Abstract
This article discusses how a sequence of 120 bamboo branch lyrics, Ōtō shiji zasshi (Miscellaneous Poems on the Four Seasons East of the Kamogawa, ca. 1826), represent the interface of Kyoto's bustling entertainment quarter with the waters of Kamogawa River that sustained it. Adapting elements of the French philosopher and Sinologist François Jullien's (b. 1951) analytical schema identifying and characterizing what he calls the “folds” or patterns of Chinese and Western thought, the article addresses how poems embed urban livelihoods and entertainment in the seasonal rhythms of their physical settings, and how fluidity, “communicability,” and “discretion” pervade the urban ambiance or urbanity conveyed therein. Pondering such features of this poetry in tandem with Jullien's thought might lead to fruitful discussions of the cultural and physical “folds” that have hardened into present-day urban landscapes. Exploring how fluidity and receptivity to transitivity, both literal and figurative—to currents of air, water, and life itself—might facilitate growth of an urbane sensibility that is less obtrusive and, ergo, less environmentally corrosive in cities of the future.
