Pathway to Japanese Literature

The First Age

Upon a deep blue sea that was neither like summer nor autumn, under a spring sun whose splendor was intensified by midday light so fierce it could almost be called such, two Hokkaido-bound steamships trailed smoke as they sailed far into the distance.
To this day I can dimly recall it all like a phantom—the toy-like smallness of those glossy black ships, the crimson accents along their waterlines, the faint trailing smoke, and above all, that intense blue of the sea under spring light that enveloped everything, its vivid hue lingering in my mind for over thirty years.

At fifteen, I saw the black summer Japan Sea spewing white foam some ten ken wide, crashing against the desolate rock-strewn shore.
Among the rocks bloomed pale-hued pinks and demure violet bellflowers, while on a cliff standing like a folding screen some fifty meters from shore—already hinting at early autumn—evening cicadas sang.
This was an impression from when I still attended middle school in my hometown, during a summer spent journeying along that region’s western coast.

At twenty years old—a time when I was already living in Tokyo—during midsummer, I traveled along the Bōsō Coast for over half a month and gazed through gaps between camellia trees at the Pacific Ocean’s deep green, bright-colored waters, so utterly different from the North Japan Sea.

But even this Pacific Ocean—so warm and bright in midwinter despite being distinctly different from the Japan Sea—could not compare to that deep azure hue of the sea I first saw after being born, that dazzlingly beautiful color witnessed over thirty years prior on my way from the castle town at the mountain’s base to a port some ten ri away.
That the steamship seen then was one bound for Hokkaido—this too I only came to understand some years later.
That what steam was—this too I only came to understand afterward.
Furthermore, that this was something called the sea—this too lay beyond the comprehension of me at that time, when my teeth had only just begun to come in.
Yet this vision became preserved within me like some phantasmagoria in a desert—a beautiful polychrome tableau I could never forget in this lifetime, the first mysterious memory since my birth into this world, a "dream" that from that single instant would bewitch me through all the long years to come.

Immigrants…!

This too I came to understand later—my family had at that time left the ancestral castle town we had inhabited for generations, jolted and jolted in a canvas-covered horse-drawn carriage as we crossed northward from mountain foothills to plains, traversed perilous national highways through mountain gorges, ascended and descended passes, until just as we were about to enter another plain, the mountains suddenly gave way and there spread to our right—beneath spring light both cheerful and effortless—a sea so dazzlingly blue it burned itself into our vision, manifesting before our carriage-borne procession.

My family had apparently fallen to rock bottom at that time, yet Father, Mother, and my sole surviving brother were all renowned among acquaintances for their beauty.
My mother—whom I remember from earliest childhood—had a fair-skinned face with shaved bluish eyebrows that contrasted beautifully against her ohaguro-blackened teeth.
At eleven years old, my brother—shrewd beyond his years yet studious—was praised for possessing womanly beauty.
As for Father, he kept his chonmage topknot long after the Meiji Restoration and wore robes that shimmered like jewel beetles.
He was called a handsome man.
Immediately before me there had been two brothers—each perishing around age four—yet even they were lavished with praise as beautiful children.
Now, as the youngest child, I must have been fashioned from the dregs of my parents.
"This child is the ugliest," someone declared at my birth.
I was a child who resembled neither parent nor sibling in looks—utterly homely—with behavior so absent-minded it verged on vacancy.
Yet this nursing infant—hardly deemed capable of perception—retains vivid phantom-memories of fragmentary scenes from ages two to five, preserved with such clarity one marvels at their persistence.
The sea's enchantment came first among these.
Ah—whether our family of four rode a single horse-drawn carriage across twelve ri of plains and mountain paths, or split between two vehicles with people and luggage, these details escape me—but there I lay, not yet one year full, perhaps cradled on Mother's lap, exhaling milky breaths while gazing wide-eyed at that resplendent polychrome witch's garment men call the sea beneath spring's light...

As humans encounter countless things from birth onward, even if they forget all else, certain memories remain forever—carrying these like personal treasures even into the grave. Does this not suggest some karmic connection between these memories and their keeper? Modern psychological science teaches us that in the instant a person is about to drown, they see with astonishing clarity—as if unrolling a scroll—the entirety of their forgotten past life.

Then our memories must all exist precisely as psychological science’s established theory dictates—even those forgotten are not dead. But that among these memories, some become deeply ingrained from the very beginning and differ from person to person—is this not conceivable as stemming from each individual’s unique qualities, their innate disposition? Setting aside for now the mysterious workings of human memory—those sudden resurrections at the brink of drowning, those unexpected recollections of distant matters triggered by a whiff of scent—let us instead consider the opposite phenomenon: those things we ourselves have clearly remembered since early childhood, those few memories preserved from our first days in this world. Might there not be some obscure relationship between these particular memories and our innate qualities?

A person’s earliest and most vivid memory may be the first emergence of dark emotions—those pressed into service under the shadow of their bleak existence.
For such a person, memories of this kind—even their mere recollection—wrench at his heart.

In another person's memory there may exist something that has been hinting at the heart through moral means—be it color, scent, or shadow—since earliest days, something that adorns their illuminated noble path with loveliness, beauty, and purity.

But for those of us who follow art, being especially blessed with a heart that cherishes this world's beauty—and since this beauty can be effortlessly perceived even by the youngest child—it may be that among countless impressions received by that innocent, carefree child's heart, the one or two most suited to its nature would leave their most vivid imprint precisely when others exclaimed in astonishment, "How can a child this young...?"

