Lost

I watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night, I’d never got around to watching it when if first came out, and I found a copy at home so I popped it in. It started a bit slow for me, but I quite enjoyed it in the end. But there was one moment in the film that grabbed me; it was a line from the older Sayuri, narrating (and me paraphrasing):

There’s a poem carved into a rock in the garden called “Lost”, made up of three words that the author had carved then scratched out; you can’t read “Lost”, only feel it.

Despite all the inaccuracies of the book and the movie, I think that line really captured one part of what it means to be Japanese. Loss is part of life, it is an inevitable conclusion of having had something. I think the Japanese take loss more philosophically than we do; certainly more than I could. And it’s such a beautiful phrase, I confess I could feel the tears welling up inside.

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