...The late summer wind carried the sound of cicadas to us: chirr, chirr, chirrrrrr.
“Nothing in the cry
Of cicadas suggest they
Are about to die.”
- Dad?”
- That is a poem by Basho. Do you understand it?
I shook my head. I did not like poems much.
Dad sighed and smiled at me. He looked at the setting sun and spoke again:
“The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty
Though it is so close to the day’s end.”
I recited the lines to myself. Something in them moved me. I tried to put the feeling into words: “It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”
Instead of laughing at me, Dad nodded solemnly.
- That is a poem by the classical Tang poet Li Shangyin. Though he was Chinese, the sentiment is very much Japanese.”
We walked on, and I stopped by the yellow flower of a dandelion. The angle at which the flower was tilted struck me as very beautiful. I got the kitten-tongue-tickling sensation in my heart again.
“The flower . . .” I hesitated. I could not find the right words.
Dad spoke,
“The drooping flower
As yellow as the moon beam
So slender tonight.”
I nodded. The image seemed to me at once so fleeting and so permanent, like the way I had experienced time as a young child. It made me a little sad and glad at the same time.
“Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: We are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”
I looked around at the clean streets, the slow-moving people, the grass, and the evening light, and I knew that everything had its place; everything was all right. Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.
Even though the Hammer hung right overhead, I was not afraid.
..........
“We live in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, Hiroto. We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above....Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”