千曲川のスケッチ English

Preface

My dear Yoshimura — Shigeru — now that I am writing, in place of a preface, a piece addressed to you at the beginning of this book, I still want to call you by the familiar name I was used to calling you.

At last I have been able to gather together this memorial of my life up in the mountains, which for many years I had hoped to offer you.

Shigeru, the bond between you and me is a deep and long one.

I was lodged in your house as a boy before you were born, and after you were born I carried you in my arms and walked about with you on my back.

When you were going to the primary school in Hisamatsucho in Nihonbashi, I was going to the Meiji Gakuin in Shirokane.

You and I grew up almost like brothers.

When I spent a summer at my sister's house in Kiso, I took you with me.

That, I believe, was the first journey of your life.

After I had set up house at Komoro in Shinshu, my wife and I welcomed you up in those mountains for two summers.

By then you were a fine young man, nearly finished with middle school.

One summer you brought your father with you, and one summer you came alone.

The neighborhood of the old castle at Komoro, the Nakadana hot spring, the sloping country all round Asama, which appear in this book — I think some of them will be familiar to your memory too.

I have not only addressed this to you in place of a preface; I wrote the whole of this book addressed to you.

From me as I was when I lived up in the mountains, to you as you were when you still wore your middle school uniform.

This is the most natural thing for me, and it feels as though it will make the best memorial of that life.

"Is there no way to make myself fresher, and simpler?"

That was what was in my heart when I got clear of the air of the city and went off to that mountain province.

I went among the farmers of Shinshu and learned a great many things.

As a country schoolmaster my duty was to teach, at the Komoro Gijuku, the sons of the town's merchants, of the old samurai families, and of the farmers; but from another point of view I learned from the school's caretaker and from my students' parents as well.

In the end I spent seven long years up in those mountains.

My mind came to choose the form of the novel over that of poetry.

What chiefly formed the foundation of this book are the impressions of the three or four years I lived quietly in the provinces.

Shigeru, your father is no longer with us, and neither is my wife.

The years since I came down from the mountains have changed the shape of your life and of mine.

But those seven years at Komoro are something I shall never be able to forget.

Even now I can see the Chikuma River vividly before me, from its upper reaches to its lower.

I feel as though I were standing again on that rocky slope at the foot of Asama.

I feel as though I could smell that earth.

From the works I published one after another — The Broken Commandment,

Green Leaves,

then Collected Toson,

and part of The Family,

and my recent short pieces — you, who have read what I write so faithfully, will know how deeply I was formed by that life in the mountains.

It is a regret to me that in these sketches I did not introduce you to the mountain village where my friend Kozu Takeshi lives.

I have never written especially for young readers before, but this book was written with something of that intention.

I hope too that it may be some small comfort to those who live lonely lives in the provinces.

Winter, the first year of Taisho

Toson

Part One

A Student's House

On the Empress's Birthday I went out with two or three colleagues for a day in the hills toward Mimakigahara.

We walked among the pine woods like hunters, and on a hill covered with young pines we gathered a great quantity of bracken.

Then we turned back to a village called Tokikubo and spent half the day in a place that might be called the country within the country.

I am teaching now, at a school near the old castle site at Komoro, students of about your own age.

How long, do you suppose, spring is awaited up here in the mountains, and how short a time it lasts?

Nothing flowers until about the twentieth of April.

Plum, cherry, and damson open almost at the same moment.

There is a festival on the twenty-fifth at the Kaikoen in the castle grounds, and that is the height of the blossom.

And then, as regularly as clockwork every year, wind and rain come and sweep every blossom away at a stroke.

Our classrooms are surrounded by double-flowered cherries, and three weeks ago the blossoms, clustered exactly like bouquets, were rioting close to the classroom windows.

When we went out at break, the dense shadow of the blossom fell even across our faces.

The students romped and played beneath them.

The young ones just up from primary school in particular were hiding behind this tree and swinging from that branch, for all the world like small birds.

And now, would you believe it, all that has changed completely into the scenery of early summer.

A week ago, after eating my midday meal, I went with four or five students to the Kaikoen.

Between the high, ruined stone walls everything was buried in new green.

The students I teach are not only young men from the town of Komoro.

They come on foot two or four miles from Hirahara, Kohara, Yamaura, Okubo, Nishihara, Shigeno, and the other villages scattered round about Komoro.

Most of these students are young men from farming families.

When the school day is done they set off for their homes, going through the pine woods, along the railway line, or along the bank of the Chikuma River, listening to the frogs as they go.

Yamaura and Okubo are villages on the far bank.

It is country that produces good vegetables — burdock, carrots, and the like.

Shigeno does not belong to Kitasaku but is a farming village on the slopes of Chiisagata, and many students come in from the villages round about it.

Here both the men and the women work hard.

Someone studying in the city, as you are, will know nothing of such a thing as a silkworm holiday.

In the country districts abroad too, in wheat-growing regions, they say the schools have a harvest holiday.

I read something of the kind in a book once.

Our silkworm holiday must be much the same thing.

When the busy season comes, even students must help at home.

And they have been well used to lending a hand at such work since they were boys.

A student I shall call S comes in from the village of Kohara.

One day I arranged to visit S's house.

I like villages such as Kohara.

There is a great deal of living shade there.

And I like the level road between the fields that goes from Komoro to that village.

I set off breathing in the strong scent of the green wheat.

There are wheat fields to right and left.

When the wind comes they move like green waves.

And among them you can see the ears of wheat flashing white.

Walking along a country road like this and hearing the frogs rising from the depths of the valley, I feel oddly weighed down.

The terrible voice of breeding.

The unknown, mysterious world of living creatures reaches our hearts now and then through the quickened senses.

Lately S's family have started a dairy.

They are farmers on a fairly large scale, and both the father and the elder brother are well thought of in the district.

Out in country like this it is nothing unusual to find a household of seven or eight.

There are even great households of ten or fifteen.

At S's house, from the old people down to the children, the family's country courtesy drew me to them.

Have you ever visited a farmhouse?

A wide yard is left at the entrance, and one can pass straight through from beside the kitchen to the back door.

The several tsubo of beaten earth floor in front of the house itself is another feature of a farmhouse.

The earth floor of this house runs on to a grape trellis, and beside it a cowshed has been built.

Some three milk cows are kept there.

S's brother came out from the direction of the cowshed carrying a large bucket.

In the doorway S and his mother bent over their work, getting ready to bottle the fresh milk.

I stood and watched them for a while.

Presently, in front of the cowshed, I heard all sorts of things from S's brother.

According to the cow's temper, some will be milked quietly and others grudge it.

There are the wild ones and the calm ones, all sorts.

Cows have extremely sharp ears, too, and can tell their master by his footsteps.

After this talk I learned that pastures such as the one at Nishinoiri are maintained to rest these dairy cows.

The evening milk was ready for delivery.

S's brother set out for Komoro.

The Longhorn Grub

Up here in the mountains I often meet girls with dull brown hair.

Some of it is almost gray.

The sight of such a girl standing in front of a thatched hut, or beside a stone wall among the mulberry fields, brings home to one the harshness of life in this country.

"A small farmer's no more than this: he works spring and autumn, and when winter comes he eats what he's got. Just like a longhorn grub — eats and bores through, eats and bores through—"

That was what the school caretaker said to me.

The Pasture at the Foot of Eboshi

The watercolor painter B, after traveling in Europe and America, built himself a new studio in his native village of Nezu.

Formerly another watercolorist, M, used to come and teach at our school, but M painted a great many Shinshu landscapes and after about a year went back to Tokyo.

Now B has taken his place and teaches drawing to the students.

Between one piece of work and the next, B comes every week from Nezu to Komoro.

On the Saturday I set out to visit this painter, taking the train from Komoro to Tanaka and then climbing some two and a half miles up the slopes of Chiisagata.

In Nezu there is a young man, O, who graduated from our school.

O says he wants to sit the examination for the military academy, but he is already a farmer good enough to be no shame to anyone.

I called at his house too, and met O's mother and elder sister.

O's mother is a stout, big-framed woman, and the red, glossy color of her cheeks gives one a simple sort of pleasure.

Along the banks of the Chikuma the women generally work hard, and their tempers are strong accordingly.

To you, who are used to seeing only city women, this is probably beyond imagining.

I do sometimes meet women in this country who strike one as rough and untamed.

O's mother has nothing of that harshness.

At any rate the woman is astonishingly robust in build.

O's sister too had the hands of a woman used to labor.

I was taken round Nezu by B and by the master of the house next to his.

That neighbor, he told me, has been B's friend since their primary school days.

From this great slope one could look out over a panorama to one's heart's content.

Far below, in the bottom of the valley, we could see the Chikuma flowing.

We went along the path between the paddies at the edge of the village and came out in the shade of the young leaves of the black poplars.

In the stream, poisonous plants such as water hemlock grew thick.

Choosing a spot at the foot of a small hill, the three of us stretched out our legs on the grass.

There B's friend produced the shochu he had carried along.

Now and then a party of young women passed in front of our drinking place on the grass.

They were on their way to cut grass.

B's friend said, as though it had just come back to him,

"You and I came out here shooting once and sat drinking half the day, didn't we."

And B, in the tone of a man remembering the days before he went abroad, answered,

"That is five years ago now—"

That was his answer.

B took out his sketchbook and talked while he drew the gray trunk of the black poplar and its soft young leaves stirring in the wind.

Even for a short walk this painter never parted with his sketchbook.

The next day B and I set out alone for the foot of Mount Eboshi.

When I asked about the pasture, B said he would come with me and sketch as we went, and so in the end I stayed the night with him.

From that village to the pasture, however, one must climb another four miles or so.

It was not a place someone like me could have reached without a guide.

Summer hills — mountain wagtails — the words alone will let you imagine the mountain road we were following.

The soil they call "noppei"

is dry, like ashes.

Treading it, pushing along the single narrow track through the scrub, we met a traveling peddler in the cool shade of yellowish young leaves.

We went deeper into the hills.

Turtledoves were calling.

As we walked, B began to talk about his travels in Hida and spoke of how lonely he had felt on hearing the bird they call the juichi.

"Juichi… juichi… juichi…"

said B, letting his voice grow thinner and thinner, imitating for me the cry of the bird crossing the valley.

Presently we came out onto the top of a hill.

