In the winter of the first year of Jingkang, the Jin soldiers broke through the city. Elder Meng stood on the Zhouqiao Bridge and looked back at the city of Tokyo in the snow for the last time.
I am leaving for the Northern Kingdom, and I will never see my old capital again.
But halfway through, he turned around and came back - there were some things that he had to remember.
So he wrote about Bianjing. Write about the smell of meat cakes in Zhouqiao Night Market, the sound of women pounding clothes on He Street, the lights of Fan Tower, the bookstalls of Xiangguo Temple, Huo Siqiu, the storyteller in the Vasheli, and Li Shishi, the singer. Write about how the lantern mountain turned around all night during the Lantern Festival, how the dragon boat rowed across the Jinming Pond during the Dragon Boat Festival, about the music of the Chinese Valentine's Day, the moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the stew of the winter solstice.
Write about those lively, happy, and full of fireworks days.
Write about people who never come back.
Twenty years later, a volume of "Tokyo Menghua Lu" was quietly handed down. Later generations will know that the city of Tokyo, which was burned by the war, never disappeared - it lived in the text for eight hundred years.
This is a book that pits "remembering" against "forgetting". When a city turns into rubble, only those who remember it can make it reborn in the snow.
