Kokoro

You may find it odd that I use a specifically religious word to describe my feelings for a young woman, but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. At the mere thought of her, I felt elevated by contact with her nobility. If this strange phenomenon we call Love can be said to have two poles, the higher of which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire, this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of Love’s higher realm

some stage this feeling transformed into a conviction that it should be I who hurt myself. And then the thought struck me that I should not just hurt myself but kill myself. At all events, I resolved that I must live my life as if I were already dead.

I observed his calm demeanor with envy, and with loathing, interpreting it as indifference to me. His serenity smacked of self-confidence, and not of a kind that it pleased me to see in him

had decided that if he accustomed himself to hardship, then pain would sooner or later cease to register. The simple virtue of repetition of pain, he was sure, would bring him to a point where pain no longer affected him.

At times he spoke as if he alone bore the weight of the world’s woes on his shoulders, and he grew agitated if I contradicted him

It is impossible to read the heart of someone who is looking away, and I couldn’t guess what she might have been thinking as she listened

I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith.

she might have been whispering secrets.

Sensei, on the other hand, I still knew very little. I had had no chance to hear from him the promised story of his past. Sensei was, in a word, still opaque to me. I could not rest until I had moved beyond this state and entered a place of clarity. Any break in relations with him would cause me anguish.

Young people these days seem just to know how to spend money and never think of how to make it.”