Miles Goetz
03-24-2013, 06:30 PM
The Novelist.
By Miles Goetz.
As the blade glided further along the length of his stomach, he felt each disgrace and doomed passion flow from him along the crashing deluge of crimson blood…
Kochan Tanizaki had begun to think of his destiny. The ultimate realization of his mortality had only recently dawned; he, ever since his childhood, had sought to be one with the infinite wave of time that had claimed the lives of his loved ones; he wished to be the lone inquisitor, a being comprised of a matrix of fibers only vaguely visible. While his spirit cascaded along the plains and peninsulas, the diminutive bodies below would either morph into veils of ash or fall to the ground and never regain their precious vitality.
Literature became his escape into the vistas of immortality he had envisioned while still a child. There had been a lone novel on an unscrupulous book shelf, upon its cover was a man, fraught with intellect, yet whose appearance had set him upon a path of contemplation and renunciation; one eye crawled away from his line of vision, as if it were treating his shadow as suspect. In it this lone prophet had decried literature as the key to eternity; a writer cannot die! It was then that he had begun to write as if life itself would collapse if he ceased. The works of authors from the western canon became his confidants and companions, ones who would not defame or ground him into nothingness, rather, they would pull him from the precipice standing above the venomous vortex of death’s sickness; Wilde, Goethe, Elliot, each would be his guardian that would compel his spirit to ascend past the dreary threshold of the clouds and into the pantheon of the blessed and the proud.
Even in youth he received accolades for his prose. His teachers would chide him into submitting his works to literary journals, though he himself felt unsure about the affair. As the gates of university were taken aback, he began to study law, though he attended lectures on literature of all varieties when not engaged in his absorbed ponderings over the ways of the national legal code.
Little time was devoted to the gregarious ways of a young student. The drunken stuttering of his fellows would dissolve the once impenetrable lining of his walls as he struggled, in vain, but with a dash of potential embellishing the words he crafted, to write. At the graduation ceremony, he witnessed the scattering of the cherry blossoms upon the curved breeze; they fluttered like birds of piety who threatened to descend upon the skulls of those in attendance like birds of prey, before they landed upon a placid lake under whose surface a shimmering school of fish scattered. In this natural exhibition, he believed himself to have discovered the key to existence: the gilded heart of the tree swoons in the wind and soars with elegance, but it is shamed by its flaunt, and thus, to cleanse the ineluctable spirit of the eastern wind, it lays itself upon a mirror of the purest water, then dissolves, perishing against the eternal grace of the river, bringing about the catharsis destined for itself since conception.
He found employment in the service of an insurance agency, but an injury sustained whilst traveling to work one day, on his bicycle, deferred his work for a year, and he was compensated. Even while his leg lay in a bitter house of plaster, inflicting sharp pain in increments too sporadic to decipher, he felt relived, and could at last write with purpose. Oh the luscious scent of the lilies! Their dignified staunchness in the rustic winds, as well as the lush, lucid tones procured from the passing of a current through their bulbs, it proved to be his muse in the silence of the dawn, the hour when he first rose to create his purpose from a scattered, yet close at hand, portrait which could give the hummingbird its heart and the sand its golden hue, once it had been properly concluded.
In a fortuitous moment, an esteemed poet of his province discovered a short story penned by Kochan in a literary journal discarded crassly upon a park bench. Seeing the passion in the words, he wrote a sagacious letter to the young man, and offered him the opportunity to craft a novel, which he would then present to his publisher.
Kochan toiled like an ant deprived of its cluster; the tea he sipped while his hand fluttered on the page grew feculent, yet his passion was so great that he did not rise to make another pot. The company of a geisha he would not have denounced, but the intellectual prominence possessed by this nascent drama of creation was too tantamount to euphoria to simply be abandoned; it required diligence and a stoic mouth.
After its completion, he submitted his labor to that kindly poet, who sent it to his publisher. It reverberated in the mind of the publisher, who sent it to be printed without even communicating an accompanying prognosis to Kochan or his compatriots.
