All of a sudden a rumbling sound came, and all the trees on the mountain spoke. We looked at each other, not knowing why, and saw a solitary spray of camellia in a small vessel on my desk swinging.
“An earthquake!” Nami-san brought herself right up against my desk, with a break in her pose, as she said this, and our bodies were oscillating, almost touching each other. A pheasant—a bird credited with super-human sensitiveness for seismic phenomena—flew out of the bamboo bush, making a sharp noise with the flapping of its wings.
“A pheasant,” I said looking out of the window.
“Where?” said the woman with another break in her posture, bringing herself closer to me. She was so near me that our heads were almost in contact with each other. I felt on my moustaches breaths coming out of her gentle nostrils.
“Remember, all unhumanity!” said the woman unequivocally as she quickly corrected her pose.
“Of course,” I responded promptly.
A pool of water in the hollow of a rock in the garden was agitating in alarm; but that body of water moving from the very bottom as a whole, there was no break in the surface but irregular curves. If there be such an expression as moving “full roundly,” it fitted exactly, I thought, the condition of this pool of water. A wild cherry tree, which had its shadow cast peacefully in the pool, now stretched out of all shape, now shrivelled up, then wriggled and twisted. For all those contortions, it was most interesting to observe that the tree never failed to appear the cherry tree it was.
“This is delightful. There is beauty and variation. Motion must be of this sort to be interesting.”
“Man will be all right as long as his motion is of this sort, no matter how hard he moves.”
“You cannot move like this unless you are unhuman.”