Imagine, my friend, a hilltop full of early summer light, covered all over with sweet little flowers hanging like white bells.

It had never occurred to us that there could be a place where those fragrant lilies of the valley grew so thickly.

B had heard of the flower in the West and knew that it grew in Hokkaido and in the Asama range, but there were so many of them that in the end he had no wish to pick any.

We both stretched out our legs and lay down among them.

It was a very bed of flowers.

The lily of the valley has another name, kimikagesou, and it signifies "the return of happiness,"

so B, who is fond of flowers, told me.

In the company of an artist who talks so well, I never once knew boredom until we reached the pasture.

Azaleas were flowering everywhere on the hill.

The cattle will not eat this flower, they say, and that is why it grows so thickly.

Before us lay part of a broad plateau said to measure some five miles around.

Herds of cattle could be seen.

Some of them, taking us for I know not what, came charging in our direction.

Passing close to herds pastured loose like this seemed uncanny to me, being unused to it.

We hurried toward the herdsman's dwelling.

His hut stood at the bottom of a valley.

Before we reached it we met calves drinking from the stream in the ravine, and children gathering bracken.

Because the cattle come and break through the doors and paper screens, a fence has been built around the hut.

An old herdsman lived there.

The small patch of poor field seemed also to be worked by this old man.

Under his broken roof the herdsman boiled water and made tea for us.

On the wall hung the thing they call a "mountain cat," holding a saw, a hatchet, a sickle and the like.

That was what it was called.

With the look of a man glad that anyone should have come so far into the hills to see him, the herdsman told us about his experience with cattle, and said that he received ten yen a month from the manager of this pasture, and that he had come to this ravine at Nishinoiri from another pasture.

The cattle's horns itch, he said, and they rub them against things and break them, which is a nuisance.

He said too that the grass was short and scarce just now, so the cattle move along as they graze.

The herdsman thought for a moment and then began to speak of a cow that had gone missing.

He supposed it had gone up that deep ravine between the hills toward the mountain hot spring.

"No — that ravine's not the sort a beast goes right down to the bottom of. It'll be stripping willow leaves and eating them."

So he spoke of the cow again, as though he had thought better of it.

Before long we left the hut with the herdsman.

He went with the look of a man with many cattle waiting for him, carrying salt in his hand.

As we walked he told us all manner of things — "This pasture is turf, so it is good for the cattle,"

and "The trees are low here now, so in summer the heat is trapped and it will not do,"

and so on.

Coming here, one feels that the lives of men and cattle have almost run together.

This old man knew everything, down to the fact that if a cow licks salt and drinks clear water her sickness will pass.

He had an ear that could distinguish even the cry of a cow in season.

Crossing a valley where the akebi flowers hung purple, we came out again where a herd could be seen.

When the herdsman came near and gave them salt, a black calf came first, shaking its ears.

After it came a broad-browed red cow with charming eyes, and a long-necked brindle, and others trooping along, shaking their heads and swishing their tails as though to say "A feast,"

and pressing toward the salt.

The herdsman told us that when the cattle first come here they pine for home, but after two days they grow used to it, and the strong gather with the strong and the weak pair off with the weak.

Over on the far slope, herds could be seen lying down and getting up and idling about…

This pasture takes in cows from owners here and there at fifty sen a month.

There are about fifty such cows at present.

One bull is kept.

The herdsman's chief duty was to watch over the breeding of the cattle.

We thanked him and parted from the keeper.

Part Two

When the Green Wheat Ripens

The school caretaker is an interesting fellow and tells me all sorts of things.

Besides his work as caretaker, this man farms rented land of his own.

It is worked chiefly by his aged father and his younger brother.

They are a tenant farmer's family through and through.

When the school day is over and the caretaker is sweeping out the classrooms, his red-cheeked wife sometimes comes with a child on her back to help her husband.

Where any of the teachers' houses have a patch of field, this man goes and tends the vegetables for them.

At the principal's house they grew vegetables every year on the scale of a fair-sized farm.

They grew oats as well.

At break I catch hold of this caretaker and get him to talk about cultivation.

Our staff room is near the site of the old samurai quarter, and beyond the pine wood one can hear the Chikuma River running in the depths of the valley.

The room is on the upper floor above one of the classrooms, adjoining the secretary's room on one side and the principal's on the other, occupying a corner of the second story.

There are four windows.

From one of them one sees the clustered pines and the thatched roof of the principal's house.

From another one sees a shallow rolling valley, mulberry fields, and bamboo thickets.

Part of the distant mountains can be seen as well.

Leaning against one of those plain but pleasantly placed windows, I heard from the caretaker about the labor of sowing beans in June.

One turns the soil, one sows the beans, one spreads the manure, one covers them with earth — four of them work at it; and the earth is baked until it is like fire, so that sowing barefoot is impossible and they can only manage it in straw sandals.

The caretaker told me about the wheat crop as well.

For one tsuka of wheat — ninety tsubo — one needs a to of rice bran for manure.

For that they rot down barley husks and cut grass, mix in the bran, and scatter it over the wheat field.

The wheat too goes into the tenant's rent, and the summer beans and buckwheat are the farmer's own share, he said.

When the south wind blows the snow on Asama melts; when the west wind blows the green wheat in the fields ripens.

That is what the caretaker told me.

And indeed the season has come when a faint, lukewarm west wind strokes our faces and passes by outside the window.

A Band of Boys

On my way home from school, below the stone wall beyond the railway crossing, I came upon a band of boys.

They were dark-skinned children with two streams under their noses, wearing straw sandals, and some of them were treading the earth barefoot.

"You beast,"

"You little beast,"

they cried, scratching each other's faces as they wrestled at play.

Children anywhere are a kind of actor.

With me standing there as an audience they grew livelier still.

Some climbed the dangerous wall for show, and others called from below, "You'll hurt yourself,"

as they stood below.

Among them I asked one small boy how old he was.

"Me, I'm five,"

the child answered.

From beyond the watermill came voices that sounded like another band of boys.

Some of the children playing there heard it and suddenly took to their heels.

"Aren't you coming, you little beast — here, take my hand,"

said one who was plainly the elder brother, pulling the younger child's hand as though to help him.

"Here, eat some rice, then!"

With words like these one of them tore up a handful of grass and stuffed it into a companion's mouth.

And the other did not take it lying down.

As good as saying "You wait," he shouted, "You little beast!"

That was his cry.

"Brute!"

said one, in a tone of contempt.

"What? You little beast!"

And the other picked up a stone and threw it.

"No you don't, no you don't,"

laughed the child who ran away, and the other chased him with a stick.

One of them went off after them with a baby still on his back.

My friend, I see scenes like this almost every day going to and from school.

Sometimes one sees a grown man raise a stone at a child and cry in fun, "You beast — I'll kill you,"

and the like.

These, my friend, are the words exchanged quite innocently and with laughter between grown men and children.

If one showed all this to someone like you, brought up in the air of the Tokyo lower town, what would you say?

Barbarous, no doubt.

But that barbarousness, my friend, is of the kind that gives life and a sting to the senses of a weary traveler.

The Wheat Fields

The green fields are full of a steaming light.

The trees at the edges of the fields here and there have put out fresh, living leaves.

Mixed with the songs of larks and sparrows one hears the sharp call of the reed warbler.

The fields hereabouts, made by cultivating the great slope at the foot of the volcano, are all held up by stone walls.

And now is the season when those walls are decked with the leaves of weeds.

What is as common as the walls is the persimmon tree.

It is pleasant to walk in the shade of their yellowish, translucent young leaves.

Komoro is a town that has grown long and narrow along this slope, on both sides of the Hokkoku highway.

Honmachi and Aramachi, bending left and right at the Kogakuji as their boundary, are where the principal merchants are, and at either end of them Ichimachi and Yoramachi continue on.

I went from behind Honmachi, crossed the road of Aioimachi that grew up with the station, passed through Fukuromachi where the old samurai houses remain, and came out on the narrow path beside the paddies.

From there the roofs of the houses of Aramachi and Yoramachi can be seen as part of the whole view of the town.

The white plaster and the earthen walls were buried in green leaves.

On the grass beside the paddies a man lay on his back with his muddy feet stretched out, evidently worn out with work.

The ears of green wheat were ripening to a yellow-green, and radish flowers could be seen blooming white in profusion.

I went along the stony path between stone walls and grassy banks.

Presently I came out into the wheat fields near Yoramachi.

A young hawk was circling above my head.

I chose a grassy spot and lay down there, smelling the earth.

When a wind full of moisture came over, the ears of wheat rubbed against one another and made a whispering sound.

Among it one could hear the hoe of a farmer out in the field cutting the "saku"

— and if one listened closely, the sound of the thin water falling away toward the bottom of the valley came up as well.

In that sound I imagined running sand.

For a while I lay listening to it.

But I cannot stay so long alone in the grass like a field mouse.

A sky that glows while clouding to the color of milk wearies my heart.

Nature, for me, is something I cannot go on looking at for long… something that at times makes me want to run home.

So I got up again.

When the lukewarm wind came across the wheat, my hair fell forward over my forehead.

I put my hat on again and walked about.

There were children playing among the fields.

There were women working with wristlets on and pale blue cords looping up their sleeves, their arms bare.

When a baby laid on the grassy bank woke suddenly and began to cry, its young mother put down her hoe and came running to it.

And there in the field she let it search out her breast, heavy and hanging.

It was like looking at some artless picture, and I stood there a while watching the mother and child.

An old woman went by carrying on her back the weeds she had cut from the grassy bank.

Behind Yoramachi I met K out working in his field.

K is a short man of a cheerful turn, only lately married, and the people of the district place their hopes in him as one of the young men who will shape the Komoro of the new age.

I find it interesting that such a man should be out hoeing a field.

An old gentleman with pepper-and-salt hair, deep-set eyes and a high nose, whose great hands showed every knuckle, greeted us as he passed.

At his waist hung a large tobacco pouch with a horn toggle.

K pointed him out and told me he was the finest old farmer in the district.

The old man looked back at us as though something had struck him, showing his short white beard.

A man carrying manure buckets on a pole passed on the far side of the field.

K pointed him out to me too and said, laughing, that at the bottom of those buckets there would certainly be stolen onions or the like.

Then I met a farmer with reddish-white hair and grayish eyes and a florid face that suggested a fondness for drink.

