I fell in love with a boy at school 50 years ago, and we lost touch with each other when I was 20. Then, a couple of weeks ago, he contacted me out of the blue and I wrote this poem to him.
50 Years of Separation
Hello brother from the depths of our hearts. It's been a while, and things have happened; glad, mad, happy, sad, but always fruitful and we're still here
We are bookends in geography and spirit, sparks of remembrance and future unfolding
Where do our thoughts come from? They come from right now
This ball of hot light exploding from the body in razor shafts that take our breath away
Yes, there is so much to say, a lifeful of things
And everything begins without end
22 Feb 2026
This story, based in Kyoto and showing a very modernist view of the city, was written by Kajii Motojirō in 1924. I included my translation of it in a book entitled The Youth of Things which centered on Kajii.
Lemon
An unaccountable, sinister lump was constantly pressing onto my heart. What would you call it? Fretfulness? Repugnance? A hangover is sure to follow a drinking bout; if you drink every day, the moment of stupor arrives. And here it was. This was rather unfortunate. What troubled me was not the resultant congested lungs and nervous prostration. And it wasn’t my back-scorching debts. It was the sinister lump that I couldn’t stand. Every beautiful piece of music, each delightful verse of poetry that had once given me so much pleasure, was now unbearable. Even when I made the effort to get out and listen to someone’s gramophone, after only the first couple of bars I felt a sudden urge to get up and leave.
Something prevented me from remaining in one place. And so, I was forever drifting from one part of town to another.
I don’t know why, but I recall being strongly drawn at the time to run-down, beautiful things. The scenes I liked best were quarters of the city on the point of dilapidation; and even within these quarters, not the forbidding main-streets, but back-streets, somehow intimate, with soiled washing hung out to dry, bits and pieces of rubbish scattered around, seedy rooms peeping outwards. Charming neighborhoods with a look of having been gnawed by wind and rain, that would presently return to dust—mud walls crumbling, and lines of houses starting to tilt. Only the plants had any vigor, with the occasional shock of a sunflower, and the canna in bloom.
Sometimes, while walking along such a street, I’d try to create the illusion I wasn’t in Kyoto at all, that I’d suddenly arrived in Sendai or Nagasaki or some such place hundreds of miles away. I desperately yearned to flee Kyoto, to end up in a city where I didn’t know a soul. The most important thing is a place to rest: the room of a deserted inn; a clean, pure quilt; the fine smell of a mosquito net, a freshly starched summer kimono. I want to lie there for a month and think of nothing. If only where I am now could suddenly change into that city! Once the illusion finally began to take shape, I went on to apply the assorted pigments of my imagination. It was nothing less than the overlapping of my illusion and the run-down district, and I took great pleasure in watching my real self get lost within it.
I also developed a love of fireworks. But more than just that it was bundles of them, garishly colored with various striped patterns of red, purple, yellow, blue; the Shooting Stars of Nakayama Temple, Flower Tangles, the Withered Rice Shoots. And those Spinning Mice, individually coiled and crammed into boxes. Strangely, such things excited me.
Other things I came to like were colored glass marbles, embossed with sea bream and flowers, and glass beads too. What inexpressible pleasure it was to lick them. Does anything else possess as faintly cool a taste as those marbles? When still very young, I’d often be scolded by my parents for putting them in my mouth. And yet, perhaps because that sweet memory of infancy has found new life in me now that I’ve grown older and gone to seed, a flavor—faint, refreshing, with a somehow poetic beauty—floats right through that taste.
You’ve guessed, no doubt, that I was totally broke. And yet, when the sight of such things stirred my heart even a little, I needed to console myself through extravagance. Something to the value of only two or three sen was extravagant enough. Beautiful things—or rather, things that appealed to my enervated antennae—naturally soothed me.
