Going on further, they came to a very large river between the provinces of Musashi and Shimousa. It is called the Sumida. They gathered and sat on its bank, thinking of the capital and sighing to one another, "How endlessly far we have come," when the ferryman said, "Get in the boat quickly, it'll be dark soon." As they boarded to cross, everyone felt somehow sad. For each had someone they loved back in the capital.
Just then, a white bird with a red beak and red legs, about the size of a snipe, was playing on the water and eating fish. It was a bird not seen in the capital, and no one knew it. When they asked the ferryman, he said, "Why, that's a miyakodori, a capital bird." Hearing this, the man composed:
"If you are true to your name, let me ask you, capital bird: is the one I love alive and well, or not?"
At this, everyone in the boat wept.
The party who had left the capital for the east had come at last to the Sumida, flowing between Musashi and Shimousa. Before a great river in a strange land, longing for the capital welled up. Then appeared a bird whose name contained the word "capital." Calling it by that name, he asks after the one left behind. That only a name linked them to the capital is the sorrow that brought the party to tears.
The miyakodori is thought to be the black-headed gull. Place names such as Kototoi Bridge over the Sumida and Kototoi Street come from the poem's koto towamu, "let me ask." The black-headed gull is also the official bird of Tokyo. A poem over a thousand years old lives on in the place names of Tokyo.