桜の樹の下には
梶井基次郎
Beneath the Cherry Trees
桜の樹の下には
梶井基次郎 · Japanese
Under the cherry trees, corpses are buried. Kajii's short prose piece begins with that assertion and spends its few pages arguing it, insisting that…
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Pagera Editor's Note
Under the cherry trees, corpses are buried. Kajii's short prose piece begins with that assertion and spends its few pages arguing it, insisting that the unbearable beauty of the blossoms must be drawing on something beneath the soil. It is less a story than a mind working itself toward calm through a disturbing image, written by an author who spent his short life ill and died at thirty-one.
Author
梶井基次郎
Kajii Motojirō (1901-1932) was a Japanese writer who left barely twenty short pieces. Lemon, in which a piece of fruit left on a bookshop shelf becomes an imagined bomb, is his best known. He wrote through years of tuberculosis and died at thirty-one, and his precise, feverish prose has outlasted the smallness of his output.
Beneath the Cherry Trees
桜の樹の下には
梶井基次郎 · Japanese
Under the cherry trees, corpses are buried. Kajii's short prose piece begins with that assertion and spends its few pages arguing it, insisting that…
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Original (Japanese)
桜の樹の下には屍体が埋まつてゐる！ これは信じていいことなんだよ。何故つて、桜の花があんなにも見事に咲くなんて信じられないことぢやないか。俺はあの美しさが信じられないので、この二三日不安だつた。しかしいま、やつとわかるときが来た。桜の樹の下には屍体が埋まつてゐる。これは信じていいことだ。 どうして俺が毎晩家へ帰つて来る道で、俺の部屋の数ある道具のうちの、選りに選つてちつぽけな薄つぺらいもの、安全剃刀の刃なんぞが、千里眼のやうに思ひ浮んで来るのか――お前はそれがわからないと云つたが――そして俺にもやはりそれがわからないのだが――それもこれもやつぱり同じやうなことにちがひない。 一体どんな樹の花でも、所謂真つ盛りといふ状態に達すると、あたりの空気のなかへ一種神秘な雰囲気を撒き散らすものだ。それは、よく廻つた独楽が完全な静止に澄むやうに、また、音楽の上手な演奏がきまつてなにかの幻覚を伴ふやうに、灼熱した生殖の幻覚させる後光のやうなものだ。それは人の心を撲たずにはおかない、不思議な、生き生きとした、美しさだ。 しかし、昨日、一昨日、俺の心をひどく陰気にしたものもそれなのだ。俺にはその美しさがな
English translation (Pagera AI)
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Pagera Editor's Note
Under the cherry trees, corpses are buried. Kajii's short prose piece begins with that assertion and spends its few pages arguing it, insisting that the unbearable beauty of the blossoms must be drawing on something beneath the soil. It is less a story than a mind working itself toward calm through a disturbing image, written by an author who spent his short life ill and died at thirty-one.
Author
梶井基次郎
Kajii Motojirō (1901-1932) was a Japanese writer who left barely twenty short pieces. Lemon, in which a piece of fruit left on a bookshop shelf becomes an imagined bomb, is his best known. He wrote through years of tuberculosis and died at thirty-one, and his precise, feverish prose has outlasted the smallness of his output.
桜の樹の下には
梶井基次郎
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