Books and seashells resemble.

In both, the hard exoskeletons

Protect the silent interior.

Their colors are often beautiful.

Shapes vary.

But what matters is the fresh flesh

Hiding inside.

The flesh grows by being read.

Sometimes it sheds its shell

Then moves to a new shell

Not necessarily to a bigger one

But to smaller ones, too, multiplying.

If you listen carefully

It is murmuring, softly

in an unknowable tongue.

Orange, pink,

Scarlet, purple,

Brown, gray, green,

There are bivalves and spiral shells.

Sometimes they are washed by the waves

Away into oblivion.

Sometimes they suddenly make up their minds

And attempt landing

Toward the clarity of consciousness.

Your reading invites the book

To come out timidly

As if a seashell opens its lid

When you call to it in your mind.

Both are living fruits.

Both are living knowledge.

Both will connect each human

To something far greater than the human.

Once on an island in Japonesia

Unexpectedly I came across a deserted shore.

Soft waves coming in from the south

Between two rocky points 

There is a sandy beach shaped like a half-moon.

I stepped into the beach and

Couldn’t believe my eyes.

Numerous small books 

Are scattered all over.

Some are as big as the nail of your index finger

Some the size of your thumb.

Those miniature books, half buried in the sand

Their pages fluttering in the wind,

Just like a swarm of small butterflies

Let the breeze raise their wings.

The coast of seashells turns into a beach of books,

Mooring to the place

Knowledge and cognition

Wandering of the heart.

You who have lost your way,

Like a hermit crab, had better come to this beach.

You will surely find a shell

That suits you like no other.