Early Summer at the Old Castle

Among my colleagues is a Bachelor of Science.

He has charge of physics and chemistry.

When the school day was over, I passed by the old man's classroom.

Standing in the doorway and looking in, I found that he too had finished his lesson but was still standing at his desk explaining something to the students.

On the desk were chips of marble, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, a glass, glass tubing and so on.

A candle was burning too.

He tipped the glass in his hand a little to show them.

The gas flowed out between the edges of the glass plate that covered it.

The candle went out as though water had been poured over it.

The innocent students had gathered round his desk and were watching with open mouths and round eyes.

Some smiled, some folded their arms, some rested their chins on their hands — every sort of attitude.

On hearing that a bird or a mouse put into that glass would die at once, one of the students shot to his feet.

"Sir, will an insect not do?"

"Well, insects do not want oxygen as birds do, you see."

The student who had asked slipped out of the room, and presently his figure appeared beside the peach tree outside the window.

"Ah, he has gone to catch an insect,"

said one of the others, looking toward the window.

The young man out in the garden hunted about in the shade of the thick cherry branches, and before long came back with something in his hand.

He offered it to the Bachelor of Science.

"Is that a bee?"

said the old man uneasily.

"Ah, it's angry — it'll sting, it'll sting!"

In front of the students all crying out at once, he arched his body back as though to avoid being stung.

When the bee was put into the glass the students laughed for no reason at all.

"It's dead, it's dead,"

said some, and others, "What a weak creature."

So they said.

As though to prove the truth of the thing, the bee turned round and round in the glass, writhed, and died.

"So it has given in already,"

the old man laughed too.

That day the principal and other colleagues went off to the Kaikoen to shoot at the target.

In that green shade the enthusiasts have made themselves a shooting range of some thirty yards.

I was invited along and went straight from the school to the castle grounds.

When I first met the Bachelor of Science I took him simply for an old scholar hiding away in the country and never thought we should become so friendly.

All of us — save three colleagues — are birds of passage, and among us he is a man who seems to have tasted every kind of hardship.

He takes no care at all of his appearance and is keen on his teaching, and as he will sometimes wear an old suit smeared with chalk without troubling to brush it, the townspeople at first held him at a distance.

Judging a man's worth by his clothes and his salary is the common rate of exchange among ordinary people.

But the students' parents too could not help coming to recognize his kindness, his honesty, his fineness of nature.

I have seldom seen a man who lays everything so completely open.

Before I knew it I had become his friend, and heard, as one hears from one's own family, his uncontrollable sighs and even the voice of the anger within him.

We set off together.

Now and then a little French comes out of his mouth.

Each time I hear it I think of his brilliant past.

And for all his careless appearance he is a man who has not lost a certain old-fashioned dandyism.

His necktie is knotted in an interesting fashion, and sometimes an unfamiliar collar stud glitters there.

When I see it I want to burst out laughing like a child.

The yellowish-white persimmon flowers had already fallen everywhere and were giving off their scent.

Walking along with his bow case and a bag holding his bowstring wax and the rest, he said,

"Now, here's a story. My second boy, if you please, is quite a wrestler among the other children. Only the other day he came home with a bowstring for a prize. But his wrestling name is comical. When I asked him what it was — Shark of the Offing."

I could not help laughing.

He too could hardly hold his laughter in.

"The elder one has a name as well. When I asked him what he had chosen, he said that as his father was fond of archery he had taken Bullseye, so as to hit the mark. Yes, Bullseye. Children are comical creatures."

Listening to this fatherly talk, we reached the front of the old castle gate, where a doctor on horseback greeted us as he passed.

The Bachelor of Science watched him go and said,

"That gentleman keeps chickens, and horses, and small birds, and morning glories — he tries everything. In chrysanthemum season he grows chrysanthemums. In every country district there is usually one eccentric doctor of that sort. 'Pah, the rest of them, they're no doctors, they're drug peddlers, there's no talking to them' — he gets up a fine head of steam. But he is an amusing character, and out in the villages, if they have no money for medicine he will say a few things from the field will do, bring me onions when they come up — so he is very well liked among the farmers…"

This doctor is not the only eccentric.

Among the old samurai families there are men of a hermit turn who cannot fill their idle days and go fishing in the Chikuma, and one who lives with only his sister beside the castle gate, carrying water up to the Kaikoen and helping out at the town office.

There are many eccentrics among the old samurai.

The times have made eccentrics of them.

If you were to walk through the sites of the samurai houses hereabouts and see the ruined earthen walls and the mulberry fields where only foundation stones remain, and hear the painful history of the many families that were scattered, and then look back at the prosperity of the townsmen in Honmachi and Aramachi, you could not help thinking of the fearful footprints left by "Time."

You could not help it.

Yet they also say that the new men who go elsewhere and make their mark are mostly descendants of educated samurai families.

The Bachelor of Science climbing the broken slope of the castle now with his bow is himself from the samurai class of a certain domain.

The principal, they say, comes of an Edo retainer family.

The teacher who is a captain of the military police on leave, and who serves both as the school's secretary and as teacher of Chinese classics, is a man of the Komoro domain.

The Bachelor of Science, they say, went to war at nineteen.

Idling in these old castle grounds, I have looked at views you could never imagine.

There is the beauty of seeing the far white mountains from the shade of thick green leaves.

The snow in the valleys of the Japan Alps looks from here like white plaster walls.

The wisteria, magnolia, azaleas and peonies in the Kaikoen were for a time flowering against one another and giving off a heavy scent, but by now it has turned into the scent of dense new green.

The Chikuma cannot be seen unless one climbs up to the keep.

From that alone you can imagine the depth of the valley.

The great slope of Asama, wide as a sea, can be seen stretching in a single line into the June sky if one goes down beneath those blackish pines.

The pasture at the foot of Eboshi and Nezu village where B lives, of which I have already told you, cannot be seen from there, but one can point them out beyond the pine woods.

The green of the zelkovas and maples that shade our shooting range can also be looked down on from the top of that high stone wall.

In the grounds there is a teahouse with a good view.

Taking out the archery gear we had left there, I went down the mossy stone steps with him.

At the quiet range there were faces besides those of the school.

"Tomorrow it will be a year since I took up the great bow."

"A year's practice, and yet lay off it a while and one cannot hit a thing. It is almost a joke."

"Well, I am astonished. It is a foot across. Do your best, I beg you."

"Thunk."

"That will not do—"

Such talk goes on among the teacher of Chinese classics, who draws a strong bow, and the gymnastics master and the rest.

The Bachelor of Science drew the weakest bow of all, but he was keen and hit the mark often.

Speaking of an old castle site, you have probably imagined a place where nobody lives at all.

I have introduced you to the gatekeeper beside the surviving castle gate and to the teahouse in the grounds.

Besides them there is a man who keeps chickens.

He is in poor health and suffers from boredom, so he comes over to our shooting range for amusement.

And standing behind us while our bows are drawn together and the feathers of the arrows graze our cheeks, he showers us with startling comments.

In fun he says,

"Well now, sir. Once you have tired of archery — the day you tell me, here, keep some birds in this range, that will be the day for me… Still, this archery of yours looks likely to last forever."

With interruptions of this kind the strength one has carefully gathered runs out, and some found they could not draw at all.

To the Bachelor of Science, hidden away in Komoro, this green shade seemed a still deeper hiding place.

While his cherished hawk-feathered arrows ran together toward the white target, he seemed to forget everything.

Suddenly a warm rain began to fall.

Thunder could be heard.

Asama was hidden to its foot and seemed to smoke gray.

Bands of cloud were driven by the wind above our heads toward the mountain.

The rain seemed to pass, and then suddenly fell again.

"So it is in earnest after all,"

he said, and went to take down the seven-inch target he had newly stretched himself.

In the mulberry fields of the castle grounds there were people working on in the rain.

While we all watched the way the clouds were going, the early summer sunlight came slanting suddenly through the green leaves.

The archers took heart and began to shoot a round each.

Presently it came down again in a rush.

At last we all gave it up and withdrew to the teahouse.

On the way home with him beneath the high, ruined stone walls, I saw a deep-colored rainbow in the eastern sky.

He walked, indeed, very slowly, very slowly.

Part Three

The Mountain Villa

The thin stream that comes down from the direction of Asama divides in two at the bamboo thicket; one branch crosses behind my house toward the shallow hollow of the valley where the watermill stands, and the other runs along the street of Babaura.

The houses along that stream form my own neighborhood association.

As soon as I moved to Babaura I was enrolled in it.

There is, in general, no level ground in this town of Komoro.

The lie of the land is such that a little rain washes sand down even the smallest stream.

To go shopping in Honmachi I must climb a somewhat sloping road from beside the association's houses.

The head of the association is the diligent master of a tailor's shop.

One day a clerk came from a certain merchant house in Honmachi where this man regularly goes, to say that trade was slack and the people of the shop had gone to their villa at Higashizawa for a rest, and would the tailor not bring me along and come over too.

I have introduced you a little to the neighborhood of the old castle.

I have not yet spoken of the merchant houses.

Let me tell you about the time the tailor took me to see the merchant's mountain villa.

You have traveled to small provincial towns, no doubt.

You will have noticed that most of the people you meet there

— men and women in from the surrounding villages to shop, or travelers — and that there are surprisingly few townspeople about.

Country wariness shows itself even in this.

Komoro is so.

Those who know their way about go mostly by the back streets, the alleys, the narrow paths beside the paddies.

With the tailor I glanced along the Honmachi street with its row of merchant eaves, and came out on just such a path beside the paddies.

Seen from behind, part of the town of Komoro shows buildings of white plaster mixed with earthen ones, built solidly on top of stone walls.

Among them high three-storied windows catch the light of a cloudy day like a castle.

The feeling of those buildings makes a contrast with the dark, plain shop curtains seen from the front, and expresses the temper and the wealth of the district.

It was the wheat harvest.

On either side of us lay fields that turn yellow twice a year.

Many of the wheat fields had already been cut.

About a mile along the way we fell in with a farmer carrying a matting-wrapped parcel of salted fish.

The tailor turned to him and said,

"So the planting is all finished, is it?"

"Aye, only two or three days back. Mind you, in the old days we planted ten days earlier, but lately it's got much later. The fields that fall in shadow never used to fill out much, but nowadays we get a full crop."

"Is that because it has grown warmer?"