What a certain person remembers is the cheerful sound of a clock’s music box heard when they were still a nursing infant, coming from their mother’s bosom as she lay beside the pillow. Another person has forgotten the grand spectacle of carp streamers their parents raised and sent fluttering high for their sake, yet what remains vivid is those gold and black fabric scraps—the remnants of that carp—now sunk to a stream’s bottom. A certain person has their earliest memory tied to music. A certain person has theirs tied to color. It may seem trivial, yet here lies not merely the nature imparted by one’s parents but something more profoundly inherited—something that comes to govern later life, granting each person distinct and immutable traits. Unlike oppressed childhood memories or morally shaped recollections from education, these memories of beauty—springing solely from one’s heart—are rooted deeper in innate qualities we call individuality; attainable through utmost simplicity of heart, might they not be internalized like vivid dreams even by a naive mind knowing neither east nor west, enduring through all tomorrows?

When our family moved to the port, they say we led an utterly pitiable, wretched life as carpenters—yet concerning this period, my own memories only begin to emerge faintly from two or three years later. What remains as my very first memory is that sea—the memory of that blue sea seen during the aforementioned horse-drawn carriage journey while being carried by my mother, when I likely released her breast after nursing my fill and directed my eyes toward the carriage’s front, just as the mountains began to part and cheerfully revealed their profile while spreading into the distance. For me, who had been fated to be steeped in a dark soul from around eight or nine years old onward, this memory—suddenly resurrecting during that period of my life in my mid-twenties when I had despaired and given up on living—became my savior at the time. For in that instant when my mind drowned in this beautiful seascape, I realized that the nature I was born with—like the green grass that had likely sprouted along the roadside at that time—was living there tenderly within me, never pessimistic at all; this became one of those insights that utterly transformed my ideology during my mid-twenties.

Spring of Taisho 12 (1923), Nagoya

Ancestral Land

Ⅰ

Had the train emerged from the mountain gorge? To either side, the mountain ranges spread out widely.
"At last we're here," I thought, entrusting the remaining preparations to my wife as I opened the carriage window and leaned out until half my body protruded outside, gazing at the scenery ahead in the direction of the train's movement.

It was only then I understood—a sleet-like blizzard, its flakes so thin and fine as to be nearly invisible, came rushing from ahead where the train advanced, driven by a fierce wind blowing straight at us. It struck indiscriminately at eyes and nose, coldly drenching my cheeks as though scraping them raw.
Enduring this, when I kept watching the leftward expanse ahead of the train, I saw we were now approaching elevated terrain sloping toward the plain; where the mountain ranges flanking both sides spread increasingly outward, their edges receding farther into the distance until there appeared far ahead—unmistakable—the environs of my birthplace: that configuration of low mountainous terrain overlooking the plain.

However, no structures resembling houses were visible either on the mountain plateaus above or the lowlands below; only here and there across those heights and depths could one see the black shadows of scattered woods and groves backlit by the light behind them, with something like mist drifting in thin layers—this was all that met the eye.

When I thought that Hirosaki—the castle town of my birth which had vanished from my sight twenty years prior—must lie in this corner at the mountain's base, something beyond the stinging air blowing snowstorm-laden from ahead spread through this landscape: a different air that seemed to seep into my lungs and sting my eyes, making my heart feel abnormally constricted. Yet though I had anticipated seeing even a small urban vista between the mountain foothills—roofs clustered tightly in residential rows—the sight before me of snow-covered mountains and plains under thick clouds, reflecting neither light nor luster like some uninhabited borderland, left me unable to help thinking desolately: "How could anyone live in such a place?"

The mountain range beneath thick clouds curved along one side of the plain like a gray tablecloth folded flat and haphazardly.
Here and there, the usual mist crawled over the dim ground.
This, however, probably wasn’t mist.
The thin, fine blizzard that struck my cheeks—so faint as to be nearly invisible—swirled around that area, likely creating that illusion of undulating mist, I thought as I let my gaze sweep across every corner of that tablecloth.
On the continuous mountain range, a single prominent mountain, its upper part still buried in thick clouds, began to reveal its mouse-gray belly.
"This must be the sacred Mount Iwaki, renowned in this region," I realized inwardly.
The scenery was too cold to stir any particular interest.
I simply kept my gaze fixed on the sharp skyline with its flared base that had appeared beneath the clouds...

“Let me see too, please! Come on, come on!”

My four-year-old eldest daughter whined nasally from my wife’s bench.

“No, no. A cold wind’s whistling through here.”

“No-no! Wanna see! Hiroko sees too!” she protested, kicking her feet in rapid thumps against the bench.

I left the window and went to my wife’s bench.
As the train neared its terminal station, most passengers who had boarded at Ueno had already disembarked, leaving the carriage vast and hollow as if it were our family’s exclusive domain.
Looking past rows of bench backrests and over the heads of a few silent passengers, I could see through to the noticeboard hanging at the carriage’s far end—here, in stark contrast to the harsh scenery beyond the windows, it was so hushed and warm with stuffiness that one might imagine a fly buzzing at those very panes.

My wife turned her back and was diligently folding the blankets that had been spread out on the bench since last night.

“How about you? Can you see Hirosaki yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“All preparations are done.”

“I see.”

