Sunlight Pouring Through the Trees

“木漏れ日 komorebi” is a Japanese word for sunlight filtering through the trees, and people often say it is hard to translate. Honestly, I think it is fine as long as the rough feeling gets across. You can see komorebi in any season, but to me it belongs to May. The light gets stronger, pouring down onto the ground through the fresh green leaves.

It is a recurring motif in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. Also, Late Spring by Yasujiro Ozu, whom Wenders deeply admires, is set around this exact season, from the end of April into May. After the cherry blossoms fall, new green fills the rest of spring.

In Japan, there is a kind of depression called “May sickness.” The social cycle starts in April, then the first week of May comes with a long holiday, and after that, people often say a depressive mood starts to set in. I am doing okay, more or less. But in April, a girl I loved, someone who was kind of a bit of a celebrity, passed away. For a while, I was pulled down by it too.

By the rules I made for myself, the posts here are loosely themed around the concept of our art project. I do think casually writing about whatever I feel day to day is probably good for my mental health. Still, writing a piece built around one specific theme can get really overwhelming sometimes.

I learned in high school that komorebi is actually made by a pinhole effect, which is why the light on the ground often looks round. But I never really noticed that until I started taking photos. In my memory, komorebi was not always round. It is more like a blurry dissolve, changing with my mood.

To me, beautiful things are often blurred, vague, and dissolved. They are not geometric. Just as I never noticed the roundness of komorebi, maybe I can’t see this world clearly. So I always cry and laugh in the dissolved world around me.

Some of my sentiments can be analyzed, maybe even made a little clearer through a certain theory, but not completely. They just stay there, like sunlight on the ground after passing through the trees in my memory.