"Aye, that's part of it, but unlike the old days the number of fields has gone up a good deal, so there's more warmth in the water, you see."

The farmer answered while looking about him as he went.

At the villa at Higashizawa the people of the merchant house were gathered.

They had left the mistresses and two or three apprentices at the shop, and all the rest had come here to amuse themselves.

You who grew up in the Tokyo lower town — the needle wholesaler in Temmacho in Nihonbashi, the retirement house in Saruyacho in Asakusa, names dear to you and to me — can probably imagine what sort of people I now found myself among.

The villa was of two stories, standing with a pond before it at the mouth of a quiet ravine.

To the left, toward the pine woods that ringed the shallow valley, it was clouded and even the sky could not be seen well.

On a very clear day, they say, one can even see the summit of Fuji.

The irises blooming in profusion at the edge of the pond gave a pleasant feeling.

The tailor pointed out a Korean cypress in the garden and said it had been ordered specially from Tokyo, but it did not much appeal to me.

We were shown to an upstairs room with a view.

The master proved to be a man in a hand-woven country-striped kimono with a dark blue apron, his hair cropped plainly short.

He was not, they said, the heir who holds all authority, but he looked every inch the master of a solid great house.

A portly head clerk came over to us as well.

With salt-grilled carp from the pond, the master pressed drink upon us.

Downstairs there were five or six apprentices, some cooking and some coming up to wait on us.

Even in small things the plain, strict style of the great house showed itself.

Seeing that only the plates of cold bean curd in front of us had shaved bonito on them, and that his own and the master's had none, the head clerk said, "This will not do with only soy. Here, shave us a little bonito and bring it up,"

and peered down the stairs to give the order to an apprentice.

Before long the boy came up with two plates of bonito shaved in great generous flakes.

Presently the head clerk fetched a chess board from below.

He set it down before the tailor.

Let us play with two pieces handicap, he said.

The tailor laughed and said he had given the game up entirely these twenty years, but as he was not altogether bad at it he would have a try.

The master too was evidently fond of the game, and leaned over saying that the tailor seemed to have a good line, or that there was a good move there, taking his side all the while — but presently the guest lost.

The head clerk held his cup at his lips with a look that said, "Now, who will come next?"

That was his expression.

"Let me have it; I shall avenge him,"

cried the master, springing forward, and began to play against the clerk.

Presently the master's position too began to look bad.

The clerk slapped his own head and clicked his tongue: "Beaten, am I?"

That was how he took it.

In the end the master lost.

A second game began.

Downstairs a boy with a large purse at his waist had been romping with a black foreign dog, and then suddenly began whining to go home.

The apprentice could not manage him, so the tailor, unable to watch it, went down to humor the child.

Meanwhile I walked round the garden.

A late spiraea was still in flower.

Under the wisteria trellis one could see the carp leaping in the pond.

"With so much water it is not easy to catch a carp, is it."

So somebody was saying.

By the time I had been once round the pond, the clerk came down from upstairs with a red face.

"Well, sir, how did the match go?"

asked the tailor.

"Both games — like this."

He piled his fists one on the other at the end of his nose to make a great long goblin's nose.

And he laughed in a loud, cheerful voice.

In the company of such people I passed the time in a rather gloomy place among the hills.

When the rain began to come down in drops we left the villa.

The clerk, half drunk, said, "One umbrella for the two of you; sharing an umbrella is a very stylish thing,"

and brought out an oiled paper umbrella to lend us.

So the tailor and I set off home under that shared umbrella.

"Do take another one,"

said the apprentice, running after us again.

The Antidote Women

"Would you be wanting any antidote powder?"

One begins to hear women's voices calling at the doors of the houses in the sharp accent of Echigo.

Dark, travel-worn figures, great cloth bundles on their backs, hats shining in the sun — just as the swallows come from far away in flocks, all of a kind, never mistaking their season, so these women too travel all the way up into these mountains.

And as a flock of birds separates to fly to this eave and that, so they too break into twos and threes and call at whatever house they choose.

These days I meet a party of these antidote sellers almost every day on my way to school.

They resemble one another closely, even in their vigor.

Ginbaka

"In every district there is always one or two of the simple-witted,"

somebody said.

Passing through a poor quarter I met a candy seller with a black beard.

He was playing a reed pipe below a high stone wall.

That district is a back street near the station.

It is a place I often pass going to and from school.

Coming out among the stony mulberry fields, I saw a man coming down from the upper part of the slope pulling a cart, all but swept along by it.

On the cart lay the haunch of a slaughtered pig.

Afterward I heard that the man was Ginbaka.

Ginbaka, they say, is of the sort who says nothing and works hard.

They also say that his own house and land have been taken over by others and that he works on without knowing it.

The Eve of the Festival

When the spring silkworms are done with, the season of the Gion festival comes round in this district.

The houses in this town that do not raise silkworms can be counted on the fingers.

Even the temple priests reckon it among their chief incomes of the year.

My own household has never once kept them, and that sounds strange here.

This being such a place, unless you will think of the dark silkworm racks, the smell that seems to assault you, the sleep of the worms, the good or bad mulberry crop, and the men and women who at times work nearly all night, I cannot convey to you the pleasure of the Gion festival that comes after.

Men with scales at their belts and hemp sacks on their backs come into the town from around Suwa and Matsumoto.

For a time the inns are full of cocoon buyers.

The sight of such men carrying the cocoon harvest off to one inn or another lends the streets a certain liveliness of its own.

The weather, which had drizzled on for some twenty days, cleared at last on the twelfth of July.

The sunlight after the long rain was especially brilliant.

Even the far mountains, hidden for so long behind a smoky mist, showed themselves in the color of bellflowers.

This was the day for which everyone in the town, from the grown men to the children, had been waiting with new clothes made ready.

I have heard something of the dark quarrels between the town's factions, but I do not mean to tell you of such things here.

Let me say only that there had been trouble upon trouble before the festival.

For a time there were reports of a dispute over whether the festival should be allowed at all, and the sacred rope decorations, which are put up like arches at the beginning of the month every year, were only hung over the streets on the seventh day.

In the wake of it there was even a house said to have moved away rather than be troubled by having the palanquin shrine carried in.

The mere fact that such a fuss can arise shows how eagerly the townspeople look forward to this festival.

Many of the merchants in particular count on the bustle of the festival.

For the money earned from the silkworms is spent at least at this season.

After dark there was the ceremony they call "yudate,"

the boiling of the sacred water.

On that evening the principal people of the town light their lanterns and gather at the shrine.

I left the house to see it.

There were stars shining in the sky.

In front of the shrine I met a man selling candy.

He is said to have made a name for himself in Noh chanting, but he has long been hidden away in this country place.

Along the Honmachi street the red and white lanterns lit the faces of the passers-by.

In that light I met I from the pigeon shop and K from the paper shop coming along hand in hand.

Both are cheerful girls from my neighborhood.

The Gion on the Thirteenth

On the thirteenth the school too suspended lessons.

There is always an argument over whether or not to close, the principal generally being for a holiday and the secretary arguing for keeping the school open if possible.

But the Gion holiday was the custom every year.

Girls from the villages round about came early and crowded at the street corners.

Local small traders were everywhere, hauling out door boards and barrels, spreading blankets and selling food and drink on them, making do with drying boards for hastily built benches.

The greengrocer and his wife, whose faces I knew well, had taken up a position near the corner where Honmachi turns toward Ichimachi, and the pale-faced husband and his stout wife, each with one shoulder bared, were pickling stuffed rice parcels and rolling seaweed rolls.

A child from a poor family walking through the town in a new summer kimono with the air of a person on some errand of distribution is another sign of a festival day.

In the afternoon my household was invited to the B sisters' to watch the palanquin shrine pass.

B is one of those who come to read Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book

and the like, and my child often goes to play at that house.

From the bell tower in the grounds of the Kogakuji the sound of the bell came ringing over the streets without a break.

On this day anyone was allowed to climb the tower and strike it as he pleased.

From about three o'clock I too went up the sunlit summer road along the houses of my association.

At the top of it one comes out at the corner of Honmachi, where every eave has a green blind hung on it.

These blinds suit the July festival particularly well.

The people who had come to see the festival passed before me like a rustic picture scroll unrolling.

The men and women from the villages were dressed in every fashion: a man with a broad purple crepe sash wound round and round him, a party of women with the ornaments in their great hair knots looking heavy enough to weigh them down, a girl carrying a man's umbrella, a child with a flannel apron and her skirts turned up.

There were young girls with white socks on thick dark legs and short-skirted kimonos.

These are people who think nothing of walking two or four miles.

Among them was even a Western lady, evidently a visitor from Karuizawa, gazing about her with curiosity.

The town children all flew delightedly about through the crowd.

Presently a wooden mortar was rolled up from the lower part of the town.

All the spectators fled beneath the eaves on either side.

"Yoiyo! Yoiyo!"

came the cry, and the heavy palanquin shrine was carried up.

In the middle of the narrow street the shrine is set down from time to time on the mortar.

The hot-blooded young men take hold of it all round, spin it about, and throw up their arms and shout.

Amid great cheering the shrine was lifted and carried on.

A kind of rhythm ran through the bodies of the onlookers too.

On my way back I saw even the children walking to the same beat.

On this day, coming after the town's quarrels, there was something uneasy in people's hearts.

At about six I went out to the Honmachi corner again.

Even the cry of "Yoiyo, yoiyo"

had grown hoarse and now sounded fearsome — "Gyoigyo, gyoigyo."

So it came to my ears.

The men were flushed with drink, and no sooner had the shrine been carried up the town than it came suddenly down again.

Fifty or sixty hangers-on ran about shouting like madmen.

A number of policemen and festival officials went along with them at a run.

It was just supper time and the spectators had scattered, but the fury of the shrine only grew fiercer.

When it was carried past the front of one of the great merchant houses, it made the onlookers' palms sweat.

All at once the shrine turned into a kind of trial of strength.

In front of one house a man swung the front pole to strike, another threw up both arms to stop him, and driven by the weight of the crowd the shrine tilted over as we watched.

At that moment somebody came flying out of the house and leapt at the shrine, trying to swing it round.

Someone was trampled underfoot in the confusion and blood ran down his face.

"Set the shrine down! Set the shrine down!"

cried the police, running up together, and after a fierce argument it was ruled at last that nobody but the bearers should be allowed near.

