On the cost of a fury no one cared to hear

Two in the morning in Heian-kyo, ancient Kyoto. Wooden shutters closed, the street as empty as a ninth-century capital ever gets. Only one movement in this silence: a woman. She walks fast, with the strange, deliberate composure of someone who has made a decision that cannot be undone. Her hair is bound into five sharp horns, her face painted vermilion, on her head an inverted iron tripod with three burning candles. A vagrant standing by the gate dies before he can cry out. Terror trails behind her, killing everything in its path.

Seven hundred years earlier, an anonymous poet sang of the same woman differently. The poem made its way into the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled by order of Emperor Daigo in the year 905:

“On a narrow mat

spreading a single sleeve

tonight, once again

she likely waits for me –

the maiden of Uji Bridge?”

That is all. Quiet, sad, waiting. A solitary woman. A narrow mat. A single sleeve spread out – waiting, alone.

What happened between these two images? What did the girl from the poem have to live through, that seven centuries later she would return in the Japanese imagination as a naked, red, crazed figure carrying fury, death and terror? And why, in Uji itself, a few steps from the bridge, does there still stand a small shrine tucked away on a side lane, where people come, leave coins, and whisper a request that she free them from someone unwanted: from a husband, from a wife, from a lover, from a relationship they cannot sever themselves? Let us go into this story. Who knows what we may learn.

A woman on a cold mat

Hashihime's first appearance in Japanese literature can be dated precisely. The year 905, the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, Kokin Wakashū (古今和歌集, “Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern”), commissioned by Emperor Daigo and edited by Ki no Tsurayuki and three other poets. The collection contains over a thousand pieces. In Book Fourteen, devoted to love, under number 689, there is a text with no author attached. A text that has passed down through the centuries as one of the more treasured images of Heian longing.

さむしろに  衣かたしき  こよひもや  我をまつらむ  うぢのはしひめ

(Samushiro ni / koromo katashiki / koyoi mo ya / ware o matsuran / Uji no Hashihime)

“On a narrow mat

spreading a single sleeve

tonight, once again

she likely waits for me –

the maiden of Uji Bridge?”

 - Kokin Wakashū, Book XIV,

no. 689, anonymous

Five lines. Thirty-one syllables. The whole Heian drama packed into the gesture of a single spread sleeve. This needs explaining. In Heian aristocracy, lovers slept on one mat together, each spreading one sleeve of their robe beneath the other. Spreading a single sleeve, alone, was the gesture of waiting. A gesture that said: I have left you a place, come. A narrow mat, because it is meant for one person. One sleeve, because the other is waiting. “Tonight, once again”, because yesterday she waited too. And the night before. And before that.

The speaker of the poem is a man. But what speaks through him is the whole courtly culture of Heian, which produced a peculiar marriage system: kayoi-kon (婚い婚, “marriage by visiting”), in which the husband did not live with his wife. He lived separately, in his own house or in his parents' house, and visited his wife at night, whenever he chose. He could have several wives in different houses. He could stop visiting at any moment. Without a word. Without ceremony. Simply stop coming. Then his wife stayed on her mat, alone, and waited.

The poem touches this from the man's perspective. “She probably waits for me again”. There is no reproach. There is no declaration that he will go. There is only a quiet awareness that someone there, across the river, in Uji – perhaps on the other side of the mountain, perhaps in another district – this evening once again spread a sleeve. “Probably again”. An impassive, compassionless “she is probably waiting”.

The poem is anonymous. We do not know who wrote it, or about whom. We do not even know whether the maiden of Uji Bridge was a real woman, or a poetic figure, some spirit of the bridge, some echo of older folklore. In Heian-period Japan there was a tradition that large, old bridges had their guardian deities, a female-male pair set as protectors. Hashihime, the lady of the bridge, would have been one of them. But in the poem she is no longer a deity. She is a woman. Or something in between.

