Seiobo There Below Read Free Page A

impoverished, worn, dreary with bitterness: a life without hope, risk, or greatness, without the sense of any higher order — though all he would have had to do would have been to glance over while on the northbound number 3 bus, or on the battered bicycle, or while strolling on the path inscribed into the dust of the banks of the Kamo, to take a glance and see what was over there in the water, to see what the big white bird was doing there, motionlessly, as extending its neck, its head, its beak forward, it fixedly gazes at the foam-tossed surface of the water.
    There is no other river like it in the world, if someone sees it for the first time he simply can’t believe his eyes, he just can’t believe it, and standing on one of the bridges — let us say, the Gojo-ohashi — he asks his companion, if there is one, what exactly is this here below us, in this wide riverbed, where at first water, but only in the narrowest of veins, trickles here and there between the completely absurd-looking islets; because this is the question, whether someone can believe what they are seeing or not; the Kamogawa is a relatively wide river in which there is so little water that in the riverbed the little islets, hundreds of them, are formed from silt, islets now overgrown with grass, the entire Kamogawa is full of such haphazard silt-islets overgrown with grass, knee- or chest-high, and it is between these that the little bit of water meanders, as if on the verge of completely drying up; what has happened here, a person asks his companion, if there is one; maybe some catastrophe or what, why has the river dried up so much? — he, however, must be content with the reply that oh, the Kamo was a very wild river, and beautiful, and certainly downstream by the Shijo-ohashi it still is, and sometimes here too, when the rainy season sets in, even now it can be filled up with water, until 1935 it flooded on a regular basis, for centuries they couldn’t control it, even in the Heike Monogatari it is described how they couldn’t control it, then Toyotami Hideyori ordered the regulation of the river, and a certain Suminokura Soan and his father Ryõi began to do so; indeed Ryõi completed the Takase canal and then its channel was straightened, and then by 1894 the Biwa canal was completed, but of course there were still floods, and the last time, precisely in 1935, so great was the flooding that nearly all of the bridges were destroyed, and there were many deaths, and unspeakable damage; well at that point, it was decided that they would finally put an end to its destructive strength, they decided they would build this and they would build that, and not just along the embankments but down there in the riverbed as well, a kind of system of irregular dams made of blocking stones, which would then break up the flow of the water that was excessively turbulent as it fell in torrents from the northwestern mountains; and so they broke it, says the local companion, if there is one, as is clearly visible, they were able to break its strength, there is no more flooding, no more death, no more damage, only these tricklings; these blocking stones, this system of dams work very effectively and, well, the birds — from the middle of the Gojo-ohashi — the local companion points upward and downward, many kilometers into the distance, and toward the riverbed; these countless birds, they come from the Biwa lake; but even he doesn’t know exactly from where, and there is everything here — Yurikamome, Kawasemi, Magamo, Onagagamo and Hidorigamo, Mejiro and Kinkurohajiro — really all different sorts and this kind and that, and little dragonflies dart about here and there, it is just the snow-white great heron that the local companion, if there is one, does not mention; he doesn’t mention it because he doesn’t see it, as he points over there, because of its continual motionlessness, everyone has got so used to it, it is always down there, they don’t even