Ai Jiro
Then came a fleeting vision of his first visit to the old capital, a brief summer sojourn during his student days in Tokyo. When was that? 1928. So da na. It was hard to imagine, let alone remember. Kyoto, then, seemed not much more than an overgrown village by the standards of today's experience. A different universe, another incarnation... or so it seemed. Life! Wasn't it incomprehensible? The older he became, the less able seemed his ability to penetrate it. Who could believe that a boy from Bat Trang, a little pottery village in Tonkin, should have had such a career as his? And this night surely was going to be a plunge into the past. Life -- in the form of daughters and sons -- had made a call for accounting. And he could not rightfully avoid it. Others had died while he had lived, and now was the time for making his report to posterity.
Few who saw the man pass through the station doors, stare briefly up at the Kyoto Tower Hotel, then climb into a cab could have guessed that he was well into his seventies. Even his long gray hair, neatly parted and brushed back over his ears, did not suggest he was much over fifty. Often asked the secret of his youthful and fit appearance, the answer always was: Work, hard work. But he could have said that he hadn't eaten red meat or smoked for over thirty years. And having a young wife in Hongkong to compliment the wives he had had in Japan hadn't hurt either. There was nothing like a young woman for keeping an old man out of the grave.
- Volplaning with vim the upper atmosphere of business!
- Ah, to have trodden, indeed to tread,
- Hoping to plant seeds, having no dibble.
- Stuck with deadbeats sludging cubbyholes
- And doling hard-core hanky-panky,
- Ruminants chewing mental cud.
- Oh, the tremulousness of being sundered from the treadle,
- Blood and body in transubstantiation, vitrified.
- Walk like hung on a pillory, they do!
- Yes, here laconic perspicuity is mistaken for lucid perspicacity.
- Well, to the distaff side if you seek a theater-in-the-round.