Mistress Oriku. Matsutaro Kawaguchi

      CHAPTER ONE

      Life on the Sumida River

      “Tokyo was so nice in those days!” Oriku narrowed her eyes as she spoke. It was early Showa, the late 1920s. She was in her early sixties, Shinkichi in his late twenties. She was talking about the city as it had been back in the Meiji period, some forty years earlier.

      “You know, you could drop a line in the river from the garden of my place and catch a sea bass. The tide brought them all the way up here. In summer you could jump in from the jetty—people didn’t swim so much as just cool off in it. That shows you how clean the Sumida River was back then.”

      She heaved a sigh and lamented the ever-grubbier landscape of Tokyo. Shinkichi, too, was born in Asakusa, and he knew how pretty the Sumida River had been in Meiji. When summer came, water sports took over the whole river, from the Ushijima Shrine to Kototoi, and there were children everywhere, learning to swim.

      “When I think of Tokyo in those days, what makes me saddest of all is seeing the river so dirty now. I don’t care how much the world has changed, or civilization has progressed—couldn’t they at least do something about the river? If it has to be like this, they might as well just fill it in and turn it into a park.” Flushed with indignation, she really thought they could do it.

      “And then, at night the tanuki badgers would come out, and they would give the old caretaker such a fright that young girls wouldn’t work here. There were no modern conveniences in those days—no automobiles or the like—and when you went out at night, you’d go four or five together, hand in hand, swinging lanterns, along the bank. It was quite something! Rickshaws wouldn’t come late at night, and after nine o’clock there wouldn’t be a soul along the Mukōjima embankment.”

      Oriku’s Shigure Teahouse stood beside the river, among the reeds, on land within the Terajima village boundary. The Mukōjima embankment followed the river straight from Makurabashi to Kototoi, but at the Kototoi dango shop it turned right, then left at the Chōmeiji Temple corner and continued on between peaceful rice fields on the right and, on the left, a marshy expanse of reeds. In those days the embankment was made of high-mounded earth, with a row of sturdy cherry trees on either side. These were of course beautiful in blossom time, but they were lovely, too, when covered with leaves. In fact they had a special charm in every season. When the blossoms were at their height, people came in animated droves to see them, and on one side of the embankment teashops with reed blinds sprang up all along the river, from Makura Bridge to Kototoi. Over the entrance to each shop hung a festive curtain that fluttered in the breeze to invite customers in.

      These were no simple wayside teashops, either, but the outposts of famous Tokyo restaurants, serving sushi, light dishes to go with saké, or hearty soups for teetotalers. Inside, drunken revelers