This piece returns again and again in later literature. A hundred years later Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting to the empress, wrote Genji Monogatari (源氏物語, “The Tale of Genji”), the first great work of Japanese prose – fifty-four chapters, over a thousand pages, a landscape of Heian love on a scale the world had not seen before. The forty-fifth chapter bears the title Hashihime. The action takes place precisely in Uji, where two princesses live in seclusion after their father's death, and a young courtier named Kaoru travels there from the capital. It is a delicate, melancholic chapter. Murasaki inscribes her heroines into the legacy of the Kokin poem: they are women of the bridge – waiting, alone, on the boundary of worlds, for the bridge was also a metaphor for the passage between the living and the dead.

The Hashihime of poetry and of the Tale of Genji is a beautiful figure. Sad, but beautiful. Heian loved such a woman. Heian knew how to write such a woman. No one then yet imagined that, several centuries later, in times when the world would change and the sword would become more important than the ink brush, the same Hashihime would return. And she would no longer be beautiful, nor sad.

Something happened?

Heike Monogatari (平家物語, “The Tale of the Heike”) is the Japanese counterpart of the Iliad: epic, transmitted orally by wandering monk-bards playing on the biwa, an account of the rise and fall of the Taira clan in the second half of the twelfth century, set in final written form in the thirteenth. Among various variants of the text there is an additional scroll called Tsurugi no maki (剣巻, “The Scroll of Swords”), which tells of the famous swords of the Genji clan and of the demons defeated with their help. One of those demons is Hashihime.

The story begins in the time of Emperor Saga, at the start of the ninth century. A certain aristocratic woman, whose name the legend does not preserve, learns that her husband has taken a second woman. A common and accepted thing at the time, but for this particular woman unbearable. She goes to Kifune shrine, some dozen kilometers north of the capital, deep in the mountains, a place dedicated to the deities of water, where one normally comes to ask for rain or harvest. She spends seven nights there, praying for one thing: that instead of dying of grief, she might here and now transform into a demon and kill her rival.

And the deity answers her.

This is the key moment of the story. The deity Kifune, operating within the Heian cosmology where there is no sharp division between “good” and “evil” forces, where the world is a field of tensions rather than an arena of struggle between light and darkness – Kifune does not refuse. It gives instructions. Return to the capital, the deity says. Divide your hair into five sharp horns and tie them up. Paint your face vermilion, your body lead minium (鉛丹, entan, red lead oxide). Turn an iron cooking tripod upside down, place it on your head, light a candle on each of its three legs. Take into your teeth a torch lit at both ends. Go to the Uji river. Submerge yourself in its water. Stay there for twenty-one days. After that time you will no longer be human.

She does everything. She walks at night through Heian-kyo – and here appears the first trace of what will become her essence. People who see her die. Simply, from terror. She does not yet kill with sword or magic, not yet. She kills by being seen. She is already something else, although the ritual is not yet finished. After twenty-one days submerged in the cold Uji river, she emerges as an oni – a word often translated as “demon”, but meaning something broader: a being who has crossed the boundary of humanity, whose emotions have exceeded what a human body can contain (I have written more about oni here: Kanji 鬼 (oni) — When Demons Knew How to Weep).

And then she begins to kill. First the rival. Then the rival's family. Then the former husband's family. Then – and this detail will come back to us later – she begins to kill random inhabitants of Heian-kyo. She changes her appearance – a man she kills as a woman. A woman – as a man. Panic breaks out in the city. After dusk people lock themselves in their houses. Heian-kyo, capital of an empire, city of poems and silk, becomes a city of evening fear.

What happened? Whence this transformation – from a poetic girl waiting on a mat to a naked, red demoness running through the night streets?

Usually a simple explanation is sought in such cases. Folklore changes, people say. New era, new sensibility. The Kamakura period, from 1185 to 1333, marks the twilight of the delicate Heian court culture and the arrival of the age of samurai: a harder, more physical world where blood carries weight. Perhaps the times began to tell different stories.

Perhaps. But there is something more subtle in this shift. It is not that someone invented a new Hashihime. Someone heard the old one, listened to the narrow mat and the single sleeve, and asked: and what happens when such a woman finally does not endure?

The iron tripod

Three centuries after the Heike, in the Muromachi period (1336–1573), Japanese theatre companies developed a new dramatic form: nō. Slow, massive, built on poetry and dance, nō does not tell stories in the European sense. It shows the moment when the soul touches something essential.

