My favourite writing motifs

A Prose, just a murmur

Every writer has favourite motifs which repeatedly appear in their stories, such as a specific type of flowers, insects, animal or some other objects.

Masaoka Shiki (正岡 子規, 1867 — 1902) is one of the most important Haiku poets. In his poems, the lesser cuckoo (ホトトギス) was his favourite motif. Some poets in China and Japan believed that a lesser cuckoo spits blood after it sings with a beautiful voice and that’s why the lesser cuckoo had a bloody red throat.

The lesser cuckoo was written in Shiki’s poems over and over, and its red colour was his symbol colour. His pen name, ‘Shiki’ also refers to ‘the lesser cuckoo’. He called himself a ‘lesser cuckoo,’ because he coughed up blood which was related to his tuberculosis and he died of it at the age of only 34.

Writer’s motifs may come from their childhood, environment or life-changing events. As a writer, mine are gardenia, butterflies, tigers, forest and water. My gardenia cannot be replaced by a lily or jasmine. It’s almost out of my control. It has to be a gardenia.

On the other hand, as a reader, it is fun to find the favourite author's symbols. When you find their motif on the pages again, you cannot stop smiling. After all, we are writing always nearly the same thing, the same theme.

I had a dream in which I was trapped in a lift. The lift was a long rectangular box shaped like a coffin. At the beginning, I knew you were there too, but after you walked behind me we were both standing facing the lift doors, you disappeared. I turned around and found you were no longer there.

I lost the sense, and couldn’t know whether I was going up or down. I was panicked wanting to open the door, but I didn’t know how to stop it — whichever it was going up or down. I didn't know how to open the door either.

My fingers touched a small sliding door on the wall of the right side and I slid it open. There were intertwined electric tubes beating as if it were pulsing veins.

There was the same sized door on the floor of the lift room. I slid it open too. I saw the bloody arms which tried to stretch toward me and to escape from there. I shut the sliding door up even though I had a weird idea one of the arms could be yours.

I thought that I had had similar dreams many times, but it may be my misunderstanding. I think it was about the anxiety of being alone. We are always afraid of being lonely somehow. The fear of dying alone drives me to write. It might have been the same for Shiki who had a red throat and who knew that he was going to die soon.

I always want to write down the exact moment when I am sliding down asleep. It is not easy because at that moment I am too sleepy to say a word. I feel as if I was being pulled into the sand by an antlion. As if I was assimilating to my bed, or am I blending into darkness? Is it the same feeling when I am dying?

When I am walking in the woods, I occasionally see deers. They look at me, I look back at them. People judge other people. Animals also judge other animals. They judge whether it is an enemy or not. While I am astonished by their beauty, they turn around and hop behind the trees. They disappear as if they are synchronised with the woods.

I was frightened when I think about the people squeezed under the lift I was on and when I imagine how painful it is to get your neck broken. I was crying mammal like, isolated in a coffin-like lift box.

However, everything might be seamlessly connected to each other; woods, deers, me, life and death. What is the partition between you and me, forest and me, the earth and me?