Water of the Great River

I was born in a town near the banks of the Great River. When I left my house and passed through the side streets of Yokoami, lined with black fences and shaded by fresh leaves on the chinquapin trees, I would soon come out at the Hyappon-gui landing, where the broad sweep of the river opened before me. From earliest childhood until I finished middle school, I saw that river almost every day. I saw the water, the boats, the bridges, the sandbars, and the busy lives of the people born upon the water and living upon it. Even now, as the years pass, I feel that I recall with growing intimacy the smell of the river water, which I half unconsciously breathed in as I walked over the burning sand in the afternoon heat of midsummer to my swimming lessons.

Why is it that I love that river so much? Why do I feel an endless yearning for the lukewarm waters of that great stream, muddy though they were? Even to myself, it is not easy to explain. Yet whenever I looked at that water, I always felt, somehow, an inexpressible solace and loneliness, as if I wanted to shed tears. It was as though I were leaving the world I lived in and entering a country of beloved longing and remembrance. It is because of this feeling, because there I can taste this solace and this loneliness, that I love the water of the Great River more than anything.

The silver-gray mist, the river water blue as oil, the faint, uncertain sound of a steamer’s whistle like a sigh, the brown triangular sails of coal barges: all these views of the river, stirring an irresistible melancholy, must have made my young heart tremble like the leaves of the willows standing on its banks.

For the past three years, I have lived in a study shaded by a grove of mixed trees in the suburbs of the uplands, absorbed in the calm ecstasy of reading. Even so, I never forgot to go and look at the water of the Great River two or three times a month. The color of that water, seeming neither to move nor to flow and yet forever moving and flowing, dissolved the pitiful restlessness of my own heart, driven so feverishly by the ceaseless stimulation and tension of my quiet study, into a lonely, free, homesick feeling, like that of a pilgrim after a long journey finally setting foot again on the soil of home. Only through the water of the Great River can I once more live in the purity of my original feelings.

How many times I have watched the acacias leaning over the blue water, stirred by the soft winds of early summer, dropping their white blossoms one by one. How many times, on foggy November nights, I have heard the cries of plovers sounding cold and forlorn over the dark watery sky. Everything I see, everything I hear, renews my love for the Great River. My boy’s heart, quick to tremble like the wings of the black dragonflies that are born from summer streams, cannot help widening its eyes in fresh wonder each time. And especially, as I leaned against the side of a night-fishing boat and gazed at the black river flowing soundlessly by, feeling the breath of death drifting through the night and the water, how often I was pressed by a helpless loneliness.

Whenever I look upon the flow of the Great River, I cannot help recalling, with a fresh sense of longing, D’Annunzio’s heart, overflowing with passion for the scenery of Venice, that Italian city of water fading into evening with the sound of monastery bells and the cries of swans, where roses and lilies bloom on balconies, paling in moonlight that seems sunken to the bottom of the water, and gondolas like black coffins are rowed dreamily from bridge to bridge.

All the towns along the banks caressed by the water of the Great River are, to me, unforgettable and dear. Downstream from Azumabashi: Komagata, Namiki, Kuramae, Daichi, Yanagibashi, or perhaps in front of Tada’s Yakushi, Umebori, the riverbank at Yokoami, it does not matter where. To anyone passing through these places, the blue gleam of the Great River, shining like polished glass from between sunlit white warehouse walls, from between dim lattice-fronted houses, or through rows of willows and acacias putting forth silvery-brown buds, would surely convey, together with the cool smell of the tide, the old familiar sound of water flowing south. Ah, the sweetness of that voice of the water: murmuring, sulking, clicking its tongue, that blue water like the juice pressed from grass washes the stone embankments of both shores day and night alike. Whether in plays about Hanjo or Narihira, I know nothing of old Musashino, but from the joruri playwrights of Edo down to old Kawatake Mokuami in more recent times, the sound they often used in their domestic dramas, together with the bell of Sensoji, to render most powerfully the Stimmung of a murder scene, was in truth this lonely murmur of the Great River’s water. When Izayoi Seishin threw herself in, when Gennosuke first noticed Okoyo in her bird-charmer’s dress, or again when the kettle-mender Matsugoro crossed Ryogoku Bridge at summer dusk beneath fluttering bats with his carrying pole on his shoulder, the Great River, just as now, was repeating its languid whispers against the piers of the riverside inns, among the green reeds of the banks, and against the hulls of the sharp-prowed boats.

