Essay of My Wonderful Life, Yanesen

More than a quarter of a century has already passed, since the first time I came to Tokyo when I was young. I stayed in Suginami-ku, Tokyo. Since then, although I changed my house a few times, I continued staying within Suginami-ku. For the young generation coming from the area other than Tokyo, the Suginami-ku is a clean and modern but standoffish urban town. As I was still young, I loved such uptown atmosphere.

However, around four years ago, I suddenly changed my house from Suginami-ku to Yanesen, which is the typical downtown area in Tokyo. Yanesen is an informal name of the three areas, Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi, of Bunkyo-ku and Taito-ku, Tokyo. My surrounding people were surprised why I moved to such a typical downtown area. This is the edge of the Musashino Plateau, which continues from the uptown to the direction of bayside. Yanesen is located at the part of the edge of this Plateau, Hongo. There are the Shinobazunoike Pond and the Ueno Park.

The reason why I moved to Yenesen was because I was influenced by the novel of Mr.Ryotaro Shiba. The title was "Hongo---the highway series". Since I was a fan of the Shiba literature from the beginning, I have already enjoyed many of his books and was influenced by for example "the Clouds on a Hill", which made me consider the future and the past of Japan. Under the bad mood just after the riot of the universities, these books gave me courage to tackle with my life positively. Even if I went into business in Tokyo after my graduation, I still have had enjoyed his books, such as "Ryoma", "Kashin", "Mountain Pass", which brought me the ambitious revolution time of 120 years ago. Mr. Shiba authored many books, among them, his highway series books are ones of his most important works. They contain not only the various places in Japan, but also the interior China, Taiwan or even Holland and New York. What he described was the footprints of the Japanese.

What I admire Mr. Shiba, as an author, is that he can describe both of historically epoch-making events and small life of an ordinary citizen at the same time. Strangely enough, these two contradictory descriptions are harmonized in the same book, which we feel quite naturally. I think this is the magic of Mr. Shiba's literature. Among his highway series books, only the books titles as "Hongo" and "Honjo, Fukagawa and Kanda" described Tokyo. One day after I read these two books, my wife and I had a walk in this area. When we passed the place of Kanda-Otamagaike Pond, we thought of the former Chiba exercise hall. We continued to walk into Yushima, where reminded us Miss Ichiyou and Mr. Syoyou, who were famous novelists about 100 years ago. When we arrived at Yanesen area, we saw the Nezu Shrine and the remains of the previous homes of Mr. Soseki and Mr. Oogai. Although it was only one day's trip, we enjoyed the atmosphere of the end of Meiji era, about 100 years ago. Not only that, we carried out unexpected discovery. We liked these areas very much. Especially in Yanesen houses and stores are closely built and located in narrow alleys and people live very closely to others. When we were young, we didn't like this kind of downtown atmosphere. However now we are getting older and we have already reached to the middle age. Now we have nostalgic but comfortable feelings on downtown. By such a reason, when condominium was put on the market in Yenesen area, I bought it without any hesitation. I soon moved from Suginami-ku. Now we enjoyed to stay here. One more good point to stay here is the time for commuting to my office was shortened from 70 minutes to only 20 minutes.

(February 23, 1998)