One of the places I used to enjoy before my life became worm-eaten was Maruzen. Red and yellow eau de cologne and eau de quinine. Amber and jade green perfume bottles of tasteful cut-glass workmanship with elegant raised designs in rococo style. Pipes, daggers, soap, tobacco. At times, I’d spend a good hour looking at such things. And finally, my extravagance would run to the purchase of a single first-class pencil. But for me at the time, even Maruzen had become just another oppressive place. The books, the students, the cash desks; they all appeared to me like specters of debt-collectors.
One morning—at that time I was living in a succession of lodgings, moving from one friend’s place to another—my friend had gone off to school, and I was left behind in a vacant air of loneliness. I just had to get out and wander. Something was urging me forward. I walked along the back-streets I mentioned earlier, from one neighborhood to another, pausing in front of cheap sweet-shops, taking a look at the dried prawns, cod and bean curd in grocery shops, and finally making my way down Teramachi Street in the direction of Second Avenue. There, I came to a halt at a local greengrocer’s. By way of introduction let me say that, of all the shops I knew, this greengrocer’s was my favorite. There was nothing at all grand about the shop, but the beauty peculiar to a greengrocer’s was most strikingly tangible. The fruit was arranged on a fairly steep-angled base, which appeared to be an old black-varnished board. The array of fruit seemed coagulated into its present color and volume, as if the allegro flow of a gorgeously beautiful piece of music had been thrust before a Gorgon-like mask, with the power to turn those who looked on into stone. The greens were stacked higher the further back they went.
In fact, their carrot leaves were stunningly beautiful. The same was true of the beans and arrowhead bulbs steeping in water.
It was at night that the house became beautiful. The whole of Teramachi Street bustled—though it felt far more serene than Tokyo or Osaka—while light from the shop window flowed abundantly onto the street. For some unknown reason, only the area around the shop-front remained strangely dark. Naturally, one side of the shop formed a corner adjoining Second Avenue, which was unlit, so it was understandably dark there too. However, why the house next door should be dark even though it was in Teramachi Street was unclear. But if the house hadn’t been shaded, I do not believe I’d have ended up so captivated. And something else; the shop’s awning stuck right out, just like the peak of a hat pulled tightly down over the eyes. This is more than just a figure of speech. It was enough to make you think the shop had pulled down its peak out of desperation, while above the peak too it was completely dark. This environment of total darkness meant that several electric lamps set up at the shop-front lit the almost indulgently beautiful scene with a dazzling brilliance, unrivaled by anything around, and seemed to drench it like a shower. Standing on the road where the naked lamps cut their slender screws of light deep into my eyes, or gazing through the first-floor window of the neighboring Kagiya sweet-shop; even along Teramachi Street it was rare for anything to delight me as much as those times when I caught sight of this greengrocer’s.
Unusually, I bought something at the shop that day. This was because some extraordinary lemons were on display. Now, lemons are exceedingly commonplace. Although there was nothing remiss about the ones from that shop, it was just an ordinary greengrocer’s, so I’d never taken much notice of them until that time. I loved everything about those lemons; their pure and simple color, like lemon-yellow pigment squeezed from a tube and hardened into form, and their stumpy spindle shape. In the end I decided to buy just one of them. I don’t remember where or how, but for a long time I walked the streets. The sinister lump that had been constantly pressing onto my heart seemed to abate somewhat from the moment I took hold of the lemon, and in the street I felt an enormous sense of wellbeing. That such a persistent depression could be beguiled by something so simple; hard to believe but, paradoxically, true. But what a strange thing the heart is!
The coolness of the lemon was an indescribable joy. At the time my lungs were poorly and my body was always breaking into fever. In fact, I’d flaunt my fever by deliberately shaking hands with all my friends; my palms were hotter than anyone else’s. Perhaps it was due to this heat that the coolness penetrating deep into my body from the palm that held it seemed so delectable.
