沼田見

You hear about the sakura blossoms; you hear about the viewing of the fall leaves, and the snow festivals up in Hokkaido. No one talks about how, just as the last sakura blossoms are falling, all the rice paddies suddenly become shimmering sheets of water reflecting the mountains and the sky, so that space seems to stretch out in extra dimensions as you drive along the same roads you've driven for eight months. I pretty much couldn't be less of an expert about how the cultivation of rice works; but I'm assuming that it's some step in the process that causes everyone to simultaneously flood their fields like this. I want to be a passenger instead of a driver on the roads that cut the corner of Toyooka and head toward Kinosaki, so that I can properly gawk at these odd gridded lakes that will be gone, I assume, in a week or two. Maybe one of these days I will actually remember my camera and find somewhere to pull over. But in case I don't, I wanted to mention it here so I don't forget.

I think I've talked about liking reflections because of the way they make me contemplate the path of the light. I don't remember mentioning the other reason: the way they can open up the space, create the illusion of the infinite. It makes such a difference to the landscape to have the sky reflected in all the fields, to have the illusion of a whole alternate, slightly dulled and distorted and rippled, upside-down version of the world stretching out beneath us. Because they are so shallow and smooth, the rice paddies actually reflect the scenery like mirrors in a way that no lake I've ever seen does. It's incredible, and there are (as far as I know) no "flooded rice paddy viewing" festivals. I suppose because it's man-made, a practical and necessary part of farming, and not some sort of mystical gift of nature. But I think it's become one of my favorite things about life here; and all the more so because it's so unheralded.

I also -- and I don't know if I can phrase this right -- find something powerful in the temporary existence of these reflections. Like just for a few weeks (again, I am not an expert about rice fields: for all I know they'll be flooded for a couple months. I can really only vouch that they weren't all fall and winter...), these mountains get to see themselves in the mirror, get to have these almost-twin versions of themselves completing the symmetry, but then they will be gone, and then the mountains will simply rise from green fields. Right, I don't think I phrased it well. But the changing nature of it seems to make it more beautiful, somehow. Or like, how it makes the vague question float through my mind of whether the reflections only come into existence when the rice fields are flooded, or whether in some abstract sense (and this is, I'll admit, more how it feels to me) they are always there but hidden, and it's like the water erases the earth that was blocking them so we can see down into this other endless world. Well -- of course that's complete bull. But does it matter that it's complete bull? I think it's an interesting image and in a way it's just as true as anything else.

I can't think of any relevant lyrics (probably because I have an irrelevant song stuck in my head); and I need to go to sleep (like, an hour ago...), so, 歌詞なしにしよう。 Instead have a few pictures that people who remembered their cameras apparently took at some point. ^_^;;