I answered absentmindedly, my interest slightly awakened by the scenery outside the window. Thinking that upon disembarking this train we would immediately be exposed to outside air so cold it felt as though the thermometer had plummeted twenty degrees at once, I stared intently at my wife’s back as she sat hunched forward.

She was already plump and had layered on as many kimonos as possible, and with an infant swaddled to her back in a carrying cloth besides, her figure appeared far more voluminous than usual. Beside us, a bench was heaped with our bags, Shingen bags, and furoshiki bundles.

"But Mount Iwaki came into view."

"Then the city must be close now?"

"But there's not a single house - not one child to be seen."

I pictured that faint mist drifting through the distant forests and woods.

“Papa, let me see too,” my eldest daughter said, stretching out her hand and reaching up again.

“Alright then—look at Papa’s hometown. It’s a wretched place!” I said, firmly lifting my woolen-clad daughter—her small frame swollen from layers—into my arms.

“You must be freezing.”

“Ah, if it’s cold I’ll just grow sick of it soon enough,” I retorted.

In reckless defiance, I held the child up to the window’s gust and thrust her small head outside.

The train was running along a riverside slope, and the lead engine—appearing as small as a toy in our view—raced across the plain painted in gray and mouse-gray like some desolate expanse, spewing white feathery smoke as though it were the sole living creature.
The river showed black cliffs and a wrinkled lead-gray surface emerging from the snow, but soon concealed itself among snow-covered fields.
The skeleton-like bridge appeared long and black; what had been visible at an angle seemed to spread out directly ahead, only to slip diagonally once more and vanish as if snatched into the snow.

“How’s that? It’s a terrible place. Not a single soul here, I tell you!” I said, peering into my eldest daughter’s face. She too must have been struck by nature’s might—this desolation and rawness pushed to extremes—for she turned her face windward with an expression on the verge of tears, yet still kept watching the train’s forward path as though clinging to it. Having lived away from my hometown for over fifteen years, during which time this child was born, I had named her “Hiroko” by taking one character from my hometown city’s name in remembrance.

After all these years I couldn't free my heart from this hometown—now even directing my commemorative daughter toward it for reunion—yet it brazenly thrust before us this charmless landscape painting of uninhabited borderlands, radiating coldness that chilled to the bone without any reservation or explanation!
I felt as though encountering some unknown man who declared with stern countenance, "I am like a father to you—connected more deeply than your birth father. What say you? Behold my form"—or so it seemed.

“Hiroko，look there.”
“Look，the mountain! The mountain!” I pointed out mouse-gray Mount Iwaki to my eldest daughter.

Ⅱ

We arrived in my hometown of Hirosaki City after passing through what might have been the large village we had been gazing at from afar and then cutting through another stretch of the snow-covered plain.
To call it a large village was an overstatement—it was merely a long, dreary stretch of unsightly farmhouses clustered among bare tree groves in snow-drowned rice paddies. Except for the station, all that met the eye at the village’s edge was a line of four or five horse-drawn sleds, their drivers perched atop haphazardly piled loads as they departed, small in the distance. Beyond this, not a single human figure could be discerned.

Hirosaki City too differed little from this—only after leaving the large village did the sparse accumulation of roofs, scarce even as they began to appear at the foot of the distant mountain, dampen my spirits still further.
Indeed, the station was a major terminal in the region, so when the train arrived, passengers continuing northward to Aomori City—about an hour further by this same train—overflowed across the wide platform.
Snow began to fall there in flurries.

Even though we had come to our hometown of Hirosaki, we still had to wait at Hirosaki Station for the next train, as we needed to transfer here and travel about three ri due north to our friend’s town.
After exiting the ticket gate and making a couple of turns along the snow-protected passageway, we emerged at the station’s main entrance.
The snow protection was constructed by assembling logs from the ground up to the building’s eaves and covering them with straw matting.
As if this were irrefutable proof that I had truly returned to my hometown, I stopped and cast my gaze up to its high iron-edged structure.

The corner of the snow protection structure had become a passageway leading outside. When we passed through that spot, a sturdy man wearing a dog fur coat over tattered Western clothes and a soiled Cossack hat was restlessly stomping his feet while holding a trumpet. He must be the driver of the shared horse-drawn sleigh heading into the city. “We’ll have to wait quite a bit, huh.”

I said to my wife.

“Why?”

“Because our train’s been delayed by nearly an hour.”

“Yes.”

“When I asked the redcap, he said that’s why all the departure times here have gotten completely scrambled.”

“Oh, really?”

My wife blinked her eyes with a forlorn expression.

Early that morning in the mountains between Uzen and Ugo, our train had stopped for a long time due to heavy snow. Students returning home for winter vacation had nimbly leapt from the cars and promptly built snowmen there. A group of sailors traveling together had countered this by crafting similar figures. They made them hold rolled cigarettes in their mouths and grasp newspapers in their hands. That stop must have lasted over forty minutes.

“This is troublesome.”
“Then about what time will we arrive at Mr.K――’s house?”

Mr.K―― was the name of the friend we were to visit after transferring here to another train.

“I’ll go ask the station staff. Let’s just get into the waiting room for now.”

Although I had thought the express train was reliable, on the Ou Line, around this time, express trains gradually became unreliable.

