Introduction
trees in the garden.’ What do you think the host would think?”
Indeed, Sachio learned early in his poetic career to appreciate the dual nature of a word’s power. It can enchant as well as betray, and only mastering every resource in word and rhythm, can one transmute his personal experience into something rich and impersonal. Finally:
“Whether in poetry, prose, or any form of plastic art, a man cannot produce anything better than what he really is. The style cannot be separated from the personality.”
The following few years were eventful for Sachio. A new journal, Araragi, was founded in October, 1908, and he was virtually its editor-in-chief till his death in 1913. For some time he had been deeply in love, an experience poignantly expressed in his poetry and one which finally reached its breaking point about this time. A series entitled My Life in 1911 and Dark Hair in the following year are its result, and in the Light of Decay one feels a certain foreboding. Furthermore, his young pupils, Akahiko and Mokichi and others, had been drifting into a new trend to which Sachio himself could not subscribe, and this undoubtedly saddened him. It was, how-
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