The Pleasures of an Analog Soul / Books: "Musashino" by Doppo Kunikida

Where the peak of Fuji is hazy
In Musashino

Light pours down brightly
In Musashino, where the peak of Fuji is hazy


This is the opening of the school song (lyrics by Yoshio Koseki) of my alma mater, the Seventh Elementary School in Kodaira City, Tokyo. As someone who considers Musashino their home, just as these lyrics suggest, it is only natural that I feel a special affinity for "Musashino" (1901), written by the ill-fated Meiji-era author Doppo Kunikida. In its opening, one can find the following passage.


It is said that the Musashino of old was renowned for its peerless beauty, characterized by an endless expanse of pampas grass fields, but the Musashino of today is a forest. One could truly say that the forest is the defining feature of the Musashino of today. The trees are primarily of the oak variety, shedding all their leaves in winter and bursting with dripping fresh green in spring; this transformation takes place simultaneously across the fields for more than a dozen ri east of the Chichibu mountain range. The wonder of it, presenting various scenes through the four seasons—in haze, rain, moonlight, wind, mist, autumn showers, snow, green shade, and autumn leaves—is something that people from the western provinces or the Tohoku region find difficult to grasp. It seems that, originally, the Japanese people had not known much of the beauty of deciduous forests like the oak.


Doppo was born in Chiba Prefecture, raised in Hiroshima and Yamaguchi Prefectures due to family circumstances, and moved to Tokyo to study at the Tokyo Senmon Gakko (now Waseda University), where he was baptized into Christianity under the influence of his schoolmates. Later, after working as a reporter for Soho Tokutomi's "Kokumin Shimbun" and publishing accounts of his time as a war correspondent during the First Sino-Japanese War, and following the failure of his marriage, he settled in Shibuya Village, Toyotama District, Tokyo Prefecture (now Shibuya Ward) in 1896 at the age of 25 to pursue his career as a writer. It is said that the Musashino that appeared to his eyes was, first and foremost, characterized by its deciduous forests.


I, too, agree with all my heart. I entered Kodaira Seventh Elementary School in 1965. Although urbanization had progressed in the Yamanote area, including Shibuya, triggered by the Tokyo Olympics held the previous year, the atmosphere of Musashino still remained strongly in the Tama area outside the city center. Even in the neighborhood surrounding the elementary school, thickets grew here and there, providing a perfect playground for children while showing their seasonal expressions just as Doppo had written.


That is not all. When you passed through the thickets, a different world would sometimes open up beyond them. Doppo must have been deeply impressed as well, for he depicted the scene he viewed from the embankment in Koganei, which neighbors Kodaira, on a midsummer day in this way. It is my favorite passage in "Musashino."


The sky is filled with sweltering clouds, clouds hiding behind clouds, and at the bottom between the clouds, the blue sky appears. Where the clouds meet the blue sky, it takes on a pure white, transparent color—a color that is hard to compare to silver or snow, yet somehow calm and light. There, the blue sky looks even deeper and more azure. If it were just this, it wouldn't feel like summer, but then a kind of murky, haze-like substance stirs between the clouds, making the entire pattern of the sky look agitated, uneven, wild, and complex. Rays of light piercing the clouds and shadows cast from the clouds intersect here and there, and a spirit of unbridled freedom trembles somewhere in the air. Every forest, every treetop, down to the tips of the grass leaves, melts into light and heat, dozing, lazy, and drunk in a daze. A corner of the forest is cut off in a straight line, and through that gap, a wide field is visible. Across the field, heat haze rises, and one cannot stare at it for long.


I, too, must have surely seen it as a child. The scene where the terrifyingly blue, clear sky and the reddish-brown ground of the Kanto loam layer stretched on endlessly. As the railway tracks of the Seibu Shinjuku Line cut through to bisect that heaven and earth, and trains painted in two-tone red passed by periodically, I would walk back and forth along the ridges of the fields for no reason, or climb mulberry trees to watch wild silkworms devouring the leaves. Once, I even caught a giant water bug—a villainous star among aquatic creatures for a child (which catches frogs and crucian carp to suck their blood)—in a pond I had encountered for the first time, and I never told even my closest friends about that place... What nostalgic memories, or were they just a dream or an illusion?


Doppo noted that when writing "Musashino," he used the nature descriptions in "The Rendezvous" by the Russian literary giant Turgenev, translated by Futabatei Shimei, as a foundation. In that sense, it might be closer to say that he did not simply "observe" Musashino, but rather "discovered" it through the power of modern literature. Kodaira Seventh Elementary School opened in 1967, more than 60 years later, and I find myself thinking now that if it weren't for Doppo's existence, the school song might have had completely different lyrics.