Every waiting room was completely full, so I had my wife and child wait at the entrance while I went to inquire about departure times from the station employee standing at the ticket window.
The station employee, using the unadulterated local dialect, stated that the connecting train I needed wouldn't depart until around five-something.
Since there should be other branch line trains departing from here, I pressed further and asked if there wasn't a slightly more convenient time, but he explained in an accent I couldn't parse, and ultimately I failed to get the gist.
The crowd packed into this waiting room were all now sharing my fate, and since they kept asking the same questions, the station employee seemed irritable.
However, putting that aside, it would be fair to say that this station employee was nearly the first instance where I heard my hometown people's unadulterated dialect.
It pierced my eardrums vividly, as if welling up directly from this hometown earth.
I smiled and withdrew, then pushed through the crowd and returned to where my wife was.

My wife appeared to have been given a seat, for there she sat on a dim bench close to the second-class compartment entrance, still carrying the small child on her back.

“What’s wrong?”

“No good.”
“We’ll have to wait two full hours.”

“This is quite a problem.”

“Yeah, this is bad.”

I braced both legs in my rubber boots against the muddy floor sodden with snowmelt water and discussed contingency plans with my wife. When finished, I turned toward the waiting room’s center and watched the crowd surrounding us.

A crowd of peculiar composition.
Though all their clamoring voices flooded in as mere noise, what could be clearly discerned were words that seemed to well up from this very earth and leap forth—no different from what I had just heard from the ticket window attendant.

The waiting room, its exterior covered by snow barriers with the lights not yet on, stood dimly lit, the crowd appearing as a dark swirling mass from which all noises came flooding forth as if splitting the air apart. The cloaks had large hoods attached. On their heads, they wore triangular-folded furoshiki cloth as head coverings. Those wearing such head coverings were mostly farm women. Bundled up thickly without concern for appearances or style, their voices all resonated with beast-like vigor, yet within that clamor, they shouted to one another in words infused with an oddly delicate tenderness.

The people of my hometown were all fond of talking and skilled at it.
But for me, who had plunged into this whirlpool of conversation in my twentieth year, it felt as though something—just like that desolate scenery seen from the train—was forcefully declaring itself without any comprehensible reason: "I am as much your father as any, bound to you by deeper ties than even your own father."
The twenty years of life in foreign environments had nurtured my eyes and ears far beyond what I had imagined, transforming them into something entirely different.

If I had not ventured to foreign lands and had instead remained rooted in this soil until now, I would be using the same words as them, making the same expressions, moving in the same ways, and engaging in impassioned conversation. Were I to force it now, it would amount to nothing but hollow mimicry like an actor's performance. Environments possess an invisible soul, declared Maurice Barrès the regionalist—a soul that manifests in every act of those dwelling within them, and from which separation drains an individual's vital force for living.

Taking my eldest daughter through the snow-barricaded station entrance, glancing at the town beyond the rice fields, stopping by the station kiosk to buy caramels and picture books for Hiroko, and then standing before my wife—a man from the crowd around the second-class compartment’s stove, who had been thrusting his geta-clad feet toward it with utter disregard for others—shambled over toward me. He was a large, boyish-faced man approaching forty, clad in a black Inverness coat, with a habit of squinting his slightly crossed eyes.

“Aren’t you Mr.X――?” he asked in a hesitant voice.

I had intended to return to Hirosaki properly later, but thinking "You found me out already?" I stared fixedly at him.

“Ah yes, that’s right.
And you are?”

“Hmm, so it is you after all,” he laughed with an air of approachability, drawing those distinctive eyes nearer as he abruptly switched to local dialect.

“Forgotten me?
It’s W――.
W―――”

Wasure da ga meant “Did you forget?”
The Tsugaru dialect had many voiced consonants.

“Ah, Mr.W, from Aomori?”

“Yeah.”

I felt my stiffened heart suddenly melt as I stared with moved eyes at the face of this equally tall man. It had been seventeen or eighteen years since we’d parted in Tokyo during our university days, and I marveled that he’d recognized me without mistake. I stand considerably taller than most people. He matched my height.

“I’ve heard much about your reputation. You must’ve endured great hardships to reach this point,” he said gently, his tone almost consoling. For the past year or two, I’d been hearing from various quarters about him—this young politician from Aomori City who was earnestly relied upon by the locals. Truly, he was a likable, relaxed man of imposing stature.

"Ah, I've struggled," I said with a wry smile.

"I still haven't fully escaped those hardships, and now here I am—a disaster refugee fleeing the capital."

"And where are you going?"

"Itayanagi," I replied, naming the town located about three ri north of Hirosaki City.

He gazed vacantly with those aloof-looking squinting eyes while maintaining a seemingly kind smile on his cheeks. Though he didn’t utter a single frivolous joke, a pleasant force that drew people in emanated from his silent form. I felt as though I had touched something within my homeland’s soil once more...

After talking about old times for a while, we parted ways with promises of meeting again.

That evening, we—the couple and our child—were made to wait until late into the night at the station following Hirosaki City. This was a junction where branch line trains departed northward across the Tsugaru Plain toward the Japan Sea. We waited in the platform’s glass-walled waiting room, but since arriving here, the snow had intensified to a heavy fall, descending with terrifying force. The instinct that had lain dormant within me these twenty years awoke, flooding my body with inexplicable vigor. People of snow country grow taut when they see snow. Stretching my legs toward the stove, I became absorbed in contemplating my first night’s impressions of this homeland. My wife sat dozing on the bench before the stove. Thickly swaddled in blankets, Hiroko slept deeply for the first time in her father’s native land. The waiting room stood empty save for us, only the stove’s coal spewing crimson flames that roared like distant winds as they burned.