Celebrity and credulity came under the guise of a nighttime genesis for young Kochan. Before even the crickets could grate their legs, he was hailed as the heir to Yasunari Kawabata’s literary genius; he received a dozen marriage proposals from young women all over the country, with lewd descriptions and illustrations comprising the fat of their message. His contention became a commodity; he was offered the position of lecturer at Tokyo University, and even from his alma mater, though the language used in the offer conveyed to him the sentiment that he had been an enigma during his studies, as its connotation and syntax portrayed him as residing beyond the intellectual and artistic threshold commonly embodied within the school’s creed.
Soon after, columns of his literary criticism began sprouting from the pages of periodicals on both ends of the archipelago; he was accosted with kindness at the corner of every street, and soon he became a fixture at the local cinema, where admirers and the rare, phantasmagorical detractor would lie in wait for him, as if he were a crane amongst pheasants.
The picture of prosperity, while at first refreshing, with the sumptuous tang of nubile flesh germinating in the hollow, held the property of inspiring several works; but they all lacked that essential vagueness of intention that had swept away the eager masses. To the idle ornament of the bookshop’s cobwebbed staircase, nothing appeared to be amiss; it was the kindred poet, a Wordsworth with gentle grace and the wisdom of the Buddha, who saw the decline of the heart that had once been driven to create merely for its own sake. It was clear to him that Kochan’s new entries into his self-anointed canon served only that by which the corona of art becomes grotesque, the first stone along the path towards despair.
All along the wind of the coil of the snake of fortune, Kochan began to at last sense the ultimate futility of the writing. He awoke each day with a sour breath that, as it invaded the lungs, gave him the sensation of becoming an illusion. Along the bank of his bed he sat until the sunlight pouring through the ocular window jarred him from his untimely meditation. Walking along to prepare his morning meal, he would glance at the walls adorned with his honors and prizes, images of himself, hiding behind his Formica smile, with an esteemed critic or scholar who only remained on the earth to become a dogma locked within a human maze. Letters from his literary Senpai began arriving at the rate where now a Tolstoyan volume sat, untouched, upon his writing desk.
There came a point when he considered a full abandonment of his art; to wander, to simply be, a universal longing as common as the morning dew, but from where would this eternal fluency of life’s waters flow if he could not have writing?
As the ideas gradually became fainter hissings in his ears, he began to revert to the dominant philosophy of his childhood home. His father had been something of a nationalist, one with a constitution more potent than a blade still dripping with molten steel. Upon the mantel was hung a portrait of the Emperor, in ceremonial dress, kneeling, producing an aura of divine providence, as blessed as the masses were diseased. Kochan’s father bowed every morning and every night to the stillness of his brow; when he had disciplined little Kochan, he would bellow “for the Emperor!”
The entire spectacle of life appeared to drift, centrifugally, around the singular idea of the world being the property of his race; the Emperor would ride a magnificent horse with a nacreous coat, and claim each mountain from the vile grip of the devils that seemed intent on carrying out the desecration of his homeland.
The day that Kochan had left home, never to walk along its pebbled paths or smell its pleasant cabal of hydrangeas again, he had seen his father, the austerity still orchestrating the alignment of his lips and pupils, standing at the threshold, ambivalent, as if longing to wish his kin good fortune and at the same moment express his dissatisfaction with Kochan’s serene, demilitarized perception.
For the first time since the moons had proceeded with the fragility of the swan, a great many times, incalculable like the gaze of the soul’s lone eye, the fascination had come about; what was stilted so many years ago seemed now to impregnate the nucleic acid with a summer’s freshness; his blood smelt of chrysanthemums freshly plucked from a miasmic tomb, the door of life having swung open only when death itself ripened and wretched its seeds. His father’s perverse bellicosity now lighted the mountain road where once it had only laid a feather of arcane strands, making his voyage, until this moment, one of great shame.
Kochan feigned his having grown a phobia of the external world. He refused to grant the press any words, and the letters of the gregarious poet continued to mount until he was forced to burn them, looking upon the embers as would a filthy sow upon a basin of fresh water.
