“The white glaze carried a faint suggestion of red. As one looked at it, the red seemed to float up from deep within the white.

The rim was faintly brown. In one place the brown was deeper.

It was there that one drank—

The rim might have been stained by tea, and it might have been stained by lips.

Kikuji looked at the faint brown, and felt that there was a touch of red in it.

Where her mother’s lipstick had sunk in—

There was a red-black in the crackle too.

The color of faded lipstick, the color of a wilted red rose, the color of old, dry blood. . . .”

—Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker, 1959.