June 17, Taisho 13 · Tsugaru Ikari no Seki

Love of the Land

I walked along the path through the apple orchards past midnight.
In the vast field, under starry darkness, apple trees had their countless bare shadows dance after harvest.
But even when fruit orchards reached a season like this where not a single fruit remained, and even on nights like tonight when the forms of the trees became barely discernible in the darkness, they still imparted a refreshing feeling.

No matter how late the hour, I would cut straight through this vast orchard for three or four blocks, then make my way home along the pitch-dark path where the only dwellings were two or three farmhouses that looked like apple guard huts sprouting tufts of hair.
I returned home not by walking along the village's broad main street—where farmhouses with high thatched roofs like those in English watercolors and window lights peeking through trees continued in sparse rows, with hardly any shops to speak of—but by taking this straight path through the orchards.

Now, how well-suited this was for me—a bountiful, comforting, yet unidentifiable emotion viscerally gripped my heart in that moment. The puddles pooling on the path—formed by snow that had fallen four or five days prior, now melted and reflecting starlight on the pitch-black ground—barely revealed their presence. In that instant when I lowered my rubber boots with a squelch into these faintly perceptible pools, my chest was seized by an indescribable thrill.

"It was strange that I didn't find this desolate orchard path desolate at all—rather, I felt it to be infinitely enjoyable," I thought. In all those long years of Tokyo life, I had never once experienced this kind of thing. "This too must be because this place remains connected to the land where I was born."

The familiar notion shifted through my mind. The land of my birth meant Hirosaki, and this village where I now lived lay three ri distant from that Hirosaki. One might call it a contiguous settlement at the very hem of its skirts.

That mysterious bond linking humans and land—that invisible connection where my own parents had once trod this soil, and their parents before them—exerted an abnormally powerful reflexive awareness upon my heart. In my mind arose the vision of my father, who had died when I was thirteen—at our current age, he might have walked these starless late-night paths alone on some errand; and of my grandfather too, who had come as a son-in-law from a village still slightly northward—during this same season of his life, he might have journeyed through these parts alone at midnight, bearing some fierce resolve in his heart.

Even if nature were an inanimate object, the bonds that humans forge over generations expand human consciousness to depths of unfathomable profundity.
Even when walking these wide apple orchard paths that resembled a realm of midnight solitude, it never made me feel the slightest bit lonely.

December 1924 · Tsugaru Aojoshi

Love of the Land

Hometown, o hometown!
No matter how insignificant it may appear to outsiders, the influence this soil wields over those who claim it as homeland defies all measure.
Even a clump of grass sprouting where we first drew breath, even a stray pebble—these bring emotions, affections, sometimes even convictions unattainable elsewhere.
This constitutes the vague harmony stretching between humankind and the external world.
This forms the delicate imperative bridging self and surroundings.
A world stripped of this principle would hollow our human hearts to husks.
Cursed be it—Japan’s present ethos of existence turns wholly blind to this truth.
And remains utterly sightless toward how earth binds to mortals—how mortals forge there a singular communal spirit that cements society’s very sinews!

Summer of Taisho 14 · Tsugaru Aojoshi

Landscape Painting of a Country Song

In the first summer of my return to hometown living, when refreshing breezes blew down from that season's characteristic high blue skies over northern Honshu, spreading across the land a relaxed, blissful air of hushed tranquility, I once heard during those days in Itayanagi—a small town within Kitatsugaru District—a fragment of folk song that seeped into my heart and proved unforgettable.
It was a bosama—this region's unique provinsharu, that is to say, a wandering singing troupe (Note 1)—standing at a certain entrance beneath the shamisen's rustic melody,

"The long-blooming one is the walnut flower."

It was a single phrase they sang by stretching their voices interminably, wailing as though overcome by tears.

From a mountain slope path through the hills, I pictured the valley-bottom village with its thickets of trees and roofs overlapping one another. There, a great walnut tree stood in full bloom, its branches laden with flowers that carried a rustic charm.

"The long-blooming one is the walnut flower."

It was a moving landscape painting discovered by simple country folk.

Note 1.
Bosama were wandering minstrels—blind men and women who sang as they roamed from this region all the way to Hokkaido.
Their songs were Tsugaru folk melodies called Jongara-bushi and Yosare-bushi, and this walnut verse too came from a certain Jongara-bushi tune.

Early Spring Flowers

In the vast Tsugaru Plain where the thawing season progressed until its distant end extended to the sea; when last year's withered grass and this year's fresh black soil basked in spring sunlight; when valleys and streams scattered across the mountain slopes encircling this plain let thin mists linger, making the rough folds of mountain flesh in their depths appear indigo—the skies above our homeland's rural villages became adorned with magnolia flowers.

In this region, magnolias were commonly called "Field-Plowing Cherries."
It was precisely around the time these flowers bloomed that farmers began working vigorously, for across the vast plains along the Iwaki River, field plowing commenced everywhere.

Villages strung in a single line with mixed forests scattered here and there across their low skies, where Field-Plowing Cherries bloomed in dazzling white splendor even from afar—those who had yet to know rural Japan could scarcely have imagined such magnificence. They shone purely white, like the teeth of girls from this region that still retained the desolate traces of Ezo.

