Status Updates From Troubled Waters

“Buddhists do say that children are the shackles of the three realms, but how especially hard the parents of wayward children have it. These unbreakable bonds of blood are such that, no matter how much a child probes the depths of depravity, no matter how far into the abyss they fall, society will never pardon you if you abandon them.”

“How right [Murasaki] Shikibu was when she wrote that the first snow falls on a world of ever-mounting sorrows. Now here it is again this year, unaware of the torments it brings, sparing with its white veil the blushes of a broken fence, while boasting of its own splendour, as though to say, Behold this, my work!… I loved it, too—once upon a time.”

“Wherever there is a bond between two souls, their longing will colour everything, I thought to myself, recalling lines from a certain poem.”

“Soon, the cold winds of winter began to blow, stripping the trees bare. How I envied the scattering red maple leaves that would be borne towards him. I would gaze off into the distance to see where they would go, and the sight of the forest beckoned to me.”

“Yet into a mountain stream I fell, and, borne by the current, I found myself in troubled waters. My youth was my downfall, my sin love, and the go-between a snowy day.”