It's a sad ending to Spring Snow; Kiyoaki's pilgrimage to Gesshu and the Abbess fails as Satoko has vowed to Buddha never to again see him in this life.
Bedridden with fever and - despite Honda's best efforts - the karmic nun sends them.on their way. On the ride back to Tokyo it's clear Kiyo is dying, and duly does so a few days later.
Don't worry, though, he's reincarnated in book 2 of the series as a violent nationalist! I might give that one a miss, though book 3, The Temple of Dawn, looks promising. Satoko and other characters recur, and young Honda zooms through the whole set.
The abbess gives a nice speech to Honda on the Buddhist principle of karmic reincarnation. The theory of time as continual creation and destruction he disputes, making a mental note to read up on and get back to her at a later date.
This set me to thinking that different cultures may have different theories on the origin of time, but they never dispute that it exists. The basic reason is that time is not complex at all; it's what Jamaicans call "riddim" (prev.)
The sense of time is innately musical, and the sense enables one to create music. Whether it's Mozart or Lee Perry, the exact same holds true.
BLACK VEST (Perry's exotic reworking of Max Romeo's War Ina Babylon)
With time comes dissolution, and that is the basic "fact" of life. On the train ride home, Kiyo seems to have a sort of vision.
He wondered about the tortured look he had seen on his friend's face just a moment before. Hadn't it in fact been an expression of intense joy, the kind to be found nowhere but at the extremes of human existence? Perhaps Kiyo had seen something, and Honda envied him.that, an emotion that in turn stirred an odd shame and self-reproach in him. (page 389)
Time is storytelling, so whatever one's theories of reincarnation, the story goes on. Time is both simple and subtle, so the story can be as involved as, say, Theosophy.
With time safely stored on one's journey, one can then tackle "the four great inchoate elements" - earth, sun, ocean, air. These themes come into play in Francis Stevens' pulp fantasy Claimed (prev). The sea is eternal rhythm, and in the story becomes a chthonic substance representing eternal dissolution.
..a change over swept the ancient triremes; a startling change, if there be such in witnessing a revivification of a rotting corpse, in seeing a dead ship come to life.
Stevens was a dark fantasist, and the story echoes the sombre mysticism of Samothrace and Delphi, rather than the sun-bathed Apollo.
Where there is sombreness and rotting carcasses, there is classical revival. The chthonic strength comes from the acceptance of time as the arch-destroyer - and reviver (Chronos, father of Zeus).
The sea is inchoate in reason; the midgard serpent; the black, feminine moon. In the story, the theme of sacrifice is invoked; the curio-shop owner buys
the blooded Mirror, out of Sunlight, by Chalmers III (CH VI "White Horses")
The sea is illusory in its reflections. While sunlight is "high sorcery", the sea is also " the great deep, the abyss". That strength renders it ultimately flexible (see Bruce Lee).
The thought occurred to me that if the West's version of time is delusional or inadequate (as personified by Einstein), who does one ask?
As mentioned in HB154, the West seems to replace "negative" stories (history) with a positive that adds up to zero information. "Pure information" lacks blood and passion since the basic principle of rotting that revivifies is missing. The hot and sultry Southern states, swamps, alligators. The course of time that tells a chthonic story is lacking in the materialist West; the living ruins of landscape; places of power that revive through decay. What is left is a positive of more or less zero information in terms of psychic reality (history).
If you go to Tokyo, they are more or less mimicking the West, as Mishima's tetralogy more or less points out. To get a meaningful answer, you have to ask the true East, or the South, or the North.
The Eastern answer came from the Abbess. The South might come from Lee Perry's "riddims". The North might come out of the fantasies of REH.
The bay was lined with built-up terraces of red stone, and from which jutted many wharfs and docks. Its waters were not empty but thronged with shipping of a type as anachronistic, though by no means as time-rotted, as the galley of the dolphin figurehead. Great triremes, with which shields of their warriors ranged glittering down the length of their bulwarks, shared the anchorage with merchant vessels of more peaceful appearance, gilded from stem to stern and of sails varie-hued as bright banners. (Claimed)