Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World
    Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World
    Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World
    Ebook68 pages32 minutes

    Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World

    By Kamo no Chomei and Michael Hofmann

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Japan's capital city of Kyoto was devastated by earthquake, storm, and fire in the late 12th century. Retreating from "this unkind world," the poet and Buddhist priest Kamo-no-Chomei left the capital for the forested mountains, where he eventually constructed his famous "ten-foot-square" hut. From this solitary vantage point Chomei produced Hojoki, an extraordinary literary work that describes all he has seen of human misery and his new life of simple chores, walks, and acts of kindness. Yet at the end he questions his own sanity and the integrity of his purpose. Has he perhaps grown too attached to his detachment?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStone Bridge Press
    Release dateJul 1, 1998
    ISBN9780893469856
    Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World

    Related to Hojoki

    Related ebooks

    Asian History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Notes on Dogen’s Being– Time

      Feb 6, 2018

      Notes on Dogen’s Being– Time
      16 min read

    • Article

      Strong Brew

      Aug 20, 2019

      Strong Brew
      4 min read

    • Article

      Kawanakajima

      Mar 21, 2019

      Kawanakajima
      10 min read

    • Article

      'Ghosts Of The Tsunami' Humanizes The Survivors Of Japan's 2011 Catastrophe

      Jan 8, 2018

      'Ghosts' is less an analytical or journalistic account than it is a character-driven, novelistic narrative about loss and trauma.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Henry Vaughan’s Eternal Alchemy

      Apr 16, 2021

      What faith teaches is that we're all exiles from that Zion that is eternity, to which we shall one day return. What Vaughan understands is that if we seek eternity, it is now. The post Henry Vaughan’s Eternal Alchemy appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Shattered Dreams

      Nov 18, 2016

      Shattered Dreams
      5 min read

    • Article

      An Essay On The Differences Of The Races

      Sep 1, 2021

      Ambassador Taeko called me into his office, the entire top floor of the Japanese Legation to the League of Nations. The white masonry building, with its attic and mansard roof, was formerly the headquarters of a Dutch trading company, and there were

      21 min read

    • Article

      Private Devotion

      Sep 1, 2018

      Greetings from Angelus by Gershom Scholem (translated by Richard Sieburth). Archipelago Books, 2018, $14.00 paper. IN 1648—the year, according to the Zohar, destined to usher in the messianic era—a Smyrnan Jew by the name of Shabbatai Tzvi received

      5 min read

    • Article

      Out Of The Past

      Sep 1, 2018

      Out Of The Past
      5 min read

    • Article

      Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth Review – Nigeria Unmasked

      Oct 14, 2021

      Wole Soyinka won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, the first black person to win the award. He is perhaps the most versatile of African writers, equally at home in all genres; his dramatic masterpieces, such as Kongi’s Harvest and Death and the

      3 min read

    • Article

      Towards What?

      Mar 1, 2019

      Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft. Riverhead Books, 2018, $26.00 cloth. OF THE deep and manifold fascinations to be found in Chris Marker’s 1983 docu-essay Sans Soleil, one of the chief formal characteristics to which my mind r

      5 min read

    • Article

      What Gets Lost in Translation Gets Transformed

      Aug 28, 2017

      One of the major reasons I found contemporary American short fiction boring in the past is that all that is left after the “move” of the story to Chinese is an undramatic plot. The post What Gets Lost in Translation Gets Transformed appeared first on

      17 min read

    • Article

      The Book that Made the Bard: 400 Years of Shakespeare’s Folio

      Nov 8, 2023

      The Folio is our gateway to Shakespeare; it's also a cautionary tale. The post The Book that Made the Bard: 400 Years of Shakespeare’s Folio appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Not The Messiah

      Nov 19, 2021

      Not The Messiah
      3 min read

    • Article

      An Element of Perversity: The Millions Interviews Katharine Kilalea

      Aug 30, 2018

      OK, Mr. Field—the debut novel from the South African-born, London-based writer Katharine Kilalea—is the story of a man and a house. Mr. Field, a concert pianist who lives in London, suffers a wrist injury after a performance of Chopin’s “Raindrop Pre

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Hojoki

    4/5

    37 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Powerful account of disasters followed by withdrawal to Kamo's famous "ten foot square" hermitage
    • 3/5
      This was a really quick read. I like the idea of solitude in a single small room that you could move anywhere you wanted.
    • 3/5
      I think the Japanese version is probably a lot better.
    • 4/5
      Chōmei was a court poet whose artistic sense of life became a radical path in old age, retreating from the striving of ego which he experienced and observed. He saw impermanence and asked what is a good life. Not money, power or status, rather peace and nature. That's the story. In fact he left society after he lost his political backing, was passed over for promotion within the Shinto shrine associated with his family. He decided to turn his back on society only after he lost the game, it looks spiteful. A true recluse might gain the world, then give it all away. Nevertheless, the power of his words can not be denied reaching across a chasm of time.
    • 5/5
      A very beautiful, clear, objective view, from late In life, of the uncertainties of man's life In society and on eartn, given the succession of catastrophes, natural and mancaused, that visited the author's country over the centuries.

    Book preview

    Hojoki - Kamo no Chomei

    HojokiCover.jpg

    HOJOKI

    Visions of a Torn World

    Text by Kamo-no-Chomei

    translated by

    Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins

    with illustrations by

    Michael Hofmann

    Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California

    Published by

    Stone Bridge Press, P.O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

    tel 510-524-8732 • sbp@netcom.com • www.stonebridge.com

    The quotation on page 11 is from Andrei Rublëv by Andrei Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter Blair (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).

    Cover design by David Bullen incorporating a painting by Michael Hofmann

    Text design by Peter Goodman

    Text copyright © 1996 by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins

    Illustrations copyright © 1996 by Michael Hofmann

    All rights reserved

    No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the publisher.

    isbn 978-1-880656-22-8

    For the people of South Hyogo
    image01.tifleaves.tif

    He hears snatches of conversation; the wind singing under the thatched eaves; the rustle of twigs . . . the full-throated, happy cry of swallows in the evening air. His eyes are filled with helpless anguish, like someone who has suddenly lost the power of speech at the very moment when he is about to say something terribly important, something crucial to everyone who might hear it.

    FROM THE SCREENPLAY

    ANDREI RUBLËV BY ANDREI TARKOVSKY,

    TRANSLATED BY KITTY HUNTER BLAIR

    Introduction

    Yuku kawa no nagare wa taezushite

    shikamo moto no mizu ni arazu

    yodomi ni ukabu utakata wa

    katsu kie katsu musubite

    hisashiku todomaritaru tameshi nashi

    yononaka ni aru hito to sumika to

    mata kaku no gotoshi

    This is the prelude to Hojoki, the great work of literary witness of medieval Japan by the recluse Kamo-no-Chomei (1155–1216). These lines are, together with the portentous tolling of the Gion bell at the start of the contemporaneous Heike Monogatari, the most familiar opening lines in Japanese literature. Supple and melodious, they prefigure the language and substance of the entire piece that follows.

    Hojoki was composed in 1212, when its author was in his late fifties. A mix of social chronicle and personal testimony, it is a comparatively short work organized in three main parts. The first tells of a series of calamities, personally observed by Chomei, that overtook Kyoto in the late Heian Period. The last part is a record of Chomei’s thoughts and life in retirement from the world in the mountains southeast of the capital, a life brought about in part by disinheritance from a prominent ecclesiastical family, in part by a desire to find meaning and peace in a nonmaterialistic world. The two parts pivot on a central section that is a scathing commentary on the human condition.

    Basil Bunting, who based his

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1