Question of the Day!

S🤦‍♂️ I was raised with them as a child. What Westerners don't understand is its deep cultural roots. Tankas may be over a thousand years old. Rengas and hokku go back 7 centuries. It does not use European poetics. It is best thought of as prose, a song, a game.

Also one word encapsulates many secondary meanings. Ask an American to define 'cherry' and they think of pie (very utilitarian). Even nowadays, the Japanese will associate 'cherry' with a season, a certain shade of pink, a picnic, who they were with and what they were drinking, eating, doing. "Love under the cherry blossoms" could be a short passionate relationship that fades with the fall of the petals. A week that lasts forever. Americans would get that part but fail to understand it in a deep cultural way. Ephemera has little value in an American society where everything comes with a price tag, even beauty, emotion most of all. The metaphors are beyond beyond.

Do fragrances bring back memories or elicit emotions? Does music paint an image. In the "The Peach Orchard" it does.