in my heart as much as these changing clouds. Trying to catch their every shift, my vision was completely drowned in the inexhaustible process of their creation and extinction. But, as I repeated the same thing over and over, a strange feeling akin to fear rose stronger in my chest. It got to a point where I felt a choking 217 in my throat, and my body gradually lost its sense of balance. It occurred to me that if I kept this up for long, my body would probably plunge from great heights into some kind of deep abyss. But every part of my body had lost its strength, as if I were a paper...