Among the roughly two hundred and forty plays that today form the core repertoire of nō, there is one titled Kanawa (鉄輪, “The Iron Tripod”). Author anonymous. General dating: fifteenth century. It was once attributed to Zeami, the most prominent of nō playwrights, but current authoritative catalogues state simply: “author unknown”. The text never confessed to anyone.

The play tells a variant of the Hashihime story, but with a shifted accent. In the first part (mae-ba) we see a woman who has just returned from Kifune shrine. She walks to the house of her former husband – who in the meantime, alarmed by an ominous dream, has gone for counsel to the famous master of onmyōdō, the master of yin-yang, Abe no Seimei. Seimei tells him: someone has cast a curse on you, you and your new wife will die tonight.

In the second part (nochi-ba) the woman returns, but now as a demon. The actor puts on a mask called hashihime or namanari (生成り, “half-demon”, literally “in the process of becoming”). She dances before Seimei, declares her right to revenge. The master uses his magic, and she must withdraw. But – and this is important – the play does not end with her death. The play ends with her disappearance into shadow. With a declaration: I will return.

This is a finale that shakes one, if one listens to it. Because nō, unlike European drama, rarely punishes. Hashihime is not defeated in any moral sense. She is held back, withdrawn, but her cause – her shūnen, of which more in a moment – remains unsoothed. She is still a woman who has been left. Master Seimei's magic temporarily holds back the consequences, but it does not erase the cause.

In the first part of Kanawa the actor mae-shite may use one of three masks: kanawa-onna, shakumi, or deigan (泥眼, “golden eyes”). The last of these is the most interesting. The eyes and teeth are painted with gold pigment (kondei), and in Buddhist symbolism gold signifies the highest of the five kinds of vision – the vision of a Buddha. It is a sign of duality: a woman outwardly still human, but inwardly already beginning to shine with something that goes beyond human nature. Nō actors treat masks with deep respect – a mask is “set upon” one (kakeru), not “put on”, and before going on stage the actor bows to it, as if bowing to a partner.

Three centuries after Kanawa, in the year 1779, in Edo – by then a completely different world, the world of ukiyo-e and townspeople's culture – the artist Toriyama Sekien publishes his second book on yōkai: Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (今昔画図続百鬼, “Illustrated Procession of a Hundred Demons Past and Present, Continued”). Among the prints there is Hashihime as well. Sekien draws her seated beneath Uji Bridge, with loose hair and a strange, sideways gaze. A short caption: the deity Hashihime dwells beneath Uji Bridge in the province of Yamashiro. Here is her image.

This was the final closure of the iconography. From Sekien onwards every subsequent artist who would draw Hashihime cited this composition. And so the girl from the narrow mat of the year nine hundred and five became, in the Japanese imagination, a fixed, recognizable image of demonic jealousy. A thousand years of evolution of one figure, from lyric through epic through theatre to the print. And here, frankly, we should stop.

Because this is everything that could be said about Hashihime from the outside. And now it is time to go inside.

To become something else

In Christian culture, sin has a definite grammar. A person transgresses a rule, bears guilt, performs penance, is pardoned or condemned. The classical structure: act, guilt, punishment or salvation. Around this grammar there grew up over two thousand years a complex moral, legal and psychological apparatus. To have sinned means: to have done something wrong, although one could have done otherwise. At the center is choice.

Hashihime did not sin. Hashihime became something else.

It sounds like wordplay, but in Buddhist psychology, on which Japanese emotional culture is built, the difference is fundamental. Buddhism knows the concept of shūnen (執念) – literally “sticky thought”, an attachment that does not let go. The first character, 執, means “to grasp”, “to hold tightly” – the same one that appears in the word shūchaku (執着, “obsession”). The second, 念, means thought, but a conscious, attentive thought, inscribed in the presence of mind. Together shūnen is a thought that grasps and does not release. Not so much obsession in the European psychological sense, as a certain state in which consciousness becomes glued to one point, and everything else around it begins to fade from that perspective.