A complex network of relations now assumed the pertinence that his prose had once occupied; men of tenacity, ecstatic harbingers of fury, and the occasional nomad too pertinacious to reflect, the new sanctum of his destiny, each one of them. Among them was Kimitake, a writer who was both praised and vilified on account of his militant, right wing politics. Kimitake had been something of a philistine when it came to Kochan’s early published works, which had only aided in the spread of remonstrations amongst the public. In their letters they discussed the nation’s banal commercialism which had seized the national character and driven it into the muck. The ensconced desire to purchase and to parade about was a mutual point of shame and abasement between the two wordsmiths.
When the dawn was cast like a stone across the meditative lake of the horizon, they met to discuss the future of their careers; Kimitake had too grown weary of his literary exploits. The public could no longer quell their disdain for the authoritarian musings that filled the pages of his novels. In truth, he bore a silent indifference towards Kochan: he could still create his elegant tales of redemption, and they would sell with the speed of a thin-winged fly.
Kimitake had taken the liberty of bringing his friends from the military into the fold. Each broad-shouldered brute held the ways of the old dynasty as being absolute, for they subscribed to the Confucian belief that the leaders of the past should be enshrined and imitated: perfection is to be found in the mirror swaddled with dust. In the beginning, the audacity they imagined themselves to possess was merely a callow swoon, for at first the discussions never involved the issuing of an edict. Each, however, slowly metabolized into the ferocious wolf that comes about during the supreme hour of darkness, when day and dawn are equal in their distance from the heart. Plans were drawn, fireflies flickered around the open space of the old temple in which they gathered; they fettered the men to the earth, concealing them in a saintly shall of light that pierced through the plaintive Zen of the words spoken centuries ago within this sacred place, yet such was so far removed from the crowded streets that none had cared to notice. After nearly one year of this clandestine behavior, a design at last emerged, and a day was chosen to bear the mark of their inwardly manifested greatness.
It was only one night before, several hours to fruition, a hamlet laying in the wake of a gale, minutes coagulated like the rich sap of a towering tree that would crest and simmer until the moment had fallen, turning it from the bitter essence of a voided life into a pedestal placed amongst the mausoleums of those warriors who had flooded the valleys with blood… all for the eternal one.
By Miles Goetz.
As the blade glided further along the length of his stomach, he felt each disgrace and doomed passion flow from him along the crashing deluge of crimson blood…
Kochan Tanizaki had begun to think of his destiny. The ultimate realization of his mortality had only recently dawned; he, ever since his childhood, had sought to be one with the infinite wave of time that had claimed the lives of his loved ones; he wished to be the lone inquisitor, a being comprised of a matrix of fibers only vaguely visible. While his spirit cascaded along the plains and peninsulas, the diminutive bodies below would either morph into veils of ash or fall to the ground and never regain their precious vitality.
Literature became his escape into the vistas of immortality he had envisioned while still a child. There had been a lone novel on an unscrupulous book shelf, upon its cover was a man, fraught with intellect, yet whose appearance had set him upon a path of contemplation and renunciation; one eye crawled away from his line of vision, as if it were treating his shadow as suspect. In it this lone prophet had decried literature as the key to eternity; a writer cannot die! It was then that he had begun to write as if life itself would collapse if he ceased. The works of authors from the western canon became his confidants and companions, ones who would not defame or ground him into nothingness, rather, they would pull him from the precipice standing above the venomous vortex of death’s sickness; Wilde, Goethe, Elliot, each would be his guardian that would compel his spirit to ascend past the dreary threshold of the clouds and into the pantheon of the blessed and the proud.
Even in youth he received accolades for his prose. His teachers would chide him into submitting his works to literary journals, though he himself felt unsure about the affair. As the gates of university were taken aback, he began to study law, though he attended lectures on literature of all varieties when not engaged in his absorbed ponderings over the ways of the national legal code.
