I was reading Li Jianliang's blog and her speculation where Kyoto is mentioned and the lightbulbs went off. I went there a few summers ago and remembered that it was very easy to navigate the main road (Karasuma-toori) because its main intersections are named after numbers. So I checked with the bus map I kept from the time and sure enough, the number went up to 10. So I thought maybe roads could possibly be the metaphorical river, because the roads you find in many cities are numbered, and they do "flow" through the city. (And the kanji used for toori 通 could also mean pass through.)
I don't know which city the epitaph could refer to, but I started with Kyoto because it was where I was at
I used a Japanese atlas (
http://www.mapion.co.jp/) to see if I can find a 里 around the main road. Eva mentioned thinking like a child's riddle and it reminded me of the solution of a Japanese child's riddle in a manga where the
shape of the buildings/roads resemble a kanji. Since Kyoto is a very geometric city, it's very easy to find 里 shapes close up
but in the zoom out map (presumably how Eva sees it) you can get a pretty good shape towards the bottom of Karasuma-toori, so I felt I was on to something.
Then I zoomed in to see if I can find any shores. No such luck inside the shape, but right outside of it I noticed a name for a town 上人町 (priest town). The clue mentions that two people will tell you of a shore... Not that far below it was a town called 八王子町 (eighth prince town) which was somewhat inside the 里 shape. That's two people, and there's also a river between them. I looked around the shore of the river between them, and what do you freaking know...
鍵屋町 = kagiyachou = key dealer's town
That's not exactly six letters in kanji. Not really in kana. But if you ignore the "chou" (town) part, that's "kagiya" in romaji.
Unfortunately, my limited Japanese meant I don't know what to do with it. I tried applying it to the first of the ten intersections. (Not numbered one, by the way. It was actually called Karasuma Marutachou, which I really didn't know how to apply "kagiya" to) I really couldn't do anything with it, or even know what to do with the other streets following the instructions in the epitaph. However, on the 10th street I did find something interesting:
大金龍院 = great golden dragon temple
大 can be read as "oo" or "ou" and 金 can be read as "gon" so you can get that pronounciation. I'm really wondering if it's too much of a coincidence that this is the place you find traveling south from the first to the tenth street.
It kinda make sense too that Kinzo could've possibly spent his childhood at a temple, which would make a good reason for him to be separated from the main family. I believe Kyoto was also spared from the earthquake and the bombings during WWII, and the overall layout is pretty much the same as it was pre-war.
Of course, I could be way off the mark. The relation to the sweetfish is weak (I'm thinking it could possibly be that karasuma = crows. Crows eat the fish?
) and I still haven't figured out how to apply the key to the intersection names. And, again, this is a current map so things could be changed, like I know for a fact the train station smacked in the middle of the area is pretty recent. So please take all my ramblings with a huge grain of salt.