Kokoro

You may find it odd that I use a specifically religious word to describe my feelings for a young woman, but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. At the mere thought of her, I felt elevated by contact with her nobility. If this strange phenomenon we call Love can be said to have two poles, the higher of which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire, this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of Love’s higher realm

While she remains alive, I therefore ask that you keep all this to yourself, a secret intended for your eyes alone

There I read the letter that the general had written before he died. He had been longing all this time, he wrote, to die in expiation for his failure in the Satsuma Rebellion.2 I paused to count on my fingers the years he must have lived with this resolution in his heart. Thirty-five years had passed since the Satsuma Rebellion. By his own account, General Nogi had spent those thirty-five long years yearning to die without finding the moment to do so.