Roused thus by these earliest sounds of the city's wakening life, I
slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning
over a soft green cloud of spring foliage rising from the river-bounded
garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its
farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ohashigawa, opening
into the grand Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in
a dim grey frame of peaks. Just opposite to me, across the stream, the
blue-pointed Japanese dwellings have their to [1] all closed; they are
still shut up like boxes, for it is not yet sunrise, although it is day.
But oh, the charm of the vision--those first ghostly love-colours of
a morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself resolved into a visible
exhalation! Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake
verge--long nebulous bands, such as you may have seen in old Japanese
picture-books, and must have deemed only artistic whimsicalities unless
you had previously looked upon the real phenomena. All the bases of the
mountains are veiled by them, and they stretch athwart the loftier peaks
at different heights like immeasurable lengths of gauze (this singular
appearance the Japanese term 'shelving'), [2] so that the lake appears
incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a
beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with
it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume, and visionary
strips of hill-ranges figure as league-long causeways stretching out
of sight--an exquisite chaos, ever-changing aspect as the delicate fogs
rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun's yellow rim comes into sight,
fine thin lines of warmer tone--spectral violets and opalines--shoot
across the flood, treetops take tender fire, and the unpainted façades
of high edifices across the water change their wood-colour to vapoury
gold through the delicious haze.
Looking sunward, up the long Ohashigawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden
bridge, one high-pooped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most
fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw--a dream of Orient seas, so
idealised by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost
that catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly
semi-diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light.