Spring in a Snowy Country

第1話

Even in China, I think the center of literature has long been on both banks of the Yangtze River, where the willows are lush. Even so, what our ancestors were able to understand and admire in the past was the so-called elegance of Gangnam. Perhaps it was because there was a natural and strikingly similar affinity between the senses of the two peoples. It is not easy for people who first learned of the existence of writing to know every corner of the minds of people in a foreign country through new signs. Especially as far as the imagination of the people living on the island was limited. There was also a small amount of discrimination in their original lives. Nevertheless, it is a wise and agile thing to say that it is still rare today that after only a few exchanges they have quickly mastered all that they consider beautiful and elegant, or that they have borrowed the same techniques to color and shape and explain what is inside of them. In addition to understanding that the actions that had been working on the local population for some time happened to be the result of many things that both sides had in common, and that they were able to come and approach each other as easily as friends who had never met each other, it is, in fact, difficult to explain why this is the case with the previous laws of cultural imitation alone.

Yangtze River......（名）長江

willow......（名）柳

lush......（形）繁茂した、青々とした

Gangnam......（名）江南

strikingly......（副）著しく

affinity......（名）親しみ、親和性

people......（名）民族

discrimination......（名）差別

agile......（形）機敏な

Therefore, there were even scholars who wanted to find the distant old homeland of the Japanese there, so the new theory of the descendants of Taibo of Wu was a fantasy that was easy to come up with without any evidence. Not only did the fish and birds come from far and wide, and the fruits and flowers of the trees and grasses were already there, but the warm, moist air that nourished and nurtured them, the wet sunlight that shimmers through it, the rich water and the soil that was sorted and leveled by it, gave the peoples of both countries a very similar texture for hundreds of years. It is not surprising that human sentiment has been under the influence of that continuum.

descendant......（名）子孫

Taibo......（名）泰伯

Wu......（名）呉

come up with......思いつく

shimmer......（動）チラチラ光る

On top of that, both areas had an insatiably long spring in both. Look in any direction in the world and you won't find many landmasses that enjoy a temperate climate with lazy winters and summers pushed back and forth like those around the East Asian region. The feeling of walking through a forest of flowers and waiting for them, or wondering where they are going to fall in the breeze, is something that only those who live in a country where the idyllic spring days last as long as they did yesterday and today. As if an amusing image of a butterfly in a dream backed up a quirky philosophy, the loneliness of sitting in the daytime shadows with no storms or clouds, wondering what to do, before long became a poem of spring melancholy. The women also called this a spring grudge, but it wasn't necessarily a simple human pining. Nor was it an agony as scanty as the ennui of modern man. If they were beasts, it would be a time to just sleep and occupy more peace than contentment, but people had a calculation to not have time to forget the shortness of life, but rather to huddle in the good day and the good hour and spare themselves the waste. In other words, various spring games were invented to wile away this happy disharmony, and art was gradually created from among them. Although the Japanese were not lazy people in the past, their circumstances and experiences were so similar that they learned to know and learn the leisurely and elegant hobbies of their neighbors without much effort.

level......（動）平らにする

continuum......（名）連続

insatiably......（副）飽くことなく

temperate......（形）温和な

idyllic......（形）牧歌的な、のどかな

quirky......（形）突飛な

grudge......（名）恨み、怨念

pine......（動）切望する、恋焦がれる

agony......（名）苦悶、苦痛

ennui......（名）倦怠、退屈、アンニュイ

occupy......（動）占有する

contentment......（名）満足、充足

huddle......（動）うずくまる

wile......（動）紛らわす

disharmony......（名）不調和

leisurely......（形）のんびりした