JAPAN: Rain God

It rained. Cozily seated at green-gold tables in the green-gold Hotel Imperial, Tokyo, wealthy wayfarers watched the sky blacken through the rain. All over Tokyo it rained.

First Wayfarer: “There’ll be no movies tonight—Asakusa Park (Nipponese Broadway) is running water a foot deep.”

Second Wayfarer: “And all the Yoshiwara-folk will be abed before midnight—if their roofs don’t leak.”

First Wayfarer: “Yes, there’s probably not a passable street in all Lowland.”t

Second Wayfarer: “I see by the paper a streetcar crashed down into the moat by the Palace. Why no one was killed. . . .”

There was a fluttering of feet. A bevy of waiters issued fanlike from the pantry, pattered each to his client. “Sir,” said each, “can no cook steak, no cook everything, fire died, very too much water.”

The flood had backed up even to the hotel. It had flung back the sandbag dikes, swept through the doors, put out the kitchen fires, was attacking the carpets of the foyer, had begun to drool into the dining-room.

On the second day of the flood— worst in eight years—all traffic was suspended. There were no trains to Kobe or Yokohama. Uncountable thousands were homeless. Deaths were reported. Reservists were called out to guard the bridges. It rained all day.

And the third day, it rained. But on the fourth day, God’s covenant with Noah was renewed.

*Segregated quarter of Tokyo in which are concentrated the scenes of night carousing. Permanent female denizens are called Geisha, literally “a person of pleasing accomplishments.”

tTokyo’s poor dwell on the flats commonly called Lowland, on both sides of the River Sumida.