The shrine was guarded all round by men in white caps and white coats, and with cries of "Right, up with it,"

it was suddenly carried off again toward Nakamachi.

Among the spectators even a full-grown man was knocked flat on his back.

"Quick, get out of the way — the children, the children!"

Everyone was shouting.

"The police have their work cut out, and no mistake."

"A fine nuisance for them."

So the onlookers said to one another.

After dark the lanterns of the streets were beautifully lit.

With the blinds rolled up, felt rugs spread in the shop fronts and folding screens set round, people sat near the edge and took the cool air.

The shrine moved from Ichimachi toward Shinmachi.

On one sloping street little girls were groping in the dark for the coins that had rained down as offerings.

Later there appeared even a descendant of the honest Aoto, searching the road with a lantern in his hand, and a woman of about fifty came out of the darkness and felt among the stones and clutched at the earth.

It made one feel what a sharp, greedy world this is.

The bridge at Ichimachi is near the house of the school's botany teacher.

It is near the house of my friend T, the doctor, as well.

Along both its rails stood dark figures: some enjoying the cool wind, some peering into people's faces, some singing in thick voices, and parties of women being pulled along and refusing to come.

After nine at night the lanterns of Babaura still shone as though it were early evening.

The people of the association gathered in front of the tailor's and the pawnbroker's and gossiped about the festival while they cooled themselves.

That night no stars could be seen.

Fireflies strayed up from the dark stream and flew about the town, giving off their beautiful blue light.

After the Festival

The next day a cool rain fell from morning.

Drops fell from the green leaves of the persimmons and damsons about the house.

Wet damson leaves are particularly cool to look at.

On the Honmachi street, in complete contrast to the crush of the day before, every house had its festival lantern hung deep inside.

The blinds below the dark blue shop curtains were still too.

So still that the sound of a pipe being knocked out on a tobacco tray could be heard echoing inside.

In the street there were only girls and children walking about at play under umbrellas.

The wooden mortar used the day before lay in a corner of the town.

It was wet with the July rain.

On this fourteenth, they say, each household steams glutinous rice and celebrates with simmered dishes and spends the day at leisure.

Even by four in the afternoon the sky had not cleared.

A man in a court cap with an old-fashioned sword at his side, looking as though he had stepped out of the play Shibaraku,

went about with the priest, the festival officials and the children, all of them in pale blue court dress, cutting down the sacred rope decorations through the drizzling streets.

Part Four

Nakadana

From the window of our staff room a shallow valley can be seen.

It has been cultivated and planted with mulberry and the like.

There are any number of such valleys near the old castle, divided by cliffs thick with pine.

As they fall away toward the Chikuma they grow a great deal deeper.

We are digging up the grassland beside the castle gate to make a tennis court, and that too is the head of one of these valleys.

When M was at Komoro he painted watercolors in this valley.

According to the school's gymnastics master, long ago, when there was a terrible landslide, the water that came surging down from Asama formed this varied lie of land.

At the beginning of August I crossed one of these valleys and went out toward Nakadana.

My feet often turned that way.

Not only is there a mineral spring there, but it lies at just the right distance for a walk from the house.

Around Nakadana there is a great deal of rich farmland.

Climbing to the top of a certain bluff, one finds the principal's neat little villa halfway down the slope.

Below it one can see the flag of the bathhouse.

One can see the apple orchards.

The Chikuma flows beyond them.

A little after one in the afternoon I went by the path beside the paddies and came out on the bank of the Chikuma.

Among the stones, where reeds and mugwort and short willows grew thick, I fell in with students from the normal school in Nagano.

They are the ones I call A, A and W.

They are using the summer holiday to come to my house and read.

On the bank there were many boys who had come to swim, treading the hot sand.

Among them were students of our own school.

Since the weather turned hot I have often brought my students here to swim, and compared with swimming in the Sumida the very run of the water is different.

The clear blue water may flow like oil, but the violence of the rapids is enough to make one dizzy.

Looking upstream, it comes down throwing up white water from behind the dark rocks.

Downstream it is swift as an arrow.

It strikes the red cliff at Goribuchi and goes plunging down with fearful force.

There is no possibility of cutting straight across this current from the rocks on this side to the foot of the cliff opposite.

And in the clear water there are places where great rocks lie hidden.

If one falters clumsily one is swept away.

So unless one starts swimming from a good way upstream one cannot reach the rock one is aiming for and climb out.

Unlike the Tone and other rivers of the plains, the main current of this river runs hard against one bank or the other.

We stayed on the side where the riverbed was exposed and spent some two hours in the shade of a rock where loosestrife was in flower.

Some lay face down on the hot sand, drying their shells.

Others plunged into the water with a splash.

Even young girls came here to play, rolling up their sleeves and tucking up their skirts, dipping their feet in the water and playing about with complete absorption.

Three straw hats appeared among the stones.

It was the normal school party.

"Did you catch anything at all?"

I asked.

"Well, we were thoroughly caught ourselves."

"And how about you?"

"Five of them took the hook, but every one of them cheated me."

"Mm, mm — with two whole hours you had plenty of time to think up your excuses…"

Somebody said this to take the wind out of his companion's story.

With these three I went back toward the hot spring at Nakadana.

The water is heated, but it was pleasant to soak in the mineral bath and look out at the view from the tub.

Even after coming out of the water, their pleasure was to drink tea and lose themselves in student talk.

The cool wind that came across the apple orchards and the grape trellises helped our spirits.

"When one grows old, does one stop wanting sweet things?"

one of them began, and the talk of appetite was drawn out one thing after another.

"I once sold my Eighteen Histories to pay the confectioner's bill."

"Cakes are all very well, but they cost a great deal."

"I held out for about two years…"

"That is impressive. I could not hold out two years. I limit myself to three times a week."

"But in the third year, you see, I simply could not hold out any longer."

"The other day one of the masters said — I hear you gentlemen often go to the cake shop; I have never once set foot in such a place, so take me along, will you."

"Well, well."

"You are all so fond of cakes, he said, but about how much do you eat at one sitting? So I said, well, from ten to twenty sen's worth. That is impressive, he said, and do you not ruin your stomachs eating so much? So I told him — yes, and some of us go back to school and do without supper."

"Ah, but there are all sorts; there is a fellow who eats his cakes with stomach powder on them."

The three of them seemed to find relief in whatever they said.

Some of them clapped their hands and leapt up laughing.

Hearing it, I could not help laughing myself.

Presently the three of them went off whistling toward the inn where they were staying together.

Going up the slope from this hot spring along the stone wall, one comes to the gate of the principal's villa.

He has named the house the Suimeiro, the Pavilion of Bright Water.

The building was originally his study, standing in the samurai quarter, and was moved here and made habitable.

It is a quiet little building of some character, set against the cliff in a position with a fine view.

He was my English teacher in my Kyoritsu School days.

In those days he was in his prime, and taught us Irving's Rip Van Winkle

and the like.

And now that same teacher is a white-bearded old man hidden away in such a place, taking pleasure in planting flowers and nursing his age in the mineral water.

Sometimes one hears him joke as though he were Rip Van Winkle himself.

But his spirit is not a thing to be worn away by the years.

When a visitor calls, the talk breaks out vigorously.

Every time I come to the Suimeiro I look forward to seeing his well-ordered study.

And more than that, the view of the Chikuma can be enjoyed to the full while leaning on the rail of that upper room.

The smoke visible on the far bank is the village of Okubo.

The suspension bridge below it is the Modori Bridge.

The crowing of cocks that comes across the river every morning, the color of the lamps lit each night in the farming villages — all this can be pictured from there.

The Shade of the Oaks

The shade of the oaks.

It is the precinct of the Kashima shrine.

Even since the school holidays began I often pass through that shade.

One day I crossed the railway line and came out again on the path through the green grass.

To an old oak a calf with short horns and charming eyes had been tethered.

While I stood watching for a while, the calf, still tied, went round and round until it had wound its rope — long enough to drag on the ground — completely about the trunks of the oaks on every side.

And so it could not move at all.

In the grass beyond, a red horse and a white one were tethered.

Part Five

The Mountain Hot Spring

A brief rain came, neither quite a summer shower nor quite an autumn drizzle, of the kind that falls when summer turns to autumn.

The sound of it on the grass and trees is not as violent as a summer shower.

Already the old women from the villages round about bring the first mushrooms in boxes to sell — birch-colored ones with leaves still on them, and others with a verdigris tinge.

About a month ago I went out to the hot spring at Tazawa.

I forgot to tell you about it.

There are all sorts of hot springs, but a mountain spring has a character of its own.

Bessho, near the town of Ueda, is one of the more developed, and has all sorts of conveniences accordingly.

But the feeling of a hot spring proper to the mountain country is better tasted at the inconvenient Tazawa or Reisenji.

There are respectable hot-spring inns thereabouts too, but at any rate it is the kind of place where the local people go with their own miso and rice to forget their troubles.

Many of the bathers cook for themselves.

The inns will let a room alone.

And each room has its own stove.

The bathers can go straight from the garden up the stairs in their clogs and reach the upstairs rooms.

Seeing a building made so that one can go up and down in outdoor footwear, one feels that this is a hot-spring inn deep in the hills.

As for the hot spring at Kazawa — the mountain bath — that, they say, is rustic indeed.

Along a range half wrapped in green leaves and half broken into red cliffs, with the rushing Chikuma on my left, I took the train as far as Ueda.

The Ueda bridge — a red-painted iron bridge — and crossing it I looked down on the water of the Chikuma, a proper great river there.

I walked among the several villages on the flat land near Ueda.

That district feels like true country road.

There is shade along the way.

There are plain teahouses where one can sit and rest.

At a place called Aoki village I saw how hard the farmers labor.

They had stuck leaves into the backs of their clothes for what little shade they gave, and were working at weeding the paddies.

And this in the full heat of a day when I could not have walked at all without an umbrella.

Beyond this farming village one begins to climb a slope deep into the valley along a river slightly white and clouded.

From the color of the water alone one knows one is nearing the baths.

Presently I came to a place where a signboard like this was hanging.

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓

┃　湯　　　　　　　　　　　┃

┃　　　〼　み　や　ば　ら　┃

┃　本　　　　　　　　　　　┃

┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

The Masuya is a hot-spring inn with a good view.

