Meant to be a welcome demon, locals believe that yukijin protect the hot springs, ward off evil spirits and pray for the good fortune of humans.
I thought, I see a lot of potential fame and fortune, but I don't see a lot of human evolution.
It feels almost like a medieval story-cycle designed to show the whole human comedy, the fickleness of Fortune, the vanity of human wishes.
So I take "unbinding" to mean a reversal of human fortune, a loosening of our selfhood.
Such wrangling is unfortunately necessary because if recorded history has, as Eliot wrote, "many cunning passages", that's as nothing compared to the waxing and waning of human fortunes, battling with ice ages and natural catastrophes over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Virtue, according to Machiavelli, aims to reduce the power of fortune over human affairs because fortune keeps men from relying on themselves.
More than a few modern fortunes rest on the suffering of human beings who once accounted for a large portion of American wealth and lived in chains here for 250 years.
With The World's Smallest Unicorn (Cape), Shena Mackay brings us 10 more immaculate short stories of human folly and fortune and finding the skull beneath the perm.
The contradictions in his character and his career are a reminder that no one, however powerful, is free of human frailty or immune to reversals of fortune.
In his sermon 'Of the proper estimate of human life' he says: "if we cannot control fortune, [let us] study at least to control ourselves".
