I
Hyogo, May 5, 1895.
Hyogo, this morning, lies bathed in a limpid magnificence of light indescribable,—spring light, which is vapory, and lends a sort of apparitional charm to far things seen through it. Forms remain sharply outlined, but are almost idealized by faint colors not belonging to them; and the great hills behind the town aspire into a cloudless splendor of tint that seems the ghost of azure rather than azure itself.
Over the blue-gray slope of tiled roofs there is a vast quivering and fluttering of extraordinary shapes,—a spectacle not indeed new to me, but always delicious. Everywhere are floating—tied to very tall bamboo poles—immense brightly colored paper fish, which look and move as if alive. The greater number vary from five to fifteen feet in length; but here and there I see a baby scarcely a foot long, hooked to the tail of a larger one. Some poles have four or five fish attached to them at heights proportioned to the dimensions of the fish, the largest always at the top. So cunningly shaped and colored these things are that the first sight of them is always startling to a stranger. The lines holding them are fastened within the head; and the wind, entering the open mouth, not only inflates the body to perfect form, but keeps it undulating,—rising and descending, turning and twisting, precisely like a real fish, while the tail plays and the fins wave irreproachably. In the garden of my next-door neighbor there are two very fine specimens. One has an orange belly and a bluish-gray back; the other is all a silvery tint; and both have big weird eyes. The rustling of their motion as they swim against the sky is like the sound of wind in a cane-field. A little farther off I see another very big fish, with a little red boy clinging to its back. That red boy represents Kintoki, strongest of all children ever born in Japan, who, while still a baby, wrestled with bears and set traps for goblin-birds.
Everybody knows that these paper carp, or koi, are hoisted only during the period of the great birth festival of boys, in the fifth month; that their presence above a house signifies the birth of a son; and that they symbolize the hope of the parents that their lad will be able to win his way through the world against all obstacles,—even as the real koi, the great Japanese carp, ascends swift rivers against the stream. In many parts of southern and western Japan you rarely see these koi. You see, instead, very long narrow flags of cotton cloth, called nobori, which are fastened perpendicularly, like sails, with little spars and rings to poles of bamboo, and bear designs in various colors of the koi in an eddy,—or of Shoki, conqueror of demons,—or of pines,—or of tortoises,—or other fortunate symbols.