On the upper floor, where one could hear the Yu River running, I met the wife of our school's principal, who had brought some fourteen or fifteen girl students with her.

These girls too are pupils I teach in my spare hours.

From upstairs we looked far off at the whole range of Asama.

On days when Asama cannot be seen one feels forlorn, the principal's wife was saying.

The light of the nineteenth-night moon came down into this valley.

When most people had gone to sleep, one could still hear the voices of bathers arguing vigorously behind a lighted paper screen.

"He may be small in body, but he's no such savage as that."

The sort of thing argumentative men would say.

The next day the morning light filled the ravine where the mist lay, so that near hills looked far off, and the smoke rising from the houses looked whiter than the mist.

Asama was hidden.

Beyond the hills the sky shone a bluish gray.

White clouds could be seen rising along the range.

A charming boy called Kuni had come along with his elder sister, and played a toy tin whistle on the upper floor of the inn.

The place is a valley set between the Hofukuji pass and the Jizo pass.

The twentieth-night moon rose late that evening too.

The running water sounded against my pillow so that I could not sleep, and having gone to bed I got up again to taste the feeling of a moonlit night in such a place.

Leaning on the high rail and listening, the voices of all manner of insects joined with the sound of the water and filled the valley.

Besides them, there were all sorts of voices down in the dark ravine—

the sound of shutters closed late, people talking in the depths of the night, dogs barking, the cheerful song of a farmer.

On the fourth morning, while it was still dark, we made ready by moonlight and crossed the mountain road toward Bessho as the night gradually gave way.

From the School Window, One

The summer holidays over, I began again to see the Bachelor of Science and B and the botany teacher and the rest about the school.

On the day the autumn lessons began, beside a classroom window where the cherry leaves could still be seen lying thick upon one another, I told the senior students about the Buddha.

I chose the Life of Sakyamuni.

That was the book I took.

In that book the prince's life is set out so that one reads it like a play.

From it I borrowed the story of the Buddha's royal father and of the prince's young companions.

The passage where the young prince, sunk in sorrow, goes out through the four gates of the city — east, west, south and north — toward the gardens, seems to have caught my students' hearts as well.

Going out of one gate, he met a sick man.

Must a man fall ill? the prince pondered deeply.

Going out of two other gates, he met an old man, and met a corpse.

Must a man grow old? Must a man die?

The questions of life against which this prince strikes are set out with great simplicity.

Outside the last gate he came upon an ascetic.

And there the prince made up his mind, and in order to solve this Life he broke with everything and went away.

Is it not dramatic?

Is it not shaped so as to interest a boy's mind?

After telling the students this, I said to them that among so many of them there would be some who meant to go into business and some who meant to become soldiers, but that I hoped some among them might have spirit enough at least, like this young prince, to break with everything and live the life of a monk.

I looked at the students.

How they took what I had said I do not know; they all looked at one another and laughed.

Some pulled odd faces and held their heads in their hands.

From the School Window, Two

That trees put out new shoots three times a year is something I had never noticed before.

Now is the season of September's young leaves.

A good many trees have been planted round the school buildings.

When the fruit of the great cherries ripens it can call up even the days of one's own youth; and coming into this yard again after the summer holiday, the whitish apple leaves, the reddish cherries, the plain phoenix trees, all catch the light against the white plaster of the school and make a pleasant play of sun and shade.

Students' whistling rises cheerfully here and there.

Since the tennis court was moved toward the castle gate, many of them wrestle in the shade of the cherries.

On my way home from school I called on B, who has been ill since the summer.

Passing behind that house and going down the stone steps, one comes to an apple orchard.

There too the early autumn sun was shining.

The Country Schoolmaster

The Bachelor of Science, who is fond of morning glories and raises them every year, told me one day on the way home from school about a new pupil of his.

A pupil, that is, in the growing of morning glories.

The man is a minister living in the town, whom some of the children fondly call "the Sunday school uncle."

That is what they call him.

In the middle of one of this uncle's sermons a summer shower came on.

He had only just become a pupil in morning glories.

His mind went to the plot he took such daily pleasure in.

It went to his precious seed leaves.

It went to the morning glory pots out in the rain.

Cutting the sermon short, he ran off through the shower to his morning glory frames.

"Is that not exactly like a country minister?"

said the Bachelor of Science, and laughed, telling me about his new pupil.

And he himself is fond enough of them to come and pay a call after a fire and stay talking about morning glories.

A Path Between the Paddies in September

I came out where the rows of houses of Akasaka — a part of the town of Komoro — could be seen along the slope.

These streets at the foot of Asama were just waking from sleep.

The smoke of breakfast was rising into the somehow damp air.

Cocks could be heard crowing here and there.

Around the ripening rice fields the beans too hung down their pods.

Among the rice, some of the lower leaves had already turned yellow.

It is past the middle of September.

The ears of rice are of all sorts — some the color of plume grass, some pure grass green, some like hanging tassels of red hair — and among them I can tell that the deep russet ones are the fields sown with glutinous rice.

The morning sun came slanting into the valleys.

The dew on the grass of the path wet my feet and made them itch.

I walked about among them, listening to the crickets.

These days Asama sometimes throws up smoke eight times in a day.

"There, Asama is burning again,"

the local people are in the habit of saying to one another.

When men and women pause in the work they have begun and come out to look, or lift their eyes to the sky, one may be sure a very great mass of smoke can be seen over Asama.

Only at such times does one feel that one lives at the foot of a volcano.

Those who are used to living in such a place generally forget it in the ordinary way of things.

Asama is a mountain that looks as though it had been broken down by some great eruption, and everyone supposes that what they now call Kibayama is the site of the old crater.

Travelers who come expecting some settled beauty of outline in the mountain are generally disappointed.

Not only Asama; look toward the Tateshina range and there too are nothing but mountains with nothing remarkable about them.

What is interesting is only the air about the mountains.

The mountain one went out to see yesterday and the mountain one goes out to see today are different almost every day.

Life in the Mountains

The district where the Bachelor of Science lives is behind Aramachi, where one can see the windows of the great soy-sauce warehouse belonging to the house of K, the vinegar merchant's daughter.

Going along beside it out to the Aramachi street, among the shops selling mat facing, dried bonito, tea and sundries, there is a fairly large smithy.

Under its high, dark roof an old man with his hair in the old-fashioned knot makes the sound of his hammer ring.

This old man of the old school is the father of the school's gymnastics master.

On a day with a cool morning wind and a hot sun, I took two students, passed beside that smithy and out through the back, and set off with the gymnastics master for the flank of Asama.

A mountain house, I say, but where we were going is truly deep in the hills.

It is where people live in the depths of the forest.

Fields of millet, adzuki beans, and the barnyard millet they say is used for horse feed, lay along the hill road we were following.

There were buckwheat fields with white flowers and red stems everywhere as well.

It was the height of autumn.

The gymnastics master knows a great deal about cultivation, and pointed out to me the fields shining here and there — that one with the great purple-crimson leaves hanging is what they call "watari millet,"

and this one over here with the thin blue-black pods is the kind called "korei adzuki"

— and thanks to him I was taught a great many things.

He knew so much that he could tell the varieties of rice simply by looking at the fields.

We saw five or six pines standing close together on a hill.

That is where the Whispering Wayside God stands.

We came out at a place called Terakubo.

It is a most remote mountain hamlet, with farmhouses scattered here and there in groups of five or six.

I do not think I have told you about Kurofuyama; it is part of the Asama range too. There — from the keep in the castle grounds at Komoro, between the pines on top of that stone wall, one sees a high wooded slope that looks like a black patch: that is where we were walking now.

From that keep, at the foot of Kurofu, one can make out a single white wall far off like a dot.

That white wall too belongs to this hamlet.

A farmer went by, bent under a bale of salt on his back.

The gymnastics master called out to him,

"Pickling already?"

That was his question.

"Do it now and you gain twenty percent."

Those who must fight a harsh climate think of laying in vegetables as early as this.

With the cool rain of the night before last and the good sun of yesterday, there should be some mushrooms to be had.

Following the gymnastics master, I went with the students into the pine wood.

This wood is the gymnastics master's own hillside.

Among the fallen pine needles we found only a few yellow shimeji and some ox-brow mushrooms.

Then, pushing through the bamboo grass, we went on into what they call "the wood of shares."

That is the name it goes by.

We came into a fairly deep pine wood.

We met what seemed to be a family of young people, cutting down green pine branches and binding them into bundles.

The woman seemed a young wife of about twenty, with a grimy towel over her head, her undergarment slipped off her shoulders and her skirts tucked up, an apron hanging in front and straw sandals on her feet.

Her rough reddish hair and coarse sunburned face gave the impression of neither man nor woman.

Look at her how you will, she was a figure who might have stepped out of one of Millet's peasant paintings.

There were three or four who seemed to be her younger brothers, all with faces marked with black grime and hair that looked like mugwort.

But they sang a children's song in healthy, innocent voices.

A woman who seemed to be their mother came walking out of the depths of the wood.

They all stopped their work and gazed at us with curiosity.

Climbing on along the hill from where these people were working, we came out into a level pine wood.

A man with cut grass on his back was going home along the narrow path through the trees.

The sun came filtering down onto the damp grass.

The air in the deep wood made that grass-cutter look like a fish or some such thing moving through water.

A cart loaded with brushwood passed too, rattling as it went.

The sound rang out through the lonely wood.

Pushing through the bamboo grass and brush, we went hunting mushrooms, but the day's takings were small.

Raking the dead leaves aside with a sickle, all we found now and then was an inedible red mushroom or a first-mushroom already going rotten.

In the end we grew tired of searching, and our backs would not do as they were told for long.

Carrying our light baskets at our waists, we came out where there was a field with pumpkin flowers in bloom.

The forest keeper's hut came into view.

The Forest Keeper

The place where the keeper's hut stands is called Onoishi and lies right at the foot of Kurofu.

Standing in front of the stable with a charm against thieves inscribed to the Mitsumine shrine pasted on it, and the main house with cut bush clover drying before it, and looking at the color of the sunlit earthen wall, I felt very far indeed from any human settlement.

A red dog with sharp eyes came flying at us.

It barked at us persistently, as though suspicious.

The dog is kept by the keeper and evidently serves a number of purposes.

By the time the master of the hut had come out to meet us, the red dog had grown willing to have its head stroked.

