It is the summer that makes life in Tokyo most beautiful... Bamboo cages with singing insects, painted fans, mosquito nets, sweet-smelling reed blinds and awnings, bells tinkling in the night breeze, lanterns, dwarf plants set into miniature landscapes - where else are there appurtenances of such delicacy? ... Sometimes, walking along a canal of a summer evening, I have found myself drunk with a mood as of hearing a samisen somewhere - in a courtesan's room, perhaps, in a scene from Mokuami's "The Robbers."
- Nagai Kafu (1879-1959)
translation by Edward Seidensticker