Introduction

'The flowing river never stops, and yet the water is never the same. Foam floats on the still pools, now vanishing, now forming, never lasting long. So it is with people in the world and their dwellings.' An Account of My Hut is only a few pages long, yet its opening is one of the most famous passages in Japanese literature. Chōmei had seen with his own eyes the great fire of Kyoto, a whirlwind, the moving of the capital, famine and a great earthquake, and had learned the impermanence of all things; so he gave up everything and built a hut ten feet square in the hills of Hino, where he lived alone reading sutras, playing the lute, gathering flowers and fruit, and making friends with a boy from the hills, and he describes the joys of this simple life. At the end he turns on himself: is not attachment to the quiet of his hut an attachment too?