The use of tokaku ("somehow," for "some reason or other") gives a peculiar pathos to the utterance.]

II

Even to see the birds flying freely above me
Only deepens my sorrow,--makes me thoughtful the more.

III

Coming? or coming not? Far down the river gazing,--
Only yomogi shadows[1] astir in the bed of the stream.

IV

Letters come by the post; photographs give me the shadow!
Only one thing remains which I cannot hope to gain.

V

If I may not see the face, but only look at the letter,
Then it were better far only in dreams to see.

VI

Though his body were broken to pieces, though his bones on the shore were bleaching,
I would find my way to rejoin him, after gathering up the bones.[2]

[1. The plant yomogi (Artemisia vulgaris) grows wild in many of the half-dry beds of the Japanese rivers.

2.

Mi wa kuda kuda ni
Hone we isobe ni
Sarasoto mama yo
Hiroi atsumete
Sote misho.

The only song of this form in the collection. The use of the verb soi implies union as husband and wife.]

III

Thus was it that these little songs, composed in different generations and in different parts of Japan by various persons, seemed to shape themselves for me into the ghost of a romance,--into the shadow of a story needing no name of time or place or person, because eternally the same, in all times and places.

Manyemon asks which of the songs I like best; and I turn over his manuscript again to see if I can make a choice. Without, in the bright spring air, the washers are working; and I hear the heavy pon-pon of the beating of wet robes, regular as the beating of a heart. Suddenly, as I muse, the voice of the boy soars up in one long, clear, shrill, splendid rocket-tone,--and breaks,--and softly trembles down in coruscations of fractional notes; singing the song that Manyemon remembers bearing when he himself was a boy:--

Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:
The flowing of water, the Way of Love.

"I think that is the best," I said. "It is the soul of all the rest."

"Hin no nusubito, koi no uta," interpretatively murmurs Manyemon. "Even as out of poverty comes the thief, so out of love the song!"

III