Classic Poem

Okaru is crying:
like a velvet hollyhock trembling in prolonged twilight,
like the soft touch of flannel,
like the daylight about to fade from a field of buttercups,
like dandelion fuzz drifting away airily.

She cries and cries, but doesn't run out of tears.
Kampei is dead, Kampei is dead,
my young beautiful Kampei disemboweled himself. . . .

Okaru cries, longing for the young man's smell;
she thinks it was a strong stimulus like stifling onion in a malting room.
The soft touch of his skin was like the outdoor sun of May;
his breathing feverish as black tea,
when he held me tight, the salt farm gleamed blue in the sun,
my white parsley flower nerves turned sharp, and wilted, pale.
His inner thighs, which were trembling, and my lips I let him kiss,
on the day we parted, his white hands had gunpowder moistness soaked in them,
until just before getting on the palanquin—I was, lost in thoughts, cutting fresh vegetables. . . .

But Kampei is dead.

Like an orphan in a greenhouse,
Okaru, incited by various memories of sensuality,
is indulging in her own happy pleasures.

(Beyond the glass window of the puppet theater, red oranges blaze in
the autumn sunset, and from the bottom of the city streets comes the
whistle of a riverboat.)

Okaru is crying.
With her beautiful gestures, as if despairing of herself, of this world,
accompanied by the pressing samisen,
riding the narrative push,
she cries and cries, as if drowning to death,
Okaru is crying.

(Colors, smells, music.
Kampei can go to hell, for all I care.)