In Buddhist tradition, especially in currents related to reincarnation, shūnen has serious ontological consequences. A person who dies with shūnen in their heart is not reborn as a person. They are reborn as a spirit, a demon, a wrathful deity. The form of the next existence depends on the state of mind at the moment of death. But in certain special cases – and Hashihime is such a case – shūnen can lead to transformation during life. The person does not die. The person simply becomes something else.

That is why the Heike describes her as ikiryō (生霊, “living spirit”), and not as an ordinary demon. She did not die and was not reborn. She crossed the line of humanity during her life, in a body whose organic matter still endures. This is the most disturbing part of the legend. A demon who came from hell is in a certain sense understandable – it has its place in the cosmology. But a demon who only a few months ago was lying on a mat, longing and waiting – this is already something else.

It is also very interesting that the Japanese narrative does not condemn Hashihime. There is no moment in the story when the narrator says: she acted wrongly, she should have kept her peace, “her jealousy was a sin”, “a woman should know her place”. The Heike describes her transformation in a neutral way, as one describes a storm or an earthquake. What happened, happened. The question is not: did she have the right. The question is: how do we now live in a city where there is someone such as her.

This amorality of the Japanese narrative, so different from the European tradition in which even stories of revenge must end with a moral judgment, does not mean that Japan is better or worse. It only means that it works with different tools. Here emotional transformation is not sin. It is a fact of nature, like rain. One can fear it, one can protect oneself from it, but one cannot judge it in categories of guilt. Just as one cannot judge winter in categories of guilt.

This changes everything that can be said about this story afterwards.

The gods did not say “no”

Let us return to the scene at Kifune shrine. The woman kneels by the river deep in the mountains, at night, in the rain, and asks the deity for something terrible: for help in transforming into a demon capable of killing her rival. And the deity does not refuse.

This is a detail that is easy to miss, because it seems only a folkloric particular. And it is a cultural foundation.

Let us reach for a European comparison. In Greek tragedy a woman abandoned or betrayed knows two roads. She can die of grief – like Deianira, who out of love and fear of losing her husband sent him a poisoned robe and then killed herself; like Dido, who threw herself on a sword when Aeneas sailed away from Carthage. Or she can take revenge, and then her revenge is an act of hubris, of pride, of violation of the cosmic order. Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon and dies at the hand of her own son. Medea kills her own children and escapes on a chariot drawn by dragons, but she escapes from the divine order, not with its blessing. Hubris is never unpunished. The gods either punish openly, or strike with cold silence.

Whence this difference? Not from a difference in the level of compassion or in moral severity. From a difference in how we view the harmony of the world.

In Japanese Shinto, from which the deity Kifune originates, the world is not divided into pure and impure in a moral sense. It is divided into what is in balance and what has disturbed that balance. The wrong done to a woman whose husband has left her for another is a real disturbance, a real crack in the fabric of the world. That crack demands closure. It does not matter that the closure will come through blood, nor whose blood it is, nor whether he or she was at fault. What matters is only that the unremoved wrong should not begin to rot in the community, that harmony be restored as quickly as possible.

In Europe, in our tradition, wrong is a private matter. The victim is to forgive, to move on, to go further. A wrong that is not forgiven becomes the victim's fault: she cannot let go, she nurses her grievances, she poisons herself with resentment. In the Japanese cosmology that we see in the story of Hashihime, wrong is energy that must go somewhere. If it is not heard, it will explode. The deity Kifune knows this. That is why it does not say: come to your senses. It says: since it must explode anyway, here is a controlled path. Controlled from a cosmological point of view, from the point of view of the kami – not necessarily from the perspective of the inhabitants of Heian-kyo, who will pay for it with undeserved deaths.

Does this mean that the deity approves of what Hashihime is about to do? No. It means only that the deity recognizes necessity. Hashihime will become a demon killing random people. This will be a tragedy. But it would also be a tragedy if the woman simply perished in solitude on her mat, unheard, and her wrong passed into the wall of the house, into the pillow, into the wood of the bridge, into the water of the river. Onryō (怨霊, “vengeful spirit”) is born when the crack is not closed.

This is an uncomfortable thought for someone raised in the European tradition. But a thought that explains why Hashihime is to this day a deity with a shrine, to whom one can address prayers. She is not a symbol of jealousy or a warning. She is a being who has been heard. And that is why one can come to her for help when one stands oneself before a similar crack.

