MEMORIES OF WIND AND WAVES
Self-Portrait of Lakeside Japan
By DR. JUNICHI SAGA
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002. 258 pages, $24

reviewed by Michael Guest

"Self-portrait" is Junichi Saga's apt expression for "oral history," as students of Japanese culture may know, since his earlier book, Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan (1987), is used as a resource by a number of universities around the world. Saga, who was born in 1941, is a medical practitioner in his hometown of Tsuchiura in southern Ibaraki Prefecture, on Lake Kasumigaura, the second-largest freshwater lake in Japan. When he was a young intern at a hospital in Honolulu, Saga was concerned by the absence of literature about life in Japan, although works about the traditional arts and high culture were readily available abroad. He returned home and for the next twenty years applied himself to the job of recording and transcribing conversations with his patients, and then organizing this raw narrative material into a compelling documentary of everyday provincial life in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Memories of Silk and Straw won praise and recognition, including NHK's cultural award for international publication. Saga subsequently took up the poignant task of working against time to preserve the reminiscences of another group of interview subjects, thirty or so people in their late eighties and nineties who had made their living on the water. All of them have since passed away, but their recollections come back to life in Memories of Wind and Waves: A Self- Portrait of Lakeside Japan, which focuses on what was truly the vital force of an era now past: workaday life on and about the lake and interlacing rivers.

The region is beautifully situated for a firsthand view of the dynamic post-feudal history of Japan as it impacted the individual, family, and community. Now a commuter suburb of Tokyo, during the Edo period (1600-1868) Tsuchiura was a castle-town and "post-station" town—an officially regulated caterer to travelers on the shogun's highway. Lake Kasumigaura was a bustling transportation route and abundant fishing ground; the River Tone connected with it via a network of waterways to provide passage to Edo, or modern-day Tokyo, as late as the 1920s. Over the past hundred years, the forces of rapid industrialization and urbanization coupled with massive land reclamation projects have utterly transformed human life and work along with the natural environment. Rivers have dried up, been redirected, and even been cemented over to become expressways.

Perhaps most embodying the era of change are those whose lives were aligned with the rivers' own—the captains, crews, and builders of the takase (flat-bottomed riverboats), which, until their obsolescence in the mid-1920s, carried mostly rice and firewood destined for the kitchens of Tokyo. Takase were propelled by a single sail and oars. To get them through the twelve miles of shallows and canal that ran from the town of Ohori, the center of Tone river traffic, into the River Edo, they had to be poled along and towed from the shore by teams of laborers. The trip takes three-quarters of an hour by local train now, but in those days, the captains and boatmen, resplendent in their bright quilted jackets and loincloths, brought to the countryside the latest fancy goods and information from Tokyo. They would drink and gamble aboard the "bathboats" at Ohori and womanize to the strains of the shamisen lute in the geisha houses along the canal.

Those with a more staid if equally hardworking existence on the lake endured severe flooding two or three times a year, a side effect of land reclamation and river diversion works. Fishing on the lake in a small boat could be a demanding occupation, beset with poverty and disaster. Challenging, too, was the life of the tenant rice-farmers, who "didn't own enough dirt to throw at a crow" and might be forced in hard times to go fishing as itinerants, days away in the desolate marshland. It was a tough, fiercely competitive life, yet one imbued with a deep sense of responsibility toward the community—an attitude exemplified by a doomed fisherman who, lost in a hurricane, trussed himself up in his sail so as to minimize the inconvenience to his neighbors when they went searching for his corpse.

Along with the sailing and fishing folk, village and town dwellers appear among Saga's storytellers, presenting a colorful cross-section of the community of the time. A ship carpenter explains the special technique for hammering together a small sappabune (bamboo-leaf) boat: hitting the nails in time with the song of the yoshikiri (reed-warbler bird) would set up the precise rhythmic pattern needed to ease them into the wood and seal it against leaks. An eighty-year-old Tsuchiura woman describes preparing her marriage trousseau throughout her teens. A typical girl from a "reasonably well-off farming family," she used thread and material that she produced herself from hand-bred silkworms, as was the custom. By the time she married, she had woven and sewn enough kimonos to fill three chests, sufficient to last her lifetime. A townsman born in 1904 savors remembrances of festival sweets: "The maker would knead rice and sugar together, then use his fingers and chopsticks to fashion it into different shapes—chickens, rabbits, all kinds of animals. We kids would watch with our mouths wide open, as if it were a magic show."

The text is brilliantly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, who renders transcriptions of the spoken dialect—which is almost incomprehensible to nonlocals—into transparent, idiomatic English that preserves the earthy, homespun character of the original narratives. A collection of fine illustrations by the author's late father, Dr. Susumu Saga, a surgeon, complements the spoken record with precise visual detail.