And surely the place where one can hear that sound of the water most fondly is in the ferryboat. If my memory does not fail me, there used to be five ferries between Azumabashi and Shin-Ohashi. Of these, the Komagata ferry, the Fujimi ferry, and the Atake ferry gradually disappeared one by one, and now only two remain as before: the ferry from Ichinohashi to Hamacho, and the ferry from Mikurabashi to Sugacho. Compared with when I was a child, the flow of the river has changed, and the sandbars here and there once thick with reeds and rushes have been filled in without a trace, but these two ferries alone still remain, crossing several times a day over the river water, blue like the leaves of the bank willows, in the same shallow boats, with the same elderly boatmen aboard. I often rode these ferries for no reason at all. There was a pleasure in having one’s body lightly rocked like a cradle with the motion of the water. And the later the hour, the more deeply the ferryboat’s loneliness and delight sank into me. Outside the low gunwale, at once, is the smooth green water; the broad surface of the river, with its dull bronze-like gleam, stretches open before the eye as far as distant Shin-Ohashi. The houses on both banks have already merged into the gray of dusk, and here and there even the lights shining through paper screens float yellow in the mist. With the incoming tide, an occasional skiff with a gray sail half raised comes slowly upriver, one boat, then another, but every boat is hushed and still, so still one cannot tell whether anyone is even there at the helm. Before those quiet sails and the smell of the tide flowing blue and flat, I always feel an indescribable sadness, like what I felt when I read Hofmannsthal’s poem Erlebnis. I cannot help feeling too that within my own heart there is also a whisper of emotional waters, singing the same melody as the Great River beneath the mist.

But what enchants me is not only the sound of the Great River’s water. To me, the light of this river seems to possess a smoothness and warmth scarcely to be found anywhere else.

The water of the sea, for example, gathers green too heavily, like the color of jade. And on the other hand, the water of an upper river, where one feels no rise or fall of the tide at all, shines too lightly, too thinly, like emerald. Only the water of a great plain river where fresh water and salt mingle seems to join the coolness of blue with the warmth of clouded yellow, and thus to have some humanized intimacy, a lifelike familiarity in the human sense. The Great River especially, after crossing the Kanto Plain rich in reddish clay and flowing quietly through the immense city called Tokyo, has water whose murky, wrinkled, muttering color, like some ill-tempered old Jewish man grumbling to himself, gives one a sense of settled warmth, of human nearness, of pleasing substance. And though it too flows through the city, perhaps because it remains in constant direct contact with the great mystery called the sea, it is not dark like the water in canals linking one river to another. It is not asleep. One feels that, somehow, it is alive and moving. And yet the place toward which it moves seems to belong to the mystery of eternity without beginning or end. Needless to say, there is joy in seeing the blue water like perfumed oil between Azumabashi, Umayabashi, and Ryogokubashi wash over the granite and brick of the great bridge piers. But close to the shore as well, reflecting the white lanterns of riverside inns, reflecting the willows turning their silvery undersides, and held back by sluice gates while a warm afternoon thickens with the sound of shamisen, lamenting like crimson hibiscus flowers, disturbed by the feathers of timid ducks and quietly shining beneath deserted kitchens, even there that grave color of water held an indescribable tenderness. And even if, as one approaches the river mouth by Ryogokubashi, Shin-Ohashi, and Eitaibashi, the river water takes on the deep blue of the warm sea and under air filled with noise and smoke reflects glaring white like tin with sore eyes, listlessly rocking coal barges and old steamers with peeling white paint, the warmth of this city water, in which the breath of nature and the breath of man have somehow met and fused, does not easily disappear.

Above all at dusk, the vapor rising over the river and the fading brightness of the evening sky gradually darkening give the water of the Great River an almost incomparable subtlety of color. I, alone, leaning my elbows on the side of a ferryboat, gazing idly over the river surface in the gathering haze of twilight, once saw the great red moon rise in the sky above the dark houses beyond that dark green water, and I shall perhaps never in my life forget how tears came to my eyes.

“Every city has a smell that belongs to it alone. The smell of Florence is the smell of white iris flowers, dust, mist, and the varnish of old paintings.” (Merezhkovsky.) If anyone were to ask me what Tokyo smells like, I would answer without the slightest hesitation: it smells of the water of the Great River. And not its smell alone. The color of the Great River’s water, the sound of the Great River’s water, these too are the color and the voice of the Tokyo I love. Because there is the Great River, I love Tokyo; and because there is Tokyo, I love life.

(January 1912)

Afterward, I heard that the Ichinohashi ferry had ceased to operate. It cannot be long before the Mikurabashi ferry too disappears.