The Virginal Sea

Having spent twenty years away from my hometown—years during which I had continued admiring the luminous seas of southern Japan—I assumed that even were I now to see the seas of my native Tsugaru, they would appear as an anemic landscape unlikely to hold particular interest. Yet one day during my stay in A―― City, when I ventured out by automobile with a family of friends bound for G―― Park’s seaside resort, my expectations began crumbling the moment we alighted near the pine grove at the park’s entrance.
There first revealed themselves pine groves of such crisp tidiness that they swept the film from my eyes at first glance—groves which along the Tokaido and Kansai coasts might have seemed dusty by comparison.
Broad phalanxes of pines stretched high into the Tohoku region’s summer sky—a sky uniquely tender—their lush blue-green foliage reaching freely upward; intermittent clearings between these formations disclosed a baseball ground edged with pristine turfgrass, tennis courts, and at times white-painted stakes or wooden fences placed at bends where walking paths curved parabolically into the pine groves; a small river whose streambed was patterned with stripes of aquatic plants…
Then one flank of the pine grove became marshland, exposing a flat expanse continuing to the coastal sands.
A little further on, a sea with low horizon formed into a band beyond the swollen curves of shoreline.
A peninsula emerged vividly—ridges sharply notched skyward in several places, shaded with malachite and jade’s chiaroscuro—as if surging toward this coast.
There lay a scene bright and clear enough to utterly dispel preconceptions of what constitutes Tohoku scenery…

My impulse to go out to the sea dissipated, and an awareness—a bashful sort of awareness—of wanting to press onward welled up within me.
The sea I had seen countless times from age two until sixteen—I had ultimately perceived it as foolish and empty.
In its expression was spring—the gentleness of a cow grazing on silver grass sprouts in a snowmelt field.
And this cow—with gaze that likely held all the maidenly looks from this same land that had captivated me from age two until sixteen—possessed precisely the power to suddenly send the heart plummeting of one such as myself: this narrow-minded self that had presumptuously claimed to have mastered human existence and become thoroughly hardened through worldly wisdom!
……

The friend's wife—slender with long-lashed eyes—and his sister, still a maiden with flesh rounded at the joints, clad in black swimsuits against their fair skin, clung to the boat's planking as they swam.
Though born in this region's mountainous interior and entering the sea for the first time that day, they moved through these waters with such innate familiarity that one might hallucinate them as black-bodied mermaids harmonizing perfectly with the scenery.
Crying "Kyaa! Kyaa!", they kicked up spray with their white legs again and again, swimming parallel to shore before returning.
Their joy-widened eyes brimmed with a voracity surpassing both carnality and vulgarity.
I remained on the sand with my friend observing these women's movements and expressions, then abruptly turned my gaze toward that peninsula shaded in malachite greens and jade blues.
Becoming conscious how sunlight refracted my vision, mentally tracing the perceived cape's tip back to its true form, I recalled my sixteenth spring when I'd scaled those cliffs long ago to gaze back at this bay's shore.

The Drunken Farmwife

"How old's your husband? Mine's twenty-six this year."
"What're you laughin' at?"
"Your own aunt's got herself a man twenty years younger!"
"I ain't so different neither."
"Oh how grand! When snow melts 'n we dry herring on sunlit roofs, fields turn busy. Me 'n my man till till midday, climb up ridges—eat our rice, pour sake from medicine pots, drink in harmony."
"Field-Plowin' Cherry blooms or butterbur sprouts—viewed from them ridges makes fine flower-viewin', I say!"
"Hirosaki Park's cherry parties ain't no powdered-face entertainments!"
"Hmph!"
"What's wrong with havin' a twenty-six-year-old husband?"
"Ain't I kept widow's faith ten years? Take in some brat from others, raise 'em on straw mats—they turn sickly 'n die. End up like blind Granny Hatsuritsu at eighty—grandkids 'n daughters-in-law all dead, crawlin' into stables filthier than pigpens with village rice 'n coins—plain as day!"
"Hmph!"
"Find time to scold others but not brush flies off your own rice!"
"Ten years a widow—when mothers here 'n there accuse me of stealin' husbands after foolin' round—what use gettin' riled year-round?"
"Young he may be—said he likes me, so we wed!"
"Kept up with dead husband's honor ten years—what more can they scold?"
"Brush them flies! Brush them flies off thy rice! Hahahaha!"
"Ain't it grand! Spring comes—dry herring, loose horses, till fields in spring winds—hahahaha! Midday means Field-Plowin' Cherry viewin' 'n sake drinkin', then slog back to paddies—hahahaha!" From Tsugaru mountain hot spring's bathhouse steam emerged broad round shoulders singing "Granny's Hips": "Granny's hips, hoiya ho... Granny's hips, granny's hips hoeya ho..."

