Life is Short

人生は短い (jinsei wa mijikai): life is short. 人生 (jinsei) is a human life, は marks it as the topic, and 短い (mijikai) is short; the older form of the adjective is 短し (mijikashi), and the two are one line. The sentence is a translation, and its history is how life is short came into Japanese. It begins as the first clause of the Hippocratic aphorism, life is short, and art long, a physician's complaint that the craft outlasts the life; Meiji moral books and English readers were writing 人生は短し under it by the 1890s, and a conversation reader of 1899 glosses an English sentence with the scroll's exact modern wording. The Japanese proverb puts art in front, 芸術は長く人生は短し, and reads it as the work outlasting the maker. Japan's own life is short is a song: in 1915 the poet Yoshii Isamu wrote the Gondola Song, ゴンドラの唄, for a stage adaptation of Turgenev, and its first line, いのち短し恋せよ乙女, life is short, love, maiden, is the scroll's sentence in the old adjective, the line a Japanese reader hears behind these four words. The scroll carries the clause every use shares, a reason to do now what matters. Life Is Short is the house title and needs no change.

This beautiful art reminds us to live each moment to the fullest and to treasure the time we have.