Setting: Nakasu, an artificial island in the Sumida river, off Nihonbashi
Time: around 1905 Author: Osanai Kaoru Title: Okawabata
"...Sometimes a lighter would go up or down between Ohashi Bridge and
Nakasu, an awning spread against the sun, banners aloft, a sad chant sounding
over the water to the accompaniment of bell and mallet, for the repose of the
souls of those who had died by drowning.
Almost every summer evening a boat would come to the stone
embankment and give us a shadow play. Not properly roofed, it had a makeshift
awning of some nondescript cloth, beneath which were paper doors, to suggest a
roofed boat of the old sort.
Always against the paper doors, yellowish in the light from inside, there would
be two shadows....When it came up the river to the sound of gong and drum and
samisen, Masao would look happily at Kimitaro, and from the boat there would be
voices imitating Kabuki actors....
Every day, at exactly the same time a candy boat would pass, to the beating of a
drum. Candy man and candy would be like distant figures in a picture, but the
drum would sound out over the river in simple rythm, so near that he might
almost, he thought, have reached out to touch it. At the sound he would feel a
nameless stirring and think of home, forgotten so much of the time, far away in
the High City. The thought was only a thought. He felt no urge to leave
Kimitaro.
The moon would come up, a great, round, red moon, between the godowns that lined
the far bank.
The black lacquer of the river would become gold, and then, as the moon was
smaller and whiter, the river would become silver. Beneath the dark forms of
Ohashi Bridge, across which no trolleys passed, it would shimmer like a school
of whitefish..."
Setting: Tokyo
Time: 1927 Kubota Mantaro Title: ?
"...Among the things that have disappeared from
all the blocks of Tokyo is the hinomi (=firewatcher).
I do not mean the fire ladder or the firewatch tower. I mean the hinomi
itself. I do not know about the High City, but in the Low City, and especially
on the roofs of merchant houses in busy and prosperous sections, there was
always a hinomi. It was not only a memento of Edo, so ready with its
fires.
In the days when the godown style was the ideal in Japanese architecture, the hinomi
was, along with the board fence, the spikes to turn back robbers, and the eaves
drains, an indispensable element giving form to a Japanese house. And such fond
dreams as the thought of it does bring, of Tokyo under willows in full
leaf..."
Books you might want to read:
Eiji Yoshikawa - Fragments of
A Past (a
memoir) translated
by Edwin McLellan
Nagai Kafu - During the Rains &
Flowers in the Shade (two
novellas) translated
by Lane Dunlop
Low City, High City
(Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: how
the shogun's ancient capital became a great modern city,
1867 - 1923) by
Edward Seidensticker
Tokyo Rising
(the city since the great earthquake)
by Edward Seidensticker
Vanishing Japan (Traditions,
crafts & culture) by Elizabeth
Kiritani
