Status Updates From Золотой Храм

The corpse was just being looked at. I was just looking. To know that looking (the act, that is, of looking at someone, as one ordinarily does, without any special awareness) was such a proof of the rights of those who are alive, and that this looking could also be an expression of cruelty-all this came to me now as a vivid experience.

There was something gruesome about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man’s face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask;

I was rather pleased that his half-correct reasoning was producing no change whatsoever on my apathetic face. Evidently Tsurukawa accurately classified human feelings in the neat little drawers that he kept in his room, like boys who classify various specimens of insects; and occasionally he enjoyed taking them out for a bit of practical experimentation.

At the thought that beauty should already have come into this world unknown to me, I could not help feeling a certain uneasiness and irritation. If beauty really did exist there,it meant that my own existence was a thing estranged from beauty.[...] Being a young boy, I could not think of beauty as being neither small nor large, but a thing of moderation. So when I saw small, dew-drenched summer flowers that seemed...

Other birds fly through the air, but this golden phoenix was flying eternally through time on its shining wings. Time struck those wings. Time struck those wings and floated backwards. In order to fly, the phoenix remained motionless, with a look of anger in its eyes, holding its wings aloft, fluttering the feathers of its tail, bravely stretching its majestic golden legs.