たばこの気持ち

The other day, I finished reading "About a Certain Destiny" (Chuko Bunko, published June 10, 1987) by Ryotaro Shiba, who loved Bosa "Rape Blossoms and Mild Seven" very much.

The following is an excerpt from the tobacco related description.

The personality of Takeo Hirose, who lost his life in Port Arthur and subsequently became a textbook military deity, is introduced.

[page 28]

Takeo was still the most popular among the Japanese living in Japan for his strength and courage, and his daily tastes were still unique, with no taste for alcohol or tobacco, and no desire to play with flowers.

At the time of the war, tobacco and alcohol were considered indispensable to the life of the Russian aristocracy.

Hirose was a retarded person and did not even smoke.

Makoto Nakaoki describes how he visited Tsuneo Fujiwara at Yumotokan, where he was recuperating from pulmonary tuberculosis. (This is when Mr. Nakaoki, who was preparing to go to war, spent a couple of days in Mr. Fujiwara's hospital room.)

［Page 57］

It seems that Mr. Nakaoki was extremely quiet at this time, and spent the whole day lying quietly in his hospital room, reading books and magazines with a cigarette in the corner of his lips, ----.

The last is from the description of Ms. A., a poet and professor at a women's university.

[page 352]

After his death, an elder critic of the short poem criticism once told me that he was well aware of this poet's existence as a poet and that he had changed his perception of him after his death.

He neither drank alcohol nor smoked cigarettes. He had no children and lived alone with his wife as if they were close to each other.