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Takamura Kōtarō, Translated by Eric Hoffman To Someone It is terrible your departure— It is like the fruit that grows before the flower, like the buds that bloom before they seed, like summer months that precede the spring. It is an illogical, unnatural thing. Please do not accept a conventional husband for whom you will draw round letters. To think of this makes me weep. It is strange. Timid as a little bird, insensitive as a tempest, how will you see fit to wed? It is terrible your departure— Why is it so easy— how shall I say, to make your body a trinket for sale? You remove yourself from the world of many thousands and sell yourself to one person. Lost to one man you are lost senselessly. What a travesty, like Titian’s paintings sold in Tsurumaki-chō. I am lonely and I am sad and I do not know what to say or do. That gloxinia you gave me? I watch it rot. I, too, abandoned, rot. A bird travels through a bit of sky, waves crash on the shore, orphaned by the sea. For a moment, I burn, alone —Yet this is a different love Santa Maria It is different It is different. I do not know what it is yet I know that it is terrible, your departure— married, as well, gifted to a stranger’s heart.
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