[Tokyo Vernacular Translation of "The Drunken Farmwife"] How old's your husband?
Mine's twenty-six this year.
What're you laughin' at?
Even your ma's sister's got herself a man twenty years younger!
I ain't that different myself.
Ain't it grand! When snow melts 'n' we dry herring on sunlit roofs, paddy work keeps us busy—my man 'n' me tillin' fields till midday, then climbin' ridges to eat our rice 'n' drink sake from a medicine pot together.
Whether magnolias or butterbur sprouts, seen from them field ridges makes flower-viewin' finer than any park!
Not like Hirosaki Park's powder-stinkin' cherry parties!
Hmph!
What's wrong with me havin' a twenty-six-year-old husband?
Take me—widowed ten whole years—even if I raise some brat on straw mats (Author's note: In our Tsugaru farm villages, women still birth on plank floors strewn with straw), when that puny thing gets sick 'n' dies, don't ya see? I'd end like blind Granny in Hatsuritsu—branch village—at eighty, all my caretakin' kin dead too, crawlin' into some stable-filth shack with village office rice 'n' coins, beggin' to live!
Hmph!
While findin' time to badmouth others, brush flies off your own rice bowl!
Ten years a widow, when hags from here 'n' there yell I stole their men—what's use gettin' riled all year?
Young as he is, he said he likes me—so we're couple now.
After ten years keepin' up for my dead man—what worse could they say?
Brush them flies! Brush them flies off your rice!
Hahahaha!
"Ah splendid! Splendid! Spring comes—dry herring, loose horses, till fields in spring breeze—hahahaha! Noon brings sake-sippin' under magnolias, then squelch-squelch back to paddies—hahahaha! 'Granny's hips, hoiya ho... Granny's hips, granny's hips hoeya ho...'"

Author's Note: ○ Regionalist writers advocate creating works in their local dialects—they declare that all genres must implement this: poetry, novels, plays.
The piece to my right was my first attempt at prose poetry.
There can be no literary activity that resonates authentically with the soul apart from the language engraved in one’s spirit since infancy.
This holds true for the author, and likewise among fellow countrymen.
○ On the other hand, regionalists preside over each domestic dialect while also respecting the common language—forged through bearing the civilization of the entire nation, or in the process of being forged—(what is today commonly called the standard language).
And they respect its various functions and forms that have been literarily matured.

But that is that, and this is this.

The common language occupies a representative position within the national language, but it is not the entirety of it.
Regional languages—or at least dialects—together constitute the national language.

As many Japanese people misread it—if one pronounces Miho-no-Matsubara as "Mio-no-matsubara," the scenery of Miho-no-Matsubara fails to emerge—this is something experienced by those who have visited the place.
In that region, they pronounce Miho with the 'h' sound resonating.
The cases of Azuma District for Jōshū’s Agatsuma District and Azuma River concerning the upper reaches of the Tone River’s Agatsuma River are also examples of the same error (correctly pronounced as Agatsuma District and Agatsuma River).
Sound is the corporeal form of language's existence.
Therefore, there can be no language that disregards sound.

The use of Chinese characters in our Japan has severely damaged the Japanese people's linguistic consciousness. For Chinese characters are nothing more than conceptual markers formed by ignoring phonetic sounds—mere signs existing solely within the realm of ideas. Phonetic scripts too may sometimes remain mere conceptual markers. In fact, even phonetic scripts—including international phonetic alphabets—are not perfect replicas of sound. Yet even if one were to transcribe Shanghai English or British colonial English using conventional English orthography, they could still manifest some local character there—just as European-character editions of *Isoho Monogatari* and *Heike Monogatari* published during the Momoyama period reflect the lived reality of that era. Language is the nation’s promissory note. And it performs the practical conveyance of daily life. Traditional Japanese people, being inattentive to sounds, remain utterly unconscious when it comes to regional languages. For instance, even what is called the Zūzū dialect of Tōhoku—the distribution of the Zūzū sound within the Tōhoku region begins in Ibaraki Prefecture under Tokyo’s direct influence, passes through Aizu, and extends northward only as far as Sendai and Yamagata; there is no trace of it in the three regions of Nanbu, Akita, and Tsugaru. In this regard, the so-called Zūzū dialect of Tōhoku has no meaning. In contrast, Tōhoku possesses precise sounds not found in other regions—for example, clearly distinguishing between “ha” and “fuwa,” or “ga” (guttural) and “nga” (nasal). What is famously called the "confusion" between shi and su in Tōhoku is not actually a confusion, but rather a single sound—si—that belongs to neither. It is thought that in Japanese, there was no distinction between shi and su in ancient times. I believe that the abundance of voiced sounds also represents an ancient form of the Japanese language.

When transcribing folk songs in regional dialects, the practice of carelessly converting them into Tokyo pronunciation without adjusting the sounds—as had been done until now—was profoundly unconscious.
I believe this attempt of mine managed to be written in a reasonably pure Tsugaru colloquial speech.
Even in passages praising magnolia flowers, these were things farmers would ordinarily say—it wasn't that I had forced poetic affectation.
Moreover, this farmwife's harsh temperament had been depicted as a regional archetype of Tsugaru women.
○ Regarding the kana usage in these two pieces: katakana followed a purely phonetic style, while the hiragana portion adhered to traditional kana orthography with some incorporation of my customary Ministry of Education style.
○ This right-hand experimental work was published in the May special issue of Taisho 15 (1926) in the monthly magazine Roba, supported by Murō Saisei and Mr. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. I wish to hereby renew my gratitude to the fellow contributors who gladly undertook the labor of publishing such a work that required painstaking proofreading at that time.

――Taisho 15, March 26, en route to Tokyo, in Fukagawa

Snow's Reminiscence

1

The reason we snow country people so desperately await spring cannot be sufficiently explained by something as trivial as being snowbound for half a year. What I would rather assert is that it stems from a desire as instinctive as our human yearning to break free from nature's incomparable might—this force whose most magnificent manifestation lies precisely in snow itself. You who dwell in warm lands may boast of understanding nature's power, but reconsider: what you encounter amounts merely to either happiness perfected or nature's capricious tricks.

