  A few days ago, I began to read a 1904 book that sought to explain Shinto to westerners. Interestingly enough, for me that is, the work very early paralleled Shinto with the Religio Romana. The next day I was reading an essay about Roman tombs, and came across a mention of the cenotaphs the Romans erected for family members who had died at sea, or in foreign lands. Immediately, my mind flashed back to a passage in a novel I read 30 years ago, and incredibly that very book has been gathering dust on a shelf at my father's house all these decades past.
Here is the passage: "Two members of the Matsugae family, Kiyoaki's uncles, had been killed. His grandmother still received a pension from the government, thanks to these two sons she had lost, but she never used the money; she left the envelopes unopened on the ledge of the household shrine. Perhaps that was why the photograph that impressed Kiyoaki most out of the entire collection of war photographs in the house was one entitled "Vicinity of Tokuri Temple: Memorial Services for the War Dead" and dated June 26th, 1904, the thirty-seventh year of the Meiji era.
This photograph, printed in sepia ink, was quite unlike the usual cluttered mementos of the war. It had been composed with an artists eye for structure: it really seemed as if the thousands of soldiers who were present were arranged deliberately, like figures in a painting, to focus the entire attention of the viewer on the tall cenotaph of unpainted wood in their midst. In the distance, mountains sloped gently in the haze, rising in easy stages to the left of the picture, away form the broad plain at their foot; to the right, they merged in the distance with scattered clumps of trees, vanishing into the yellow dust of the horizon. And here, instead of mountains, there was a row of trees growing taller as the eye moved to the right; a yellow shy showed through the gaps between them. Six very tall trees stood at graceful intervals in the foreground, each placed so as to compliment the overall harmony of the landscape. It was impossible to tell what kind they were, but their heavy top branches seemed to bend in the wind with a tragic grandeur. The distant expanse of the plains glowed faintly; this side of the mountains, the vegetation lay flat and desolate. At the center of the picture, minute, stood the plain wooden cenotaph and the altar with flowers lying on it, its white cloth twisted by the wind. For the rest you saw nothing but soldiers, thousands of them. In the foreground, they were turned away from the camera to reveal the white sunshields hanging from their caps and the diagonal leather straps across their backs. They had not formed up in neat ranks, but were clustered in groups, heads drooping. A mere handful in the lower left corner had half-turned their dark faces toward the camera, like figures in a Renaissance painting. Farther behind them, a host of soldiers stretched away in an immense semicircle to the edge of the plain, so many men that it was quite impossible to tell one from another, and more were grouped far away among the tress.
The figures of these soldiers, in both foreground and rear, were bathed in a strange half-light that outlined leggings and boots and picked out the curves of bent shoulders and the napes of necks. This light charged the entire picture with an indescribable sense of grief. From these men, there emanated a tangible emotion that broke in a wave against the small white altar, the flowers, the cenotaph in their midst. From this enormous mass stretching to the edge of the plain, a single thought, beyond all power of human expression, bore down like a great, heavy ring of iron on the center.
Both its age and its sepia ink tinged the photograph with an atmosphere of infinite poignance. " - from Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima Rereading this beautiful and evocative description of an event that took place fifty-six years before I was born and a world away, has startled me into realizing that I have dreamt of that cenotaph several times since this tableau was presented to me. I suppose these dreams are nothing more than a tribute to Mishima's skill as a writer. Hmm… 