The master was a man who looked after the forest without troubling to shave.

His wife, her sleeves looped back, was at work cutting up pumpkins grown here in the hills.

Four children came out into the yard as well.

The eldest is already fourteen or fifteen.

A girl in a narrow sash and straw sandals, but with black hair.

The younger children looked at us with a faintly awkward, bashful expression.

Beside them a white cock with a fine comb and three gray hens were pottering about, but presently they too disappeared into the wood behind.

The hut is divided in two; the matted side is nominally the sitting room, but in practice it would be truer to call it the bedroom.

On the boarded floor by the hearth, where the family eat and drink tea and receive guests, a thin mat is spread, and the farm tools and the eating vessels are all set out about it.

Seeing colored lithographs and woodblock-printed calendars pasted on the sooty, entirely unadorned wall, I thought how much pleasure even such crude prints must give to the eyes of people living up here in the hills.

It is no wonder that at the year-end sales the people who come in from the villages to shop in the town so often want these prints.

We rested our feet at the hearth without taking off our straw sandals.

His wife brought out salted shallots and tea and pressed them on us.

To our parched mouths the tea we drank in that hut tasted good.

In winter, the master said, the fire in this hearth is never allowed to go out.

Climb this high and the climate is very different.

The students who had come with me went round to look at the back of the hut and came away having heard all sorts of things from the master: that persimmons planted here never lose their astringency, that there are plums but their taste is bitter, and that peaches alone suit the soil hereabouts.

Presently it was time for the midday meal.

In the shade of the chestnut tree in the yard we grilled the mushrooms the hut had shared with us.

The master brought out three thin mats and spread them for us under the tree.

There the meal began.

His wife pressed upon us besides a soup of chicken and eggplant and a dish of simmered pumpkin.

There was a great quantity of each in the big pots.

We each helped ourselves.

The students brought out rice balls and bread.

The gymnastics master, for his part, had not forgotten to bring the drink he is fond of.

Apples had been planted here in the hills by way of trial, but the grubs of the wild pear climbed up and sucked the nectar from the flowers, so that they never bore fruit.

This was what his wife told us, coming over to where we were eating.

The red dog came round and gnawed the chicken bones the students threw to it.

After the meal the master took us round as far as the black-earthed fields.

According to him, beyond the pine wood there is a mulberry field of some three thousand tsubo, and the arable is three times that, making perhaps ten thousand tsubo of land in all; but since it came to him the family is small and he cannot manage it, so that some of it lies neglected.

Our visit seemed to have given the master great pleasure.

Contrary to his sullen bearded face, he talked of all manner of things.

He told us the buckwheat yields ten bales; that the ginkgo, cedar and bamboo he had planted by way of trial had mostly withered away; that he had sown some thirteen bales of chestnuts, and that those which survived fourteen forest fires had already reached thirty or forty feet and bore well, but that the fires had left few trees.

There was a plantation of larch as well.

The seedlings were soft as grass and shone beautifully in the sun.

Wild pears grow plentifully round the fields.

Those ripened to yellow caught our eyes at once, even hidden in the grass.

Though for us the fruit was nothing new.

The master spoke too of the terror of forest fires, and of a man who had died driven before the flames.

He told us also that some two and a half miles further up there is a charcoal burner's hut where they are burning sawtooth oak just now.

Onoishi, where this keeper lives, is said to be part of the place called Takamine.

From Onoishi to the baths at Hishino is about two thirds of a mile, and he says one can go and bathe every day.

Hearing the name Hishino, I remembered a girl who once came to our house as a nursemaid.

That country girl's village was Hishino.

Thanks to the gymnastics master, who knows the district well, I saw a rare place.

Somewhere so deep in the hills is not a place a man like me can often reach.

Once I went with the history master and stayed the night at a keeper's hut higher up than this one.

That place had only lately been cleared and the woods were not as deep as here.

Before we said goodbye and left Onoishi, we turned once more to look back toward the hut.

Among the trees, with birches mixed in, we could see the narrow sloping path to the hut, the trees on the hill, and the roof of the hut itself.

The trunk of a birch catches the eye in any wood, and among those round leaves like a mountain cherry's some had already turned a beautiful yellow.

Part Six

An Autumn School Excursion

At the beginning of October I set out with the botany teacher T, leading the students, for the upper reaches of the Chikuma.

The autumn weather was good and we were able to keep up a pleasant journey.

On this excursion we went down from the foot of Yatsugatake into Koshu, came out at Kofu, and then went round to Suwa, where we joined the Bachelor of Science, the watercolorist B, and other colleagues who were waiting for us, and came back to Komoro by way of Wada.

The journey took nearly a week.

We had made a great circuit round the long ranges of Tateshina and Yatsugatake.

Of it all, the stretch from the upper Chikuma to Nobeyamagahara is a place I had once visited before.

That time I went with the tailor from my neighborhood.

On this journey I refreshed my old memories.

Let me tell you about it.

The Koshu Highway

Coming out from Komoro to the town of Iwamurada, the Koshu highway that runs south from there cuts through a comparatively flat, wide valley.

The yellowed, autumnal country of Minamisaku opens out before us.

The Chikuma runs through this valley full of fields.

In general, until it joins the Sai River, one hardly sees the shadow of a boat on the Chikuma.

It is simply left to run as it will.

From that one fact you can imagine the character of the river and its scenery.

I have told you chiefly of the Chikuma as seen looking down into the valley from the high slopes of Saku and Chiisagata.

The country we were walking through now is a stretch of the river with a different character.

Passing through the towns of Usuda and Nozawa, we came out close beside the water.

Going up along the bank as far as a place called Managashi, the force of the river certainly seems to change.

Thereabouts, terribly large stones washed down from upstream lie buried.

The Chikuma running between them is less a great river than a large mountain torrent.

Among the resting houses facing this torrent is one called the Koshuya, and by the time one reaches it one feels somehow that Koshu is near.

One sees the Koshu merchants who are said to come over the mountains going to and fro.

Near Managashi the student T joined our party.

T's family are shrine priests, and their house stands a little off the highway on the shore of the quiet, secluded Matsubara Lake.

T had been waiting for us.

White poplar, reeds, maple, lacquer, birch, oak and the like grew thick along the bank we were walking.

On both banks we could count the villages of Minamimaki, Kitamaki, Aiki and others.

Small watermills built close to the water could be seen everywhere.

The bright red scar of the great landslide on the Yatsugatake range, the mountains Kinpu, Kokushi, Kobushi, Mikuni, their high peaks, and the nameless mountains folded one behind another near and far, all came into our view.

The sun began to sink.

Little by little we felt that we had come deep into the valley.

Now and then T and I stopped to watch the water going down from upstream.

In that direction the evening sun was reflected from mountain to mountain, and in the deep autumnal air one could see the smoke of a charcoal fire rising far away.

Where this valley ends stands the village of Uminokuchi.

The sound of the river began somehow to press on the ear.

After dark we entered the village.

A Night in a Mountain Village

In a piece about this mountain province I once wrote the following.

"After the Sino-French war, the army horses used by the French soldiers were bought up by our War Ministry and brought over the sea. Thirteen of them were sent to Shinshu as breeding stock. It was then that the strong-spirited Algerian horses came into the interior of Minamisaku. What people today lump together as crossbreeds refers chiefly to this Algerian strain. Later a famous American-bred stallion called Asama came in as well. Then improvement of the horses gradually began, the horse fair at Nobeyamagahara grew more prosperous every year, and news of it reached the ears of a certain imperial prince. His Highness was a colonel attached to the cavalry and a well-known lover of horses, and when he lent to Minamisaku, as a stallion, his own favorite Arabian, Phalaris, the excitement was something to see. There was talk of thirty-four foals of Phalaris's blood in a single year. How great His Highness's pleasure must have been. In the end he announced that he would come to Nobeyamagahara in person."

When the tailor took me along and I spent a night in this village at the foot of Yatsugatake, it was just at the time of that visit.

A quiet night in a mountain village — houses said to have moved up to the skirt of this plateau to escape the flooding of the river — board roofs weighted with stones against wind and snow, such as one sees on the Kiso road — lamps on the hills and lamps in the valley bottoms — from the upper floor of a rustic inn, through the faint starlight and the night air, I was able to look again at country I had seen before.

This is horse-breeding country, where there is hardly a house that does not keep a horse or two.

Horses are the chief property of the people here.

It is a place inhabited by rough, plain people, where a girl will ride alone along a dark road at night without concern.

That the bath tub is set above the drain pit — however laborious the lives of the people hereabouts, and however necessary it is for them to keep life simple — astonishes me each time I come.

Farther up the Chikuma from here there are the eight villages of Kawakami.

That district is said to be one of the most inconvenient in Shinshu, a poor and harsh mountain fastness where white rice is given only to the sick.

Hearing that we had arrived, a relative of the tailor's came to the inn with a lantern.

A girl from here went out to Komoro and served for a long time in our principal's house.

That girl too has now taken an adopted husband and has children, they say.

Connected with mountain villages like this, the lives of those who go into domestic service also somehow drew my thoughts.

You have surely never eaten anything called "harikoshi."

That is what it is called.

You have probably never even heard the name.

It is a buckwheat cake baked in hot ashes.

To sit by the fire in one's straw sandals eating that harikoshi

and talking is the pleasant way of the hearth in these parts.

On the Plateau

The next morning we climbed up to Nobeyamagahara.

All sorts of memories rose in me.

It was along this same road to the plateau that thirty-four of Phalaris's foals, two hundred and forty mares, and more than three hundred horses in all counting the stallions, had passed in procession.

The temporary pavilion put up where the horse fair is held, the purple and white curtains, the merchants with their stalls here and there, the crowd of more than four thousand — all of it came crowding confusedly into my mind.

On that occasion I walked about part of the sunlit autumn plain with the tailor, and what still remains in my eye is the tall councillor who had come from Nagano in the governor's train.

He was a gentleman who swung a white, supple hand and made a soft sound with his shoes.

And yet there was something quick about his movements.

Just at that time I was reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,

and I tried fitting the type of Vronsky as I imagined him to that councillor.

The way that gentleman took out the field glasses slung on his shoulder and gazed at the distant pasture on the Yatsugatake side was — with all respect — Vronsky himself as I conceived him.

Compared with the crush of that day, the plateau was lonely now.

