It is delightful to go walking in a mountain village around the fifth month. Grass and water look green all over, and as you go straight along a long path where the grass grows thick and innocent on top, underneath runs indescribably clear water. It is not deep, but as people walk through it, it splashes up, and that is delightful.
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At festival time, everything is splendid. In the fourth month, around the Kamo Festival (Aoi Matsuri), it is very charming. The senior nobles and courtiers differ only in the deep or light color of their outer robes, and their white under-robes look alike and cool. The leaves on the trees are not yet thick, young and green, and the sky, with neither haze nor mist between, is somehow splendid. On a slightly cloudy evening or night, when you hear a cuckoo singing softly, so faint and far you wonder if you misheard, what can that feeling be compared to?
As the festival day nears, people carry rolls of cloth in "green fallen leaf" and "double indigo," wrapped in paper just for form, going back and forth, and that is charming. Dyes shaded darker at the hem, or mottled, also look more interesting than usual.
On the road to the Kamo shrine, they were planting rice, and women wearing things like new wooden trays for hats stood in great numbers singing. Bending over, they moved backward, doing who knows what. As I watched, wondering what it was for, I heard them singing words that abused the cuckoo most rudely, and it made me gloomy. When they sang, "Cuckoo, you wretch, it's because you sing that I must stand in the paddy," for someone who holds the cuckoo dear it was most annoying.