午夜剧场

The scenery of Tokyo undergoes intense transformation. The Dojunkan Apartments and other sites I spent my late 20s photographing have all disappeared. When I tell young people things like, "There used to be a public bathhouse here," and they ask, "When was that?" I find myself slipping up and saying, "About twenty-some years ago." While it is natural for someone over sixty, to them, it is a past they couldn't possibly remember—in other words, a story that belongs to history.

The "Nomigawa" featured in this book is a Class B river flowing through Tokyo's Setagaya, Meguro, and Ota wards. It ran through the neighborhoods of Kugahara, Okusawa, and Todoroki, where I spent my life from childhood until my mid-20s. Along with my memories of that time, I explored the history and evolution of this river through old maps and literature, walking from its source to its mouth across a span of over thirty years. Phrases like "There used to be... here" frequently occurred, as did "Something like this has appeared" or "This doesn't match my memory at all." The Nomigawa itself had transformed from a foul-smelling sewage river into a pseudo-river flowing with colorless, transparent, highly treated water.

Shortly after I entered elementary school, on a day of heavy rain, a classmate muttered, "Ah, the Nomigawa is overflowing. I can't go home today." In the past, the Nomigawa frequently flooded and was a river that would "swallow" (nomu) houses. Regarding the etymology of "Dodobashi" on the Nomigawa in the direction he was looking, there is a theory that the Senzoku tributary flowing into the Nomigawa was a waterfall that roared with a "dodo-dodo" sound. The "Shinpen Musashi Fudoki Ko" from the Edo Bunsei era also hints at flooding near the confluence, stating, "If there is long rain... it does not escape water damage." That episode from that rainy day fits within the timeframe of my own life, yet it already seems to be a part of history. The Ebara and Kugahara plateaus on both banks of the Nomigawa consist of Musashino loam layers from around the Würm glacial period, and one can find differences in the topography in the tributaries and culverts on both banks. Furthermore, the Nomigawa is a trace of the repeated route changes made by the Tama River—which once flowed into the Arakawa river system—before settling into its current route. These are all likely prehistoric stories.

The rapidly changing scenery of Tokyo is perhaps like surface moss from the perspective of the Musashino Plateau, and the humans living temporarily in the gaps of that moss might be like mold. As one such human, this book was written not as Pascal's "thinking reed," but as a "history-telling mold."

Yu Kondo

Sairyusha

188 pages, 2,700 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.