A system without language

Let us look now at the situation of this particular woman, before her decision to go to Kifune. She was an aristocrat in the Heian era, where aristocratic marriage was a stranger construction than it seems at first glance. The husband did not live with his wife. He lived separately. He came. He could come more often, less often, or stop. She might be lucky that her parents were still alive and had influence. Or not. She might have a child – which usually consolidated the relationship – but did not have to have one. Her position with her husband was whatever his goodwill toward her happened to be.

And one evening her husband stops coming. Because he has taken another. Perhaps he wrote – Heian convention required writing polite, elaborate poems even to those being abandoned – perhaps he did not write. Perhaps he sent a messenger with a courteous explanation, perhaps he was silent. Either way: he does not come.

What is she to do now? There is no court to which she can appeal, because marriage is not a legal act requiring dissolution. There is no religious institution that intervenes, because Buddhist and Shinto temples do not meddle in private marital affairs. There is no familial help if her parents are no longer alive or have lost their influence. There is no neighborly pressure, because the neighbors live their own dramas of the same kind. There is no psychologist, therapist, support group, self-help book, mediation. There is nothing.

The woman has only her body. And ritual. These two things remain.

And she does with these two things everything she still can. The body she uses to its extremity: naked, bloodied, in cold water. Ritual she uses precisely, according to instructions, with the gravity of a professional priest. And the effect – for there really is an effect – is that the society which would not listen to her now must.

Heian-kyo closes its shutters after dusk because Hashihime has a voice. Her voice is a form of scream that no one wishes to hear, but everyone has to hear.

Here is the central observation of this story and the reason why, after a thousand years, it still means something. Hashihime is a study of what happens when an emotion finds no social form in which it could be expressed, heard, worked through. An emotion that has no form finds itself a form. And the form it finds, when left to its own improvisation, can be monstrous.

I speak of a Heian woman, but this is not a story only about her era. Every era has its groups of people to whom the system gives no language. When such a person finally screams, because they must, we who listen have an impulse to say: she exaggerates, she is radicalizing, she has lost perspective. It is easy to say this when one has one's own words, one's own courts, one's own assemblies, one's own places where one can sit and be heard. But the scream appears where there is no conversation.

She no longer wants revenge – she wants to be seen

The subtlest observation in this story was made in the nineteen-nineties by the American scholar of nō theatre Janet Goff, in her book on the connections of nō with the Tale of Genji. Goff noticed in the Hashihime of the Heike and of Kanawa something that usually escapes the traditional narrative of the jealous woman.

Hashihime at first kills specific people. The rival, her family, the former husband's family. These are still rational targets of revenge from her own perspective. Because they are people who stood between her and what she wanted.

But then the Heike describes something strange. After exhausting the list of justified targets, Hashihime does not stop. She begins to kill random inhabitants of Heian-kyo. Men, women, old people and children. Without a target. Without any specific wrong to settle. She simply kills.

Goff observes that this is not a narrative oversight. This is the key moment. Hashihime at this stage no longer wants revenge. She has already taken it. She wants something else. And that something else has no end.

She wants to be seen.

Her whole road, from the night on the shrine floor to running naked through the night streets, is a road with one guiding motif: to stop being invisible. The Heian woman on the mat was invisible. Her husband knew she was there, but did not see her. The neighbors knew that a woman lived in this house, but did not see her. No one looked. That was her life – that air of invisibility. And when her wrong finally explodes, it explodes against invisibility, not against specific people.

This is the thing that fifteenth-century nō theatre said about the psyche of unprocessed wrong with a precision to which European psychology came only at the end of the twentieth century, when it began to study the dynamics of unspoken trauma. Trauma that has not found a listener, at a certain moment ceases to seek a specific perpetrator. It begins to seek the very fact that the world still goes on, as if nothing. And to that fact it declares war.

This paradoxically makes the demoness Hashihime a deeply human figure.

