Block · kaisho 楷書 · VB3C
Block or kaisho (楷書) styles are the most common and recognizable styles. Block styles are easily read and are noted for their angular form and their vertical and horizontal lines.
水に流す
mizu ni nagasu
Forgive and Forget
Forgive and forget: set the grudge adrift and let the river take it.
by Master Eri Takase
Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, Eri Takase received the rank of Shihan, master, from two calligraphy societies, the Bokuteki-kai and Bunka-shodō, and won best-of-category awards in all-Japan national competitions. She has created calligraphy for people around the world for more than thirty years, and with your order she will be creating calligraphy for you.
In a ritual as old as calligraphy itself, Master Takase prepares the ink, meditatively rubbing the ink stick against the stone until it reaches the perfect consistency for the paper. Then, properly loading the brush with ink, she brushes your scroll. And only when the scroll is just right and meets her approval, she signs it and affixes her seal, completing your original scroll.
12 1/4" × 43" (31 × 109 cm) Japanese Scrolls
The scrolls have woven damask borders and special layered Japanese paper (washi), designed to last generations by a scroll maker in Gifu, Japan, with whom we have worked for over two decades.
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Explanation
水に流す (mizu ni nagasu): forgive and forget; literally, set it adrift on the water.
What is set adrift is a grudge, a quarrel, the knot an old wrong leaves in the heart. To set it adrift is to make what happened as if it had not, and to hold nothing against what is past. It is an act done to the grudge, not a lapse of memory. So forgive comes before forget, and a proverb dictionary of 1901 says it is said when a long entanglement is reconciled. Its water, on our reading, is a rite's water: at the purification, a paper figure that has taken the year's defilements is set adrift on a stream, and the idiom sends the grudge down the same river. On our reading, the stage knew from the start that the phrase is only as good as the one who says it.
水に流す is the phrase for a quarrel settled.
The idiom is Edo stage speech, first known, in the National Diet Library's full-text search read oldest first, in a play of 1825 by Tsuruya Nanboku, where a geisha accepts the forgiveness of the samurai she has swindled; an older phrase, "make water of it," already meant to forgive by 1806; the earliest English equations known in the dictionaries read here are two of 1909, "to forget and forgive" (as the sense of "to cast behind the back") and "let bygones be bygones."
Learn More About These Words
We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 水に流す.
