Spring in a Snowy Country

AGE

For twenty-five or twenty-six years I had traveled almost every year to a village somewhere in the north or east, but the only time I wanted to leave a travel writing was on the long journey from the summer of 1920 to the autumn. I serialized it in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun under the title of "From a Miniature Note", but I couldn't write it well, so I quit midway through.

serialize......（動）連載する

midway......（副）中途に

When I take it out again and read it, I find that I've already oddly forgotten so many things myself. There are a lot of things I want to think about now, thinking about how I felt back then. When a thin haze of the most recent modern history stands between me and it, even a little bit, it makes me feel nostalgic, like looking at the garden next door. So, I decided to make a one-volume booklet like this, adding some miscellaneous sentences.

take out......取り出す

oddly......（副）奇妙に

haze......（名）霞

Some might say it's a selfish wish, but I want people in the warm south, in rural areas where it's not a snow country at all, to read this book. However, since the last "A Small Record of the South Sea" was also set on a very dark green offshore island, it was difficult to recommend it to readers in the Shinetsu and Ou regions. It can't be helped that these days everyone is not only concerned about their own local issues and what the world thinks of their region, but also decides that they don't need to think about other people, assuming that other regions are largely the same. Unless this trend is completely changed, national cohesion will be mechanical, and it is inevitable that the prying eyes of unknown foreign countries will come first. My motivation for lining up two such different lives, one in the north and the other in the south at both ends of Japan, is for those reasons and by no means personal preference.

miscellaneous......（形）雑多な

selfish......（形）わがままな

offshore......（形）沖合の

recommend......（動）薦める

cohesion......（名）団結

inevitable......（形）免れない

pry......（動）詮索する

However, the fact that I dealt with such important and complicated issues in a casual travel writing may be criticized, but no matter how much I wanted to work in my study, there were few books on these subjects, but only occasionally they were looked down from a high place. So we went out and experimented, and if it sounds unfortunately fanciful, it's entirely because my writing is inexperienced, or because Japanese writing is not yet suitable for this kind of writing. Nothing more can be left to the compassion of sympathetic readers.

casual......（形）気軽な

occasionally......（副）時々、たまに

fanciful......（形）空想的な

inexperienced......（形）未熟な

compassion......（名）思いやり、慈悲

sympathetic......（形）同情の念がある