The shrine where one asks to be freed

Let us go back to Uji Bridge. Modern Uji is a quiet town south of Kyoto, fifteen minutes by train from the capital, known for tea and for the temple of Byōdōin, whose golden Phoenix adorns today's Japanese ten-yen coin. The bridge is long, wooden, over still water, one of the three oldest bridges in Japan, mentioned in chronicles from the seventh century. The first bridge was burnt. The next was destroyed by flood. Each subsequent one was built in the same place. Each subsequent one was also the home of Hashihime.

The shrine to which people today come with a request to sever toxic relationships did not always bear the name of Hashihime. In the year 646, when the monk Dōtō of Gangō-ji temple built the first bridge over the Uji, in its projecting part called sannoma (三の間, “third segment”), also used for the ceremonial drawing of water for tea, a small shrine was placed for the guardian deity of the river – Seoritsuhime, an old Shinto goddess who cleanses the waters. Hashihime did not yet exist as a separate figure. She would appear only in Heian poetry, as the figure of the solitary woman waiting by the bridge – the one we know from the poem in the Kokin Wakashū. With time she would merge with the guardian kami of the place, and after the Heike Monogatari she would take over the shrine already in her darkest version.

Later the shrine was moved from the bridge to the western embankment. There it stood for centuries, until in 1870, during the great flood of the Uji river, it was inundated and destroyed. In 1906 it was rebuilt in a new place – not by the river itself, but somewhat further on, deep in residential buildings on Agata-dōri street. It stands there to this day. Under one large roof two tiny shrines stand side by side: Hashihime on the left, Sumiyoshi on the right – the deity of navigation and water transport, Hashihime's old companion on the river. A small torii gate, a few stones with inscriptions, a silent space. The shrine is easy to overlook, if one does not deliberately seek it.

Formally the shrine is dedicated to the deity Seoritsuhime, a kami of cleansing related to water, who does not appear in the legend. But all who come here know to whom they really come. Hashihime is here, under this roof, in these stones. And people come because they want something from her.

They want her to sever some relationship. They want to divorce. They want to get out of an affair. They want to break with a toxic friend. They want to be done with a manipulative parent. They want to escape the trap their job has become for them. Hashihime as a deity of enkiri (縁切り, “the severing of ties”) has been hearing such requests for a long time. Women and men write the request on a wooden tablet, hang it, pray, walk away.

Do you see how everything dovetails? The community that created the demonic myth of Hashihime, in the same geography, in the same topography, on the same bank of the river, set up a place where Hashihime can help someone. There is her cruel, wrathful version recorded in the Heike and in Kanawa. And there is her second version, discreet, small, helpful, available to anyone who comes.

The myth is not here a warning: do not be like her. The myth is a model: such a thing can also happen to a person. One can fail to endure. And this too has its place in the order of the world. One can reach so far that one ceases to be oneself. And this too will be heard.

Perhaps that is why people who visit this shrine speak afterwards of feeling something strange. Not relief. Not forgiveness. Not peace in the European sense. Something closer to recognition. As though someone very old, who had been through it all themselves, had nodded and said: yes. I know. Go.

What would we do if we had our own Hashihime? Not a shrine. Not folklore. Only the awareness that certain emotions are not sin or pathology, but a reaction for which a community must keep a ready place. What would change if we did not go to the unheard with the words “come to your senses”, but with the words “I understand why you have come to where you are”?

Sources

1. Goff, Janet. Noh Drama and The Tale of Genji: The Art of Allusion in Fifteen Classical Plays. Princeton University Press, 1991.

2. McCullough, William H. “Japanese Marriage Institutions in the Heian Period”. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 27 (1967): 103–167.

3. Yoda, Hiroko & Alt, Matt (transl. and eds.). Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien. Dover Publications, 2017.

4. 小松和彦. 妖怪学新考 (Komatsu Kazuhiko, Yōkaigaku shinkō, “New Reflections on Yōkai Studies”). Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko, Tokyo 2007.

5. 『謡曲集』 (Yōkyokushū, “Anthology of Nō Texts”), Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.

6. 『新編日本古典文学全集 古今和歌集』 (Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū: Kokin Wakashū, “New Complete Anthology of Japanese Classical Literature: Kokin Wakashū”), Shōgakukan, Tokyo.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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