Little time was devoted to the gregarious ways of a young student. The drunken stuttering of his fellows would dissolve the once impenetrable lining of his walls as he struggled, in vain, but with a dash of potential embellishing the words he crafted, to write. At the graduation ceremony, he witnessed the scattering of the cherry blossoms upon the curved breeze; they fluttered like birds of piety who threatened to descend upon the skulls of those in attendance like birds of prey, before they landed upon a placid lake under whose surface a shimmering school of fish scattered. In this natural exhibition, he believed himself to have discovered the key to existence: the gilded heart of the tree swoons in the wind and soars with elegance, but it is shamed by its flaunt, and thus, to cleanse the ineluctable spirit of the eastern wind, it lays itself upon a mirror of the purest water, then dissolves, perishing against the eternal grace of the river, bringing about the catharsis destined for itself since conception.
He found employment in the service of an insurance agency, but an injury sustained whilst traveling to work one day, on his bicycle, deferred his work for a year, and he was compensated. Even while his leg lay in a bitter house of plaster, inflicting sharp pain in increments too sporadic to decipher, he felt relived, and could at last write with purpose. Oh the luscious scent of the lilies! Their dignified staunchness in the rustic winds, as well as the lush, lucid tones procured from the passing of a current through their bulbs, it proved to be his muse in the silence of the dawn, the hour when he first rose to create his purpose from a scattered, yet close at hand, portrait which could give the hummingbird its heart and the sand its golden hue, once it had been properly concluded.
In a fortuitous moment, an esteemed poet of his province discovered a short story penned by Kochan in a literary journal discarded crassly upon a park bench. Seeing the passion in the words, he wrote a sagacious letter to the young man, and offered him the opportunity to craft a novel, which he would then present to his publisher.
Kochan toiled like an ant deprived of its cluster; the tea he sipped while his hand fluttered on the page grew feculent, yet his passion was so great that he did not rise to make another pot. The company of a geisha he would not have denounced, but the intellectual prominence possessed by this nascent drama of creation was too tantamount to euphoria to simply be abandoned; it required diligence and a stoic mouth.
After its completion, he submitted his labor to that kindly poet, who sent it to his publisher. It reverberated in the mind of the publisher, who sent it to be printed without even communicating an accompanying prognosis to Kochan or his compatriots.
Celebrity and credulity came under the guise of a nighttime genesis for young Kochan. Before even the crickets could grate their legs, he was hailed as the heir to Yasunari Kawabata’s literary genius; he received a dozen marriage proposals from young women all over the country, with lewd descriptions and illustrations comprising the fat of their message. His contention became a commodity; he was offered the position of lecturer at Tokyo University, and even from his alma mater, though the language used in the offer conveyed to him the sentiment that he had been an enigma during his studies, as its connotation and syntax portrayed him as residing beyond the intellectual and artistic threshold commonly embodied within the school’s creed.
Soon after, columns of his literary criticism began sprouting from the pages of periodicals on both ends of the archipelago; he was accosted with kindness at the corner of every street, and soon he became a fixture at the local cinema, where admirers and the rare, phantasmagorical detractor would lie in wait for him, as if he were a crane amongst pheasants.
The picture of prosperity, while at first refreshing, with the sumptuous tang of nubile flesh germinating in the hollow, held the property of inspiring several works; but they all lacked that essential vagueness of intention that had swept away the eager masses. To the idle ornament of the bookshop’s cobwebbed staircase, nothing appeared to be amiss; it was the kindred poet, a Wordsworth with gentle grace and the wisdom of the Buddha, who saw the decline of the heart that had once been driven to create merely for its own sake. It was clear to him that Kochan’s new entries into his self-anointed canon served only that by which the corona of art becomes grotesque, the first stone along the path towards despair.
All along the wind of the coil of the snake of fortune, Kochan began to at last sense the ultimate futility of the writing. He awoke each day with a sour breath that, as it invaded the lungs, gave him the sensation of becoming an illusion. Along the bank of his bed he sat until the sunlight pouring through the ocular window jarred him from his untimely meditation. Walking along to prepare his morning meal, he would glance at the walls adorned with his honors and prizes, images of himself, hiding behind his Formica smile, with an esteemed critic or scholar who only remained on the earth to become a dogma locked within a human maze. Letters from his literary Senpai began arriving at the rate where now a Tolstoyan volume sat, untouched, upon his writing desk.
There came a point when he considered a full abandonment of his art; to wander, to simply be, a universal longing as common as the morning dew, but from where would this eternal fluency of life’s waters flow if he could not have writing?
