On houses and their occupants

Chōmei opens with the river but he is writing about a city — the houses that burn and are rebuilt, and the people inside them who are never the same people twice.

That is the turn worth keeping. The river is not a lesson about rivers; it is the one thing steady enough to measure a town against. What looks permanent is the form, not the contents, and the form persists precisely because the contents keep being replaced.