Time after time, I held the fruit to my nose so as to catch its smell. California, the land from which it grew, rose up into my imagination. The words, “assail the nose,” from the Chinese classic I’d once studied, “Words of the Citrus Fruit Seller,” kept coming to mind. Having never really breathed deeply before, I took a great gasp of fragrant air into my lungs and felt a lingering flush of warm blood rise through my body and face as a kind of vitality awoke within me.
I marveled that it all came together so perfectly, to the extent that I was actually convinced that the only thing I’d been seeking for so long was that pure cold sensation, that sense of touch, of smell, of sight. Such was my condition at the time.
Buoyed by an airy excitement, and even with a certain feeling of pride, I walked the streets imagining myself a poet swaggering about in aesthetic dress. I placed the lemon on my grimy handkerchief and held it against my coat, gauging the reflection of its color.
“So this is its weight,” I thought.
I soon grew weary of such inquiry, and my conceited playful mind led me to the ridiculous conviction that its heaviness undoubtedly represented the sum total of goodness and beauty converted into physical weight. Somehow I was happy.
I don’t know how I got there, but I finally ended up standing in front of Maruzen. I was normally so keen to avoid it, but at that moment I felt completely relaxed about going in. Prepared to chance it today, I entered without hesitation.
But then, for some inexplicable reason, the feeling of happiness that had filled my heart gradually deserted me. I was no longer able to stomach the perfume bottles and pipes. Melancholy pressed in and I felt suddenly weary from my wanderings. I tried standing in front of the art-book shelves. I was struck by how I needed even more effort than normal to take out a single weighty book of paintings. I did still try picking out one volume at a time and opening it, though I’d not the slightest desire to leaf painstakingly through the pages. And then, as if cursed, I pulled out the next volume. It was just the same. Even so, I couldn’t feel satisfied until I’d given it a cursory browse. When I wasn’t able to bear it any more, I put them down on the spot. I couldn’t even return them to their original place. I repeated this several times. Finally, I laid down a heavy orange-colored volume of Ingres, a painter I’d long admired, unable to endure even that. It felt like I was under an evil spell. Tiredness lingered in the muscles of my hand. I became thoroughly depressed as I gazed at the cluster of books I’d pulled out and left in a heap.
What was it about those art-books that had so captivated me before? Previously, I used to pore over them one by one, and then take pleasure in savoring that strangely inappropriate feeling when looking around a very ordinary environment.
But of course! That very moment, I recalled the lemon in the sleeve of my kimono. Why not pile up the colors of the books into a jumbled heap and test it against the lemon? I decided to try.
My previous airy happiness returned. I made a haphazard pile, excitedly demolished it and built it up once more. I pulled out new books, adding some and taking others away. A strange, fantastic castle emerged, now red, now blue.
It was finally completed. And then, hardly restraining my lightly dancing heart, I placed the lemon on top of the castle wall with great trepidation. It was my final touch.
As I watched, the lemon silently absorbed a euphony of clattering colors into its spindle-shaped body and then returned to its pristine clarity. I felt that, in the dusty atmosphere of Maruzen, only the space around the lemon was strangely taut. I gazed at it for some time.
Suddenly, another idea came to me, a curious scheme that rather startled me. Why not just leave it there and go out as if nothing has happened?
I had a strange ticklish feeling. After a moment’s thought, I made a brisk departure.
Out on the street, the ticklish feeling brought a smile to my face. How delightful if I were a mysterious villain who had planted a terrifying bomb, gleaming a golden yellow, on the shelves of Maruzen, and in ten minutes an enormous explosion ripped through Maruzen, its center bursting from the fine arts shelves!
I keenly pursued this line of thought: “If that happened, stuffy old Maruzen would be smashed to atoms!”
As I walked down Kyôgoku, the movie billboards colored the streets with a curious charm.
Steve Dodd taught Japanese modern literature at SOAS, University of London, for 25 years. After retiring in 2019, he moved to Kyoto. He teaches part time at Sugiyama Joshi Gakuen university in Nagoya. In addition he continues to translate Japanese novels.