As the ideas gradually became fainter hissings in his ears, he began to revert to the dominant philosophy of his childhood home. His father had been something of a nationalist, one with a constitution more potent than a blade still dripping with molten steel. Upon the mantel was hung a portrait of the Emperor, in ceremonial dress, kneeling, producing an aura of divine providence, as blessed as the masses were diseased. Kochan’s father bowed every morning and every night to the stillness of his brow; when he had disciplined little Kochan, he would bellow “for the Emperor!”
The entire spectacle of life appeared to drift, centrifugally, around the singular idea of the world being the property of his race; the Emperor would ride a magnificent horse with a nacreous coat, and claim each mountain from the vile grip of the devils that seemed intent on carrying out the desecration of his homeland.
The day that Kochan had left home, never to walk along its pebbled paths or smell its pleasant cabal of hydrangeas again, he had seen his father, the austerity still orchestrating the alignment of his lips and pupils, standing at the threshold, ambivalent, as if longing to wish his kin good fortune and at the same moment express his dissatisfaction with Kochan’s serene, demilitarized perception.
For the first time since the moons had proceeded with the fragility of the swan, a great many times, incalculable like the gaze of the soul’s lone eye, the fascination had come about; what was stilted so many years ago seemed now to impregnate the nucleic acid with a summer’s freshness; his blood smelt of chrysanthemums freshly plucked from a miasmic tomb, the door of life having swung open only when death itself ripened and wretched its seeds. His father’s perverse bellicosity now lighted the mountain road where once it had only laid a feather of arcane strands, making his voyage, until this moment, one of great shame.
Kochan feigned his having grown a phobia of the external world. He refused to grant the press any words, and the letters of the gregarious poet continued to mount until he was forced to burn them, looking upon the embers as would a filthy sow upon a basin of fresh water.
A complex network of relations now assumed the pertinence that his prose had once occupied; men of tenacity, ecstatic harbingers of fury, and the occasional nomad too pertinacious to reflect, the new sanctum of his destiny, each one of them. Among them was Kimitake, a writer who was both praised and vilified on account of his militant, right wing politics. Kimitake had been something of a philistine when it came to Kochan’s early published works, which had only aided in the spread of remonstrations amongst the public. In their letters they discussed the nation’s banal commercialism which had seized the national character and driven it into the muck. The ensconced desire to purchase and to parade about was a mutual point of shame and abasement between the two wordsmiths.
When the dawn was cast like a stone across the meditative lake of the horizon, they met to discuss the future of their careers; Kimitake had too grown weary of his literary exploits. The public could no longer quell their disdain for the authoritarian musings that filled the pages of his novels. In truth, he bore a silent indifference towards Kochan: he could still create his elegant tales of redemption, and they would sell with the speed of a thin-winged fly.
Kimitake had taken the liberty of bringing his friends from the military into the fold. Each broad-shouldered brute held the ways of the old dynasty as being absolute, for they subscribed to the Confucian belief that the leaders of the past should be enshrined and imitated: perfection is to be found in the mirror swaddled with dust. In the beginning, the audacity they imagined themselves to possess was merely a callow swoon, for at first the discussions never involved the issuing of an edict. Each, however, slowly metabolized into the ferocious wolf that comes about during the supreme hour of darkness, when day and dawn are equal in their distance from the heart. Plans were drawn, fireflies flickered around the open space of the old temple in which they gathered; they fettered the men to the earth, concealing them in a saintly shall of light that pierced through the plaintive Zen of the words spoken centuries ago within this sacred place, yet such was so far removed from the crowded streets that none had cared to notice. After nearly one year of this clandestine behavior, a design at last emerged, and a day was chosen to bear the mark of their inwardly manifested greatness.
It was only one night before, several hours to fruition, a hamlet laying in the wake of a gale, minutes coagulated like the rich sap of a towering tree that would crest and simmer until the moment had fallen, turning it from the bitter essence of a voided life into a pedestal placed amongst the mausoleums of those warriors who had flooded the valleys with blood… all for the eternal one.