In the tropics, no people were ever scorched to death by the heat; rather, beneath that opulent luxuriance of plants, religions of asceticism and meditative joy came into being.
As for nature's capricious displays of power there—floods, pestilence, venomous insects.
But what does that signify?
Does not great nature, even while using that same force to demolish human constructions and slaughter people, immediately employ its abundant vigor to multiply humankind and scatter fragrant, lustrous sustenance for living?

Snow was not like that.
Unfailingly beginning to fall during a fixed season each year, it froze nearly half the Earth white.
It came every year with regularity, rigor, and inevitability.

During this season, the world—as long as one travels northward—becomes a desolate, monotonous expanse of death where humans remain powerless to their utmost limits; no matter how far one goes, there is nothing to see but white.
This decisive inevitability and powerlessness!
Herein lies revealed the might of great nature—its unfathomable depths of solemnity and oppression.

People could only kneel beneath this and live motionless within "nothingness."
That was limitless "nothingness."
It was endless "nothingness."
Yet they could do nothing but face this "nothingness" and remain silent within it.

2

From the jet-black sky fell powdery snow—to borrow someone’s phrase—as if winnowed from a basket.

The distant forest in the vast plain appeared hazed through this snowfall at nine in the morning; by noon, the surroundings were swallowed by nothing but snow; then when evening came, under accumulated snow’s weight, the house’s great roof ridge began creaking and groaning around ten at night.
One was struck by a feeling of utmost profound solemnity.

One went outside to look.
The moon hung at midheaven, enveloped by dense clouds and radiating a hazy light across the surroundings.
No village streets could be seen, no trees could be seen, no houses could be seen—only countless particles of infinite powdery snow sifting down like smoke or mist.

On such evenings, one remembers seeing rainbows appear in that hazy sky.

3

……But such a quiet snowfall hardly ever occurs even once in a season.
Usually, blizzards rage fiercely for three or four days—sometimes even seven.
I peered through the glass window—formed by joining my thumbs and index fingers into a rough square—at the roaring wind raging outside.
There, though midday was hazy and dim as if seen through the depths of the sea; the skeletal giant trees of the forest swayed from their roots like kelp, entering my vision.

I pulled my face away from the window and returned to my previous posture.
I did not read anything on such days; from morning onward, I crouched silently beside the stove in my study.
Even after eating lunch, I returned to my study and continued sitting silently in the same posture.
I was not particularly thinking about anything—merely listening to the ceaseless sound of the wind as my mind drifted away to a primordial state thousands, tens of thousands of years beyond the present human world.

At 42 degrees north latitude, in early January—unlike Europe or North American zones—Asia at this latitude was sufficiently cold; two hundred ri from the capital Tokyo, "white terror" wielded its power as it pleased.

4

Humans initially resisted this. When snow fell, as if instinct had awakened, even a valiant heart trembling with warrior-like vigor arose within them. But that there was no benefit in confronting great nature head-on and carelessly resisting it—even the most unschooled of farmers knew this well. When the autumn harvest concluded in October and the days grew darker each day, they began preparing firewood and food stores for winter, along with snow defenses for roofs and fences. At that time, rain fell every day. In the blink of an eye, mountains grew gaunt and forests stood stripped bare; barren land stretched boundlessly to the horizon as the world yielded itself entirely to the approaching season. Before long, the daily rain turned to sleet and came pelting down as though chipping away a corner of the heavens.

Local farmers there made their resolute decision.
They, faced with nature’s severe inevitability and awed by human powerlessness that could only bow its head, finally soothed the anguish in their hearts with habitual smiles and, thrusting both hands into their collars during breaks in the sleet, surveyed the surroundings of their houses, the manure storage areas, and the vast rice fields out back.

5

Spring drew near.
When one went outside at night, even in the starless pitch-black sky, something warm seemed to permeate the air.
Now when snow fell at this time, it came not as powder but as broad flakes like peony petals.
This snow would then melt midair and—borne aloft by fierce winds blowing straight northward for days—become rain that dissolved the snow from mountains, fields, and villages.
It filled rivers and paddies to overflowing with turbid water, drowning last year’s withered grass remnants and submerging the skeletal shrubs along the water’s edge.

On days without rain, mornings were cold with the lingering chill of remaining snow, but a flock of mountain birds pierced the predawn air with shrill chirps, rustling across roofs as they foraged.
They multiplied each morning.
And a flock of wingbeats flapped vigorously over the still-dark roof, shattering our monotonous thoughts that during this long interval had heard nothing but the sound of snow and wind.
How many times did I press my face into the pillow and prostrate myself, feeling through these small raptors’ wingbeats and chirps the severed boundary between seasons, awakening that mouse-less surge of emotion pressing against my chest?

The snow melted every day.
The fair weather continued unbroken day after day.
Mist thickened densely in the sky; the blanket of snow over the fields split open to expose black earth; the mountains encircling the environs took on a blue haze, their sharp ridges gleaming like crystal within the mist; the comings and goings of people and horses along the highway grew frequent; children clamored; farmhouses brimmed with vitality—spring’s arrival became visible everywhere one looked.

Before long, all the snow on the ground disappeared; butterbur sprouts began to reveal their vivid pale-green forms.
Tree bark glistened; the earth was moistened.

The blood in our bodies feels as though fresh blood courses through; the muscles in our arms and legs seem to thrum with separate strength; there, even farm women don rubber work boots to tread upon the new earth.

The enjoyment of seasons, in the most wholesome sense, thus commences for us snow country people...

June 1928 · Setagaya Nishiyama