Treading the weeds, some turned yellow and some dark brown with frost evidently near, and watching the morning sun on the trunks of the birches standing here and there, we went on toward the village of Itabashi.

This plateau measures some twelve miles across, and in the desolate expanse there are patches sown with buckwheat and the like, where those who work them have formed a few small hamlets here and there.

Itabashi is the nearest of them.

I once wrote of this district in a story in this way.

"How beautiful is the sight of the mist clearing from the plateau. As Yatsugatake, its skirts just visible, gradually revealed the sharp bones of the mountain, and at last even the summit could be seen touched with crimson light, shadows were falling from peak to peak. The color of the range that runs into Koshu changed I cannot say how many times. Now a purplish yellow. Now a grayish yellow. Suddenly the sun struck and began to light the road the husband and wife were taking. Looking up, clouds like torn cotton were floating, and before we knew it the sky was blue. Ah, it is morning.

Otokoyama, Kinpusan, Onnayama, Kobushidake and the rest of the mountains all appeared without exception.

Far off, flowing between them, is the source of the Chikuma; those faint shapes are the villages of Kawakami.

The Chikuma shone white in the morning sun—"

The husband and wife are the characters I meant to write about in that story.

There was a time when I too liked writing in that style.

"Farmers in narrow-sleeved coats and leggings and straw sandals, with cloths over their heads, passed the couple in group after group. There were men with hoes on their shoulders, men going along twisted at the hip under manure buckets, children following with their fathers' tobacco pouches hanging at their waists. Against climate, weeds, barren ground and poor soil, the hard labor of an autumn day was just beginning.

Some farmers were already at work.

As we came along beside a blackish field of "noppei" soil,

a rough fellow, soaked with sweat, was breaking the ground without once looking up.

Driving in his great hoe, he turned his body until he was all but falling sideways as he lifted the clods.

The smell of the black earth, enough to make one faint, came sharply to the nose… Leaving Itabashi we met parties of travelers as well.

Autumn on the plateau is now.

Looking about, there are trees only here and there.

Every branch grows out southward, so that one can imagine the strength of the winter wind.

The birches have mostly shed their leaves and stand up high into the sky, while the narrow-leaved willows hide low as though crouching.

When a wind carrying the autumn light blew noisily across, the grass ran in yellow waves and bent, and the oak leaves turned over.

The autumn sun struck the great stones lying here and there and gave one a lonely feeling.

It is here that the "arishiode"

hangs its leaves and the kobona puts out its flowers.

It is here too that the nuts of the "kashibami"

come scattering down.

Here too the birds of the field lived hidden.

The lark that nests in the shade of the bamboo grass has aged and has not the vigor of early spring.

Quail, startled by the sound of people passing, flew up now and then out of the grass.

One saw them spread their ungainly short wings and try to rise, and then drop as though falling and vanish into the grass.

Among the other trees, yellow and half withered, there were places that still kept a good deal of green shade.

These tell the traveler where the water runs, for there the scrub grows thick, hanging its branches over the spring and dipping its roots deep.

Now the farmers of the villages are driven by the autumn work, and few turn their horses out onto this plateau.

Only the farmers of Yamanashi, who live on the southern skirts of the Yatsugatake range, being short of winter fodder, had brought their horses all this way and were cutting and gathering grass…"

This is chiefly the view from the old road.

It is the old road that has the greater character.

Once I went by the new road as well, and cut across the plain on the way back.

That time I met farmers, men and women, leading horses loaded high with fodder back toward Yamanashi.

They were eating their midday meal as they walked.

When I asked, they must walk forty miles there and back and cut and gather their fodder in between.

Even leaving Yamanashi while it is still dark, they say, there is no time to sit and eat.

A meal eaten while leading a horse along — a picture, I thought, of a truly hurried life.

I told T all this as we went along the old road.

After leaving the small village of Sangenya one sees no houses.

This plateau is said to suit pasture because there is so much fodder.

Few horses are to be seen now, but among the rolling hills one can see herds far off, idling about.

The lower leaves of the birches had already fallen.

The sound of dead leaves and grass stirring — the rattle of the oak leaves in particular — reminds one that one is traveling on a plateau where the wind is cold and the sun hot.

We saw what they call a "dung hawk"

flying in the sky toward Yatsugatake.

We passed the brown oak groves standing here and there.

The way they stand against a background of distant gray cloud gives a somehow boundless feeling.

Beside the single narrow path across the plain there were purple flowers in bloom.

When I asked T, he said they were scabious.

This district was once a battlefield, and there is a place where the lord of Uminokuchi is said to have fought the warriors of Koshu and been killed.

Near the Koshu border we found a crab apple as tall as a man.

Its leaves had all fallen and small red fruit remained.

Walking through the grass to pick some, we found them still sour.

Some of them, though, had been touched by frost and tasted as though they melted in the mouth.

Before long we came out where the Koshu side of Yatsugatake could be seen.

We stood looking down on great treeless slopes and deep valleys.

"Fuji!"

the students called to one another, and from there we went down the high, steep road toward Koshu.

Part Seven

Falling Leaves, One

Every year about the twentieth of October we see the first frost.

To you, who are used to the winter that comes to the Musashino of scrub woods and flat fields, and to the pleasant, shallow frost of the city, I should like to show the frost up here in the mountains.

Let that frost come three or four times to the mulberry fields here and the mulberry leaves shrivel up at once as though scorched, and the soil of the field crumbles away… it is fearful even to look at.

What shows the ferocious power of winter is that frost.

Compared with it, snow has a softer feeling.

Falling snow rather gives one a sense of peace.

It was one morning at the end of October.

I went out to the back door of the house and watched the persimmon leaves, colored by the deep autumn rains, dropping to the ground in a way that fascinated me.

Thick-fleshed persimmon leaves are not scorched or shriveled by frost, but when the morning sun comes and the frost loosens, they cannot bear the weight and fall easily.

I stood there for a while, gazing at them vacantly.

And I understood that a particularly hard frost had come that morning.

Falling Leaves, Two

With November the cold increased sharply.

On the morning of the Emperor's Birthday I got up to find frost everywhere, and the mulberry fields and the vegetable plots and the roofs of the houses all showed white.

The persimmon leaves at the back door had fallen all at once, almost burying the path.

There was not a breath of wind.

And yet they fell quietly to the ground, one leaf and then another.

Even the sparrows chirping on the roof sounded higher and braver than usual.

It was a day when the sky was overcast and looked wholly gray with mist.

I wanted to hold my frozen hands over the kitchen fire.

The toes inside my socks were bitten with cold, and I felt how surely the fearful winter was coming near.

Those who live up in these mountains must get through nearly five months of winter, from November to March of the following year.

They must prepare for that long confinement.

Falling Leaves, Three

The winter wind came.

It was the middle of November.

One morning I was startled awake by a sound like a tide rushing in.

It was the sound of wind passing through the sky.

Now and then it seemed to quiet, and then struck again suddenly.

The doors rattled and the paper screens rattled.

Against the south screens in particular came the pattering of leaves, and between the gusts the sound of the Chikuma came much nearer than usual.

When I opened the screen the leaves came whirling even into the room.

It was a day when the sky was clear and white clouds could be seen, but the willows by the stream behind the house looked as though they were tossing their hair in the gale.

The russet frost-touched leaves left in the withered mulberry fields were blown this way and that as well.

That day, going to and from school, I crossed the street in front of the station and met men with their heads wrapped in silk-wadded caps or flannel, and women with towels over their heads and both hands hidden in their sleeves.

Everyone who passed was sniffing, or red about the eyelids, or with tears running; their faces were whitish and only their cheeks and ears and the tips of their noses red, and they walked hunched and bent, looking cold.

Those with the wind behind them seemed to fly, and those walking into it looked as though they were pushing something with all their strength.

The earth, the rocks, the color of people's skin, all looked gray to me.

The sunlight itself was a yellowish gray.

The way the wind swept the hills and fields that day was fearsome, violent, and also splendid.

Every branch of every tree bent, the trunks swayed, and the willows and bamboos leaned like grass.

The persimmons still left on the branches were blown down.

The frost-touched leaves of the plum, damson, cherry, zelkova and ginkgo all fell in that single day.

And the fallen leaves gathered here and there were blown up and whirled away.

Suddenly the mountain scenery grew lonely and bright.

Talk Around the Kotatsu

I have told you how fearful it is to wait for winter up in the mountains.

But I must also tell you that that long cold season is the richest in character and the most enjoyable time in Shinano.

To explain that, let me first speak of my own body.

Yes.

When I first came to live in this mountain province I was unused to the place and caught cold easily, which was a trial.

I wondered whether I could get through at this rate.

In fact they say that a man's organs develop according to what his life requires, and something of the kind happened to my body.

Little by little I became able to resist the sharp stimulus of the climate.

Compared with my days in Tokyo, I feel that my skin in particular has grown tougher.

My lungs can bear breathing the very cold mountain air.

More than that, listening to the cold wind rattling the oak wood whose dead leaves do not fall until spring, and looking at the onion fields white with frost, I have come, whenever I walk out of doors, to feel a certain stinging pleasure that only those who live in such a district can know.

Even the plants that grow here look different from those in a mild climate.

That the green of most evergreens looks heavy and dark here also tells us something of nature's condition.

If you were to look with eyes used to the green of Musashino at the red pine woods that grow on this stony ground, the difference in color alone would astonish you.

One morning I set out for school through a deep mist.

Walking along a road where one could not see more than a few hundred yards, I met farmers going out to work in the fields, a track watchman standing forlornly by his hut, and the carriers of the transport company pushing a goods wagon, damp with mist.

And I learned — as I feel it myself — that even on a morning cold enough to swell these men's hands bright red, none of them fears the weather as much as one would suppose.

"Well now, shall we put on another layer?"

Saying such things, they all move about.

And even so they manage to keep warm.

Then I fell in with the school party, and the morning mist gradually cleared.

Everything about us grew brighter.

The skirts of Asama began to show a little.

Swiftly moving clouds came into view.

Patches of deep blue sky appeared here and there.

Presently the west cleared and the sun came warmly through.

When Asama comes fully into view, one feels that it has indeed become winter.

Already snow like white hair can be seen on that summit.

In this way winter comes.

For those who work against a harsh climate, the one pleasant season of rest in the year comes.