Mood Reading · 2026-05-04 · Reading time ~ 9 min
Six Japanese Nature Pieces for a Rainy Day Window
Six Meiji-Shōwa essays — Saitō, Ōmachi, Naka, Tayama — that flow as quietly as the rain. Korean translations on Pagera.
Pagera Editorial
On a rainy day, the right book is one that runs as quietly as the rain itself. Not something with fast cuts or rising tension, but a piece that breathes at the same pace as the water on glass. Meiji and Taishō nature essays from Japan do exactly this. They watch a single thing — a carp drifting in a river, cherry blossoms falling without sound, water drawn from a well before dawn — and they don't look away until they understand it. Here are six short pieces available in Korean on Pagera, arranged for a window-seat afternoon.
1. Carp — Saitō Mokichi
A short memoir from 1946, set along the Mogami River in Yamagata. The poet and psychiatrist Saitō Mokichi recalls watching carp transported in tanks through mountain roads, and the particular stillness of fish resting in clear water. The essay closes with a waka in 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm that settles like the last ripple on a surface. "Watching the carp, their forms grow quiet in my mind." Quiet is what it gives you.
2. The Cherry Blossoms of Koganei — Ōmachi Keigetsu
Spring 1901. A half-day walk along the canal path at Koganei, west of Tokyo, lined on both sides with blooming cherries. The prose has a Sino-Japanese formality that sounds slow and measured in translation, which happens to suit a rainy-afternoon pace very well. "The falling flowers make no sound; the flowing water says nothing." That line alone is worth the read, whatever the season.
Read The Cherry Blossoms of Koganei
3. Late Autumn — Tayama Katai
A short essay on the deepening of autumn in the Tokyo suburbs. Leaves down, smoke from a garden fire, the particular silence of late afternoon in a district where the houses thin out. Tayama Katai is known for his naturalist novels, but his short essays show a more patient eye — observation without argument, description without sentiment. Good for rain.
4. Impressions of Sapporo — Iwano Hōmei
Late Meiji. A self-described wanderer arrives in Sapporo and walks the grid streets in the early evening. Red brick scorched by the great fire, acacia trees, the government building at the center of the city plan. Iwano Hōmei writes with a flat, deliberate eye that catalogues what he sees without inflating it. Walking a strange city in the rain looks much like this.
5. Drawing Water — Tokutomi Roka
A short memoir of moving from Tokyo to a rural village and discovering what it takes to carry two buckets of water from a canal at dawn. The yoke, the buckets, the knees bending to keep balance, the cold splashing through the trouser leg. Tokutomi Roka calls himself a human camel and means it warmly. The essay is funny and grounded in the weight of actual water, which is the weight of actually living somewhere.
6. In the Moonlight — Tanaka Kōtarō
After the Sanriku tsunami of 1896, a fisherman walks the ruined shoreline under moonlight and sees, or believes he sees, his dead wife. The story is filed as a ghost tale but reads more as a meditation on grief and the edge where the living and the absent stand close together. Tanaka Kōtarō tends toward pathos over fright. Read at night with rain on the roof.
Suggested reading order
Start with The Cherry Blossoms of Koganei — the lightest tone, the most open air. Move through Drawing Water and Carp into Late Autumn. If you want to go deeper, finish with Impressions of Sapporo and In the Moonlight. All six together take under an hour. The rain will likely still be falling when you finish.
The closing verse
Many essays from this period do not end with a sentence of conclusion. They end with a waka or a couplet in Sino-Japanese rhythm — a short line that draws the whole piece tight. Saitō Mokichi's carp essay closes this way. So does Ōmachi's cherry-blossom walk. Read those closing lines out loud, even quietly, and you will find they have the same rhythm as rain against glass. The essay ends; the rain does not; something stays.
Browse all Korean-translated works on Pagera: Translated titles