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"Memories of Chuuya Nakahara" (中原中也の思い出) from Hideo Kobayashi's "On Life" (人生について)

"One late spring evening, both of us were sitting on a stone, silently watching crabapple blossoms fall. The petals, like dead air, fell straight down without pause. The ground beneath the trees was dyed thick in pale pink. They're not just falling, they're scattering, even though they scatter petal by petal, they possess an unmistakably rigid order and speed, with such great care and effort, I kept thinking for some reason. It's an astonishing art, a perilous temptation. Though it was wasted on us, who knows what sorts of frivolous thoughts and foolishness it would provoke in young men and women. The petal's motions were without conclusion, and our gazing was never-ending. It soon brought me an unpleasant feeling. I became unable to endure it. Just then, Nakahara, who had been silently watching, suddenly said "That's enough, let's go home." At first I was startled, and with a trembling in my heart I frantically searched for words. "Clairvoyant as usual, aren't you," I managed to sputter out. He gave me one of his usual clownish smiles.

The two of us drank beer at the tea house of a Hachiman shrine. The willows looked hazy under the light of dusk. He took a sip of his beer, and cried out "Ahh, bōyō, bōyō." "What's bōyō?" "It's the infinitely vast future, ahh, bōyō, bōyō," he chanted in a sorrowful tone, his eyes fixed. I felt pain. To understand a poet, not their poetry, but to understand a natural born poet's flesh and blood, what a painful feeling. From the moment I met him, that same feeling had come again and again and again. One would think I'd have grown accustomed to it by now. I wondered if it would always be this freshly painful. He devoured two heaping plates of sushi rolls. I knew that for him it was late, it had caused his appetite to become abnormal. His clairvoyance, as always, had that blind spot. He quickly glanced at my face and said, "After this, I'll eat again at home. I'll be starving at home, you know. Or I'll be in trouble." After that, he says he'll somehow manage, that you see, the truth is, he doesn't have the confidence to keep living, actually no, he doesn't have something as petty as "confidence", and so forth. This is his personal philosophy. It has nothing to do with his appetite. Before long, both of us were kicked out of the tea shop." (pages 72-73)

Note: The word Nakahara uses for "infinitely vast" is 茫洋 which is read as bōyō.

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This occured in April of 1937. In October of the same year, Nakahara died from tubercular meningitis. The shrine they drank at was Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine (鶴岡八幡宮), and while the exact kaido/crabapple trees that they gazed at are dead now too, new ones are in their place: