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MASTERPIECES
OF
CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FICTION
The Japan Times’ Series

UNHUMAN TOUR
(KUSAMAKURA)

BY

SOSEKI NATSUME

TRANSLATED
BY
KAZUTOMO TAKAHASHI

THE JAPAN TIMES

INTRODUCTION

DURING the eras of Meiji and Taisho (1868–1926) the literary life of Japan was enriched by a wealth of many notable productions, worthy of a place in the atheneum of the world; but strange to say, no attempt has, as yet, been made to embody them into any part of the works forming an international library. It is true, that some Japanese novels have been rendered into English, but such ventures have been few and far between, and in any case, they have been of a fragmentary nature and cannot be considered as a part of any systematic attempt.

Literature is the mirror of a living age in which is reflected the life of a people. It is through literature, more than any other medium, that students of the present and future eras may more readily gain an insight into the characteristics and life of a people. The publishers are convinced that the placing before the world, of representative Japanese writings and fictions, will render an inestimable service by bringing to it fuller and better understanding of Japan and the Japanese.

“Masterpieces of the Contemporary Japanese Fiction” comprises a few of the most representative works of the age, embodying as it does, the favourite productions of those authors, and which have been rendered into English as faithfully as it has been within the power of the translators to do so.

In this present undertaking, the publishers are not actuated by any other motive but to allow the world to understand, and to see Japan, as she really is.

THE PUBLISHERS.

Tokyo, June, 1927.

PREFACE

KINNOSUKE NATSUME, better known by his pen-name “Soseki,” was one of, if not, greatest fiction writers, modern Japan has produced. A man of solid university education unlike many another of the fraternity, he established a school of his own, in point of originality in style, and what is more important, in the angle from which he observed human affairs. More points of difference about him from others were the complete absence in his case of romantic elements and adversities, almost always inseparable from the early life of literary geniuses, and the sudden blazing into fame from obscurity, except as a popular school teacher and then a university professor, with some partiality for the “hokku” school of poetry.

Soseki Natsume was born in January, 1867, a third son of an old family in Kikui-cho, Tokyo. His education after a primary school course took a deviation, for some years, into the old-fashioned study of Chinese classics. It was probably then that he laid foundation, perhaps unknown to himself, of the development of his literary talent, that later blossomed out so picturesquely; and he was different, also, in this respect from the later Meiji era writers, who went, many of them, through a Christian mission school, and were all under the influence of Western literature.

In 1884, our future novelist entered the Yobimon College, intending to become an architect; but later changing his mind he took a course in the Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University, from which he graduated in 1892. While in the university, Soseki formed a close friendship with Shiki Masaoka, which lasted until the latter’s death separated them in 1904. Shiki Masaoka was the greatest figure in the revival of hokku poetry in rejuvenated Japan, and Soseki’s association with him accounts for the novelist’s mastery of that branch of literature.

After finishing his post-graduate course in the university in 1895, Kinnosuke Natsume taught successively in Matsuyama Middle School in Iyo, and the Fifth High School in Kumamoto, making no name particularly for himself except as a bright, promising scholar. He took a wife unto himself in 1896, and was four years later sent by the Government to England to study English literature. In three years he returned home to be appointed Lecturer in Tokyo Imperial University. About this time his “London Letters” in Shiki Masaoka’s Hokku magazine, the Hototogisu, began to attract attention; but it was not till the publication of the first book of maiden work “I Am A Cat”, that he suddenly entered the temple of fame. That was in 1905.

The “Cat” with its perfect novelty of conception, style, study of human nature, etc., made him, at once, a star of first magnitude in the literary firmament, and from that time on, for the next five years, his productions, long and short, followed in a constant stream, including “Botchan” (Innocent in Life); “Kusamakura” (Unhuman Tour); “Sanshiro”; “Kofu” (The Miner); “Hinageshi” (The Corn-poppy) and many others, some, perhaps many, of which are assured an immortal life.

Soon after his debut as a fiction writer with meteoric brilliance, Soseki resigned his post at Tokyo Imperial University and also First High School, and accepted a position in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun (newspaper) Office as its literary editor. Five years later he was seized with ulceration of the stomach, from which he never really recovered, and he died in December, 1916.

If Soseki’s rise to fame was meteoric, his retention of it was also meteoric, it lasting only five years, before he bowed to an illness that sent him to the grave in another five years.

All of Soseki’s writings have a ring distinctly his own and are pervaded by a vein of thought, which is the happiest combination of humour born of poetical acumen and well meaning cynicism of the human heart. Especially is this true of “Kusamakura” or “The Pillow of Grass,” which is a poetical way in Japanese of speaking of a journey or tour, and is rendered into “Unhuman Tour” in the present translation, from its contents rather than its literal meaning.

In “Kusamakura,” Soseki is at his best in giving free play to his artistic fancies and contempt for conventional worldliness, to visualise a refined Bohemianism, if there be such a thing, by summoning all his literary skill. How his dissertations on his own dreamy fancies, occurring frequently in the story, will take with the Western readers is problematical; but they most fascinatingly appeal to the Japanese mind, which always takes the highest delight in things that are presented with philoso-poetical humour. “Kusamakura” was the most successful of Soseki’s work, second only to “I Am A Cat.”

It should be added that the present translator is not conceited enough to think that his English version, which nearly covers the whole original text of “Kusamakura,” is doing anything like justice to the master strokes of its creator. He considers himself well repaid for his labor, if he succeeds in giving an idea of the trend of thought and atmosphere which Soseki loved to produce and for which he is so ardently liked by his countrymen.

It is to be added that no attempt has been made at versification in translating poems of all kind, but to barely transliterate the original.

TRANSLATOR.

Tokyo, June 21, 1927.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

Climbing the mountain, I was caught up into a train of thought.

Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you to discomfort. Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in. When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art creates.

This human world of ours is the making neither of God nor of the Devil; but of common mortals; your neighbors on your right; your neighbors on your left, and your neighbors across the street. Hate you may this world of common mortals, but where else can you go? If anywhere else, it must be an unhuman world, but you will find an unhuman world a worse place to live in than this of humanity. Things being disagreeable in the world you cannot depart from it, but you must resign yourself to making the best of disagreeableness, by rubbing off its sharp corners and relaxing its pinches, to what degree you may, to pass pleasantly, even for a brief while, this life of so short a span. Here arises the heaven-ordained mission of the poet and the painter, and blessed are they, who with their art, make life in this world more rich and more cheerful.

Picture your hard-to-live-in-world, turned into one of bliss and thankfulness, with all its disagreeableness taken away, and you have poetry, a painting, or music, or sculpture. Nor need you produce it actually; when you fancy you see it before your eyes, poetry springs into life and songs arise. You hear the ringing of a silver bell within you, even though you have not written a line of your verse on paper, and your mind’s eye drinks of the beauties of the rainbow without paint on the canvas. You attain your end as soon as you soar to the height of taking this view of the human life you live in and see the soiled and turbid latter-day world purified and beautified in your soul’s camera obscura. Thus a poet may not have a single uttered verse and a painter not a solitary sweep of the brush; but they are happier than a social lion; than the most fondled child; nay, than a great prince, in that they can have their own cleansed view of life; in that they can rise above lust and passions, and live in a world of etherial purity; in that they can build up a universe where differences all disappear, and can break away free from the bondage of greed and selfishness.

Twenty years of life taught me that this is a world worth living in; at twenty-five I saw that light and darkness are but the face and back of a thing, there being a shadow where the sun shines. My thoughts, today, at thirty, are these: When full of joys sorrows are as deep, and the more pain the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make an end of the world. Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up, even in sleep, when it accumulates. Love is sweet; but you will yearn after the days when you knew it not, so soon as its very sweetness begins to weigh heavy on you. The shoulders of His Majesty’s Ministers are supporting the feet of millions and the whole country is weighing heavily on their backs. You miss nice things when you part with them without tasting; but you want more of them when you take only a little of them, while you get sick if you overload yourself....

Here my train of thought broke, as I found myself sitting involuntarily on a good-sized boulder, my left foot having, in its effort to avert a peril, caused by a slip of my right foot, landed me in that posture. Fortunately I was none the worse for the accident, except that my color-box jerked itself forward from under my arm, which was not much.

As I rose from my forced rest, I saw at a distance, to my right, a peak of mountain, the very shape of a bucket with its bottom up, covered from foot to summit by thick dark greens, studded with blossoming cherries in a dreamy relief, behind a screen of haze. A little nearer there rose a bare mountain, rising shoulders above the others, with its flank cut straight down as by a giant’s axe. The foot of its craggy side sank into a dark abyss. A figure of man wrapped in a red blanket was coming down from the height and I thought my climb would have to take me up there. The road was very exasperating. If clay only, it would not have required such very great labor to negotiate, but there were boulders, which refused to be smoothed. Clay may be broken, but not rocks and there they lay determined not to give way. If unyielding on their part, then they must be passed by going round or else by surmounting them. The place was not easy to go up even without rocks; but to make it worse, it made a sharp angle in the centre, the sides of which rose sharply, so that it was more like walking the bed of a river than going up a road. However, not being in a particular hurry, I took time and slowly came up to the “Seven Bends”.

As I trudged upward, my ears suddenly caught a lark, his song coming up, as it were, from just below my feet. The carol was giddily busy and incessant, but my eyes saw nothing. That bird never stops and must, it appears, sing out the whole Spring day and every second of it till night. I looked down the valley left and right into the air, and up into the sky, but all in vain, as the unseen singer was heard to rise higher and higher. I thought the lark must have died in the clouds and his song only was floating in space. The road made a sharp turn here by an angular rock. A blind man might have plunged head first down the crag. But I managed to turn safely. Down in the valley the golden blossoms of the rape were in full bloom.

But the lark! It was Spring—Spring, when the whole creation feels blasé to drowsiness; cheerful to ecstacy. The cat forgets to pounce on the mice. Men become oblivious of being in debt; so oblivious, indeed, that they even fail to locate their own souls. But they come back to themselves, when they see a distant field waving with a golden sea of flowers, such as I was looking down upon in the valley. And they may locate their souls when they hear the lark. The lark does not sing with his throat; but it is his whole soul that sings. Of all creatures, of which you hear their soul’s activity in their songs, none is as lively as the lark. It was, indeed, joy itself, and as I thus thought, I became joyful, and thus, was Poetry.

Yes, poetry! Soon I was trying to repeat Shelley’s song of the lark; but I could recite only these lines:

“We look before and after

And pine for what is not

Our sincerest laughter

With pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of

saddest thought.”

I once more lost myself in a reverie of thought. Happy as the poet may be, he may not go heart and soul into singing of his joys, forgetting everything, like the lark. The Chinese poets, to say nothing of their brothers of the West, sing of “immeasurable bushels of sorrow”. It may be, with common mortals, that their sorrows are measured only by the pint not by the bushel. Who can say nay, then, if the poet soars to the height of joys unreachable by his vulgar brothers, he has also unfathomable griefs? It is perhaps, well, that one thinks twice before one decides to become a poet.

My eyes captivated by the golden rape on the left, a coppice hill on the right and the road under foot running on a smooth level, I stepped now and again on humble dandelions, crushing them, as I thought, under my heels; but on looking back regretfully, I found the lowly beauty nestling, none the worse, in their double-toothed leaves. Easy is the life of some of God’s creations.

I continued my climb, returning again to my thoughts of reverie.

Sorrow may be inseparable from the poet. But once in an humour, in which you forget yourself, listening to a lark or gazing at a bed of golden rape, all gloom and pain disappear. Going along a mountain path so entranced, dandelions make your heart leap with joy. So do the blossoming cherries—the cherries had now gone out of sight, by the way. Up in the mountain, in the bosom of nature, everything that greets you fills your heart with joy, with not a shadow of misery. If any misery, it would be no more than that of feeling tired in your feet and of not having good things to eat.

But how can this be? Nature unrolls herself before you as a piece of poetry, as a scroll of a picture. Since poetry and a picture, no thought occurs to you of getting possession of this home of nature, nor a desire to make a scoup of money by making it accessible by building a railway. Nothing darkens this scenery, to rob it of its charms, which help neither to fill your belly, nor add something to your salary, as long as it gladdens your heart merely as scenery, so long shall you feel no pain, no weight on you. So great is the power of nature that it intoxicates you, transports you, in an instant, to the world of poetry.

Love may be beautiful, and so also filial devotion, and noble and edifying may be loyalty and patriotism. But it will be different when you are yourself a figure on the stage, a cyclone of conflicting interests making you too dizzy to appreciate the beautiful or the noble, but to become entirely lost to the poetry of the thing.

You have to make an onlooker of yourself with room for a sense to understand, in order that you may see the poetry. Placed in that position, you will enjoy dramas, and novels will interest you; because you have got your personal interests packed and put away on the rack. You are a poet the while you enjoy reading or seeing.

Even at that, common dramas and novels are not free from humanities of afflictions, anger, quarrels, and weeping, that carry you into corresponding moods. The only saving feature may be that no sense of gain and selfishness is acting on your part; but this absence of personal interest will make your heart-strings the more tense and active in other respects, and that is what I hate to bear.

I have come through my thirty years enough, indeed more than enough, of wallowing in the mud of troubles, of fuming in anger; of being in rows; or of sinking in sorrows; all which are indivorcible from human life. I want poetry that lifts me above the dust and noise of the world. I know, of course, there can be no drama, however great a masterpiece, that is absolutely transcendental of human sentiment, or scarcely a novel that can rise completely above all sense of right and wrong, this being especially the case with Western poetry of which the stock paraphernalia are Sympathy, Love, Justice, Freedom, and so forth, the staple goods in the bazaar of human life. It is no wonder that the lark made Shelly heave a deep sigh. To my joy, poets of the Orient can, some of them, soar above this earthly atmosphere. Let Tao Yuan-ming of ancient China recite his lines:

“Chrysanthemum I pick from the Eastern hedge,

On the Southern hill leisurely I cast my eyes.”

Not that there is a charming one on the other side of the hedge, nor a dear friend on the hill; but the two lines take you with Tao into a sphere beyond the reach of the worries and cares of the world. Or listen to Wang Wei of the same land:

“Softly I harp and sing alone,

In the quietude of wooded bamboo;

Not a soul into deep solitude, but the

Tell-tale moon comes, and speaks its heart.”

A world looms up from the four verses, the charm of which is not that of popular novels, but a good you feel from a sound and all-forgetting sleep you have had, after being thoroughly tired of steamers, railways, rights and duties, morals and formalities. Sleep? Yes, and if sleep be necessary even in the Twentieth century, equally indispensable to the Twentieth century is this super-earthly poetical sentiment. Unfortunately poetry makers and poetry readers are nowadays all enamoured of the Westerners, and none seem to care to take a boat and float to the land of the immortals. I am not a poet by profession, and am interested in no way whatever in spreading propaganda for the kind of life led by Wang Wei and Tao Yuan-ming, in the present world. Only to me it appears that such inspired feelings as are sung by the Chinese poets are more powerful in remedying the ills and evils of the day than theatricals and dancing parties. They are, at all events far more agreeable to me than Faust or Hamlet. I come into the mountain with a colour-box and a tripod for my sole companions, all because I yearn to drink direct from nature of the poetical wine of Tao Yuan-ming and Wang Wei; to be away from the world-smelling and world-sounding world, nay, to breathe and live in an unhuman atmosphere, even for a brief while. It is a weakness of mine if you like to call it so.

I am at any rate, a living block of humanity, and however fond I may be of unhumanity, my love of it cannot go so very far. I do not suppose that even Tao Yuan-ming had his eye on the Southern hill, year in and year out; nor is it imaginable that Wang Wei slept in his bamboo jungle without a mosquito net. In all likelihood Tao sold his chrysanthemums to a florist after keeping what he wanted, and Wang his bamboo sprouts to a green grocer. I myself am not unhuman enough to live under the blue sky in the mountain, just because the lark and golden rape captivate my fancy. Such as the place is, human beings are not a rarity,—men with their heads wrapped in a towel and their kimono tucked up at the back; country lasses in red skirts and so on, and sometimes also even long faced horses. Breathing the mountain air, hundreds of feet above the sea level, surrounded by a million cypresses, I could not still be rid of human smell. Nay, I was crossing the mountain to reach the hot spring hotel of Nakoi as my destination for the night.

However, things assume shapes or colour as you will, according to the way you look at them. In the words of Leonardo Da Vinci to a pupil of his “the bell is one; but listen, and its sound may be heard in all sorts of ways.” Opinions may differ in a man or a woman, all depending upon how you look at him or her. I had come out in my present tour to indulge in unhumanity and people would appear different from what they did when I was living round the corner in the crowded Mud-and-Dust Lane, if I looked at them now, I thought, bearing in mind my unhumanity idea. Impossible as entirely getting away from humanity may be, I should be able to bring myself up or down to suit the frame of mind, in which one finds oneself at a “Noh”[(1)] play. The “Noh” has its humanity or sentimental side. Who can be sure not to be moved to tears by the Shichikiochi or by the Sumidagawa? But the “Noh” performance is seven-tenth art and three-tenth sentiment. The attractions of “Noh” do not come from the life-like presentation of things human in this mundane world; because the life-like in it appears only from under many, many layers of art, which give it an air of extreme tranquility and halcyon serenity, never to be met in the world of reality.

Note—Bracketed numerals and alphabet letters at the end of words refer to notes at the end of the book, explaining Japanese terms and expressions.

How would it do to interpret all the events and people I came across in the present tour as part of performances on the “Noh” stage? I could not cast aside humanity altogether. To be poetical at the bottom of my whole venture, I should like to let unhumanity carry me into a “Noh” atmosphere, by doing away with humanity as much as possible. Different in nature from the “Southern hill” or the “bamboo grove,” nor identifiable with the lark or blossoming rapes, I still would see people from a point of view as near those objects as possible. The man Basho[(2)] saw something poetical and made a “hokku”[(3)] even of a horse stalling near his head! I would deal with everybody I was going to meet—farmers, tradesmen, the village office clerk, old men, old women—seeing in them only objects, complementing a picture. However unlike figures on the canvas, they would move as they please. It would be grossly common, however, to enquire, as does an ordinary novelist, into the cause of each of them going his own way, to dig into their mental state, or to try to solve the tangle of their human affairs. I shall not care, move as they will. They won’t trouble me, as I shall regard them as characters in a picture in motion. Painted figures cannot get out of the plane of the picture, no matter how they may move. Troubles would arise of conflicting views and clash of interests, the moment you think, the characters might jump out of the plane and act cubically. The more troublesome the matter grew, the more impossible it would become to look at it æsthetically. Wherever I might go and whomever I might meet, I should look at them as from a transcendental height, so that human-magnetism might not easily pass between us, and I shall, then, be not easily affected, however animatedly they might act. In short I am to assume the position of one standing before a picture, and looking at the figures in it, running hither and thither on its plane. With three feet between, you can calmly look on, without any sense of danger. In other words, you run no risk of anybody snatching away your weapon and you may give yourself up altogether to studying their doings from an artistic point of view. With undivided attention you may see and judge the objects before you as beautiful or as not beautiful.

By the time I had come to this decision, the sky began to assume a doubtful aspect. A bank of clouds of indistinct foreboding had no sooner mounted overhead than it went tumbling and overspreading until the whole space seemed to turn into a hanging expanse of dark sea. From the sea soft Spring rain began to fall. I had long since gone past the golden rape blossoms and was now toiling along between two mountains; but the threads of rain being so fine as to appear as mist, I could not tell how distant they were. Now and again, as the gusts of wind blew asunder the high drapery of cloud, a grey ridge of mountain showed itself to the right as clearly as within reach of a hand: probably the range ran on the other side of the valley. The left side seemed to be the foot of another mountain. Back of the semi-transparent screen of rain, trees—they might be pines—appeared and then disappeared, with an endless frequency. Was it the rain that was moving? Or was it the trees in motion? Could it be that I was dreaming a floating dream? I trudged on, feeling strange.

The road became wider than I had imagined, and quite level also. Walking was no longer a task; but being not prepared for rain, I had to hurry.

About the time the rain-water began to fall in drops from my hat, I heard a jingle, jingle of a bell some yards away, and there appeared a pack-horse driver leading an animal behind him.

“Hello, any place to stop around here, man?”

“A mile more or so, you will come upon a tea stall. Getting pretty wet, eh?”

A mile more! The figure of the rustic dissolved into rain like a magic lantern view, as I looked back.

The misty rain had now become thick and long until each drop could be seen distinctly like a pencil flying in the wind. It had long since soaked through my outer garment, and then penetrated to the skin. The heat of my body made lukewarm the water in my under-wear and the feeling produced was by no means the most pleasant. I pulled my hat to one side and quickened my pace.

The drenching figure of myself, running through a grey expanse of space, with innumerable silver shafts beating at it slantingly will make poetry, an ode, when I look at it as not my own. I make a beautiful harmony with a natural scenery, as a figure in a picture, when I forget my material self completely and take a purely objective view of myself. Only, I cease to be a figure in poetry, or in a picture, the moment I feel vexed with the falling rain and take to heart the tiredness of the stamp, stamp of my feet. I then find myself only an indifferent individual of the street, blind to the changing humour of the flying clouds; untouched by the falling flowers, and the carols of birds; nay, a perfect stranger to the beauty of my own self going alone and quietly through a mountain in Spring. I walked first with my hat pulled to one side; but later I kept my eyes pivoted on the back of my feet. Finally I went gingerly, shrugging my shoulders. The rain shook the tree tops all round, and closed in from all sides upon a lonely traveller. I felt I was having rather too strong a dose of unhumanity.

CHAPTER II.

“Are you there?” I said, but no response came.

I was standing before the humblest shop, which had at its rear papered sliding screens, shutting from view a room behind. A bunch of straw sandals for sale was hanging from the eve, swinging forlornly. Under a low counter were a few trays of cheap sweets, with some small coins lying about.

“Are you there?” I said again. The ejaculation startled, this time, a hen and her lord, which awoke clucking on a mortar, on which they had been standing bulged and asleep. I was glad to find fire going in a clay furnace, part of which had its colour changed by the rain that had been falling a minute ago. A tea-kettle was hanging from a suspender over the furnace. It was black with smoke, too black, indeed, to tell whether it was earthen or silver.

Receiving no answer, I took the liberty of walking into the shop and sitting on a bench before the fire, and this made the fowls flap their wings and hop from the mortar onto the raised and matted floor and they would have gone through the inner room had it not been for the screens. The birds clucked and cackled in alarm as if they thought I were a fox or a cur.

Presently footsteps were heard, a paper screen slid open, and out came an old woman, as I knew somebody would, with a fire going, and money lying scattered about. This was somewhat different from the city, that a woman could, with no concern, be away, leaving her shop to take care of itself and it was at any rate, unlike the twentieth century, that I could go into the shop and sit on a bench uninvited to wait, wait and wait. All this “unhuman” condition of things delighted me immensely. What charmed me most was, however, the look of the aged shop-keeper who had come out.

I discovered in her, living, the aged, masked dame of Takasago whom I saw at the Hosho “Noh” theatre, two or three years ago. I snapped that dame’s image into my mind’s camera at the time as most fascinating, wondering how an old woman could look so gentle and reverentially attractive. I say, I saw in flesh and blood this “Noh” figure in the lowly shop-keeper bowing before me. In response to my apologetic remark that I had taken possession of her bench in her absence, she said very civilly:

“I did not know that you had come in, Danna-sama.”[(4)]

“Had been raining rather hard?”

“Bad weather, Danna-sama, you must have had a hard time of it. Why you are drenching wet. Wait, I will make a big fire and let you dry yourself.”

“Thank you. Put just a little more wood there, and I shall warm and dry myself. The rest has made me feel cold.”

We kept on talking about the quietness of the place, the uguisu,[(5)] and so on. Out came my sketch book, and I made a hasty picture of the old woman, as she worked at the fire. The rain had stopped, and the sky cleared up. I saw the “Hobgoblin Cliff” by turning my eyes in the direction towards which my good woman pointed. I glanced at the cliff and then at the woman, and last of all I looked at them both half and half. Of the impressions of old women carved permanently in my head, there were that of the face of the Takasago dame of the “Noh” mask, and that of the she-spirit of the mountain drawn by Rosetsu. The Rosetsu picture has made me think that an ideal old woman is a weird creature and that she should be seen only among autumn tinted trees or else in cold moonlight. But on seeing the mask of the Takasago dame I was astonished at the extent to which the aged of the other sex could be made to look so sweet. I have since thought she could, with her warm and graceful expression, ornament a golden screen, be a figure in a balmy Spring breeze or that she could go well, even with cherry blossoms. As I looked at my homely dressed hostess of motherly kindness, with a beaming light on her face, I fancied she made a picture better in keeping with the Spring scenery of the mountain, than with the “Hobgoblin Cliff,” she was pointing at, with one hand shading her eyes. I had almost finished sketching her when her pose broke. It was disconcerting, and with chagrin I held my book to the fire to dry.

“You look hale and hearty, O-Bahsan.”[(6)]

“Yes, thank you, Danna-sama. I can sew; I can spin hemp.”

She added triumphantly, “I can grind rice for dumpling flour!” I felt I would like to see her work at the mill stones. However such a request was out of place, and I changed the topic of conversation by asking her if it was not more than two and a half miles to Nakoi.

“No, Danna-sama, about two miles they say. You are going to the hot spring there, then?”

“I may stop there a while, if the place is not crowded. Or rather I should say if I am in the mood.”

“No crowding, I am sure, Danna-sama. The place has been almost deserted since the war (Russo-Japanese) broke out. The spa hostelry is all but closed.”

“Well, well. They won’t let me stop there then.”

“Oh, yes, they will any time, Danna-sama, if you just ask them.”

“There is only one hotel there; isn’t that so?”

“Yes, Danna-sama, ask for Shiota and anybody will tell you. Squire Shiota is a rich man of the village and one doesn’t know to call the place which, a hot-spring resort or the old gentleman’s pleasure retreat.”

“Is that so? Guest or no guest makes no difference to him then?”

“Danna-sama is going there for the first time?”

“No, not quite. I was there once long ago.”

There came a temporary lull in our conversation, here, as if by mutual agreement. In the silence that followed, I once more took out my sketch book and began to make a picture of the rooster and his mate, when the jingling of bells caught my ear, the sound making a music of its own in my head. I felt as if I were listening, in a dream, to a mortar-and-pestle rhythm coming from a neighbour’s. I stopped sketching and wrote down instead:

“Harukazeya Inen-ga mimini[(7)]

Umano Suzu.”[(n)]

Coming up the mountain, I passed five or six pack horses and found them all wearing aprons between their fore and hind legs, with bells jingling about their necks. I could not help imagining I was encountering in spirit ghosts long past. Presently there rose above the jingling of bells a quaintly long drawn note of mago-uta[(8)], floating dreamily in the peaceful Spring air of the mountain, and gradually coming upward. This made my rustic but gentle hostess say, as if speaking to herself: “Somebody is coming again.”

Every passer, coming and going seemed to be the good woman’s acquaintance, since the pass lay in a single line, and all traffic must go by the humble tea-stall. All of the half-dozen drivers of pack-horses, I met on the road, must have come up or gone down the mountain, everyone of them making her think somebody was coming. I could not help wondering how often, indeed, times out of number, her ears must have caught the jingling of bells in the years past, that had turned her hair so completely grey. Oh, how long she must have lived in this little place with its lonely road, where spring had come and gone, gone and come, with no ground to walk on, lest one crushed little flowers under foot! I wrote down another “haiku” in my book:

“Mago-utaya Shiragamo

Somede Kururu Haru”[(o)]

The little verse did not quite express my poetical fancy, and I was gazing at the point of my pencil to compress into seventeen syllables the ideas of grey hair, and the cycles of years as well as the quaint tunes of a country pack-horse driver, and departing Spring, when a live bucolic individual, leading a pony, halted before the shop and greeted the old woman:

“Good day, Obasan!”[(9)]

“Why, it is you Gen-san. You are going down to the town?”

“I am, and shall be glad to get, if there be anything you want down there.”

“Let me see. Stop at my daughter’s, if you happen to go along Kajicho, and ask her to get for me a holy tablet of the Reiganji temple.”

“All right, only one, eh? Your O-Aki-san[(10)] is very lucky that she has been so well married, don’t you think so, Obasan?”

“I am thankful that she is not in want of daily needs. Maybe she is happy.”

“Of course she is. Look at that Jo-sama[(11)] of Nakoi!”

“Poor O-Jo-sama, my heart aches for her and she is so beautiful. Is she any better these days?”

“No, the same as ever.”

“Too bad,” sighs mine hostess, and “Yes, too bad” assents Gen-san, patting his horse on the head. A gust of wind came just then and shook a cherry tree outside and the rain-drops lodging precariously among its leaves and flowers shed like a fresh shower, making the horse toss his long mane up and down with a start. I had by this time fallen into a train of fancy from which I was awakened by Gen-san’s “Whoa” and the jingling of the horse’s bells, to hear the Obasan say:

“Ah, I still see before me the Jo-sama in her bridal dress with her hair done up in a high ‘Shimada’ style and going horse-back....”

“Yes, yes, she went on horse-back, not by boat. We stopped here, didn’t we, Obasan?”

“Aye, when the Jo-sama’s horse stopped under that cherry tree, a falling petal alighted on her hair, dressed so carefully.”

The old woman’s word-sketch was fascinating, well worthy of a picture; of poetry. A vision of a charming bride came before my mind’s eye, and musing on the scene described, I wrote down in my sketch book:

“Hanano Koro-o Koete

Kashikoshi Umani Yome.”[(p)][(12)]

I had a clear vision of the girl’s hair and dress, the horse and the cherry tree; but strangely enough, her face would not come to me, eagerly as my fancy travelled from one type to another. Suddenly Millais’ Ophelia came into the vision under the bride’s “shimada” coiffure. No good, I thought and let my vision crumble away. The same moment the bridal dress, hair, horse, and cherry tree and all disappeared from my mind’s setting; but Ophelia floating above the water with her hands clasped, remained behind mistily in my mind, lingering with a faintness, as of a cloud of smoke brushed with a palm fibre whisk, and producing a weird sensation as when looking at the fading tail of a shooting star.

“Well, goodbye Obasan.”

“Come again on your way back. Bad time we had with the rain. The road must be pretty bad about the ‘Seven Bends’.”

Gen-san began to move and his horse to trot as he said: “rather a job,” leaving behind the jingling of bells.

“Was that man from Nakoi?”

“Yes, he is Gembei of Nakoi.”

“Do I understand that that man crossed this mountain with a bride on the back of his horse, some time or other?”

“He passed here with the Jo-sama of Nakoi on the back of his horse, when the lady-bird went to her future husband’s house.—Time goes fast; it was five years ago.”

She is of a happy order, who laments the turning white of her hair only when she looks into the glass. Nearer an immortal, I thought, was my old woman who became conscious of the swiftness of fleeting time only by counting five years on her fingers. I observed to her:

“She must have been charming.—I wish I was here to see her.”

“Haw, haw, but you may see her. She will come out, I am sure, to receive you, if you put up at the hot-spring hotel of Nakoi.”

“Why, then, is she back in her father’s house, now? I wonder if I could see her in her bridal dress, with her hair done up in the shimada.”

“Only ask her; she will most likely oblige you by appearing in the dress of her bridal tour.”

Impossible! I thought, but my bah-san[(13)] was quite in earnest. After all, my “unhuman” tour would be insipid, if it were all common-place with no such characters. My good woman went on:

“There is so much alike between the Jo-sama and Nagarano Otome.”

“You mean in their looks?”

“No, I mean in their life.”

“But who is this Nagarano Otome?”

“Long, long ago, there was the maid of Nagara, the beautiful daughter of a rich man, and the pride of this village.”

“Yes?”

“Well, Danna-sama, two men, Sasada-otoko and Sasabe-otoko fell in love with her both at once.”

“I see.”

“Shall she accept the hand of the Sasada man or should give her heart to the Sasabe man? She tormented herself for days, weeks, and months, with the perplexing problem, until unable to allow herself the choice of one in preference to the other, she ended her life by throwing herself into a river, leaving behind her an ode:

“Akizukeba Obanaga Uyeni

Okutsuyuno

Kenubekumo Wawa

Omohoyurukana.”[(m)]

I had little expected to hear such a quaint romance told in such old-fashioned language, least of all from such an old woman in the depth of a mountain like this.

“You go down about 600 yards East from here Danna-sama and you will come upon the ‘five elements’ spiral tombstone on the roadside, that marks the eternal home of Nagarano Otome. You should pay a visit to the grave, on your way to Nakoi.”

I resolved by all means to see the grave. The Bahsan went on to tell me:

“The Jo-sama of Nakoi had, in her evil days, her hand sought by two suitors. One of them was a young man she met while she was at school in Kyoto, and the other a son of the wealthiest man in the castled town.”

“So? Which did she choose?”

“The Jo-sama herself would have had her lover in Kyoto if she could make her own choice; but her father forced her to accept the young man of the castled-town.”

“That is to say, she fortunately escaped drowning herself in the river?”

“To her young husband she was as dear as his own life, and he did all he could to please her; but she was not happy to the worry of all. Soon after the present war had broken out her husband lost his job, the bank where he was working closing its doors, while the same cause wrought the ruin of his own family. This made the Jo-sama come back to her father’s house in Nakoi, and gossip has been busy making a heartless and ungrateful woman of her. As a girl, the Jo-sama was always coy and gentle; but she has latterly been changing into a woman of unwomanly high spirits. So says Gembey every time he passes here, as he feels really sorry for her.”

I did not want to hear more, to have my fancies spoiled. The woman’s story was beginning to smell of human ills and worries and I felt as if somebody was wanting back the fairy wand, when I was just becoming celestial. It cost me uncommon pains to negotiate the perils of the “Seven Bends,” and reach here. All that and the very reason of my wandering out of my house would have been lost, if I were now to be so recklessly brought back to the every-day world. This and that of life are all very well up to a certain point; but past that limit it brings a worldly odor that enters you through the pores of the skin and makes you feel heavy with dirt. So I started to go, with this departing word, after depositing a silver piece on the bench: “The road is straight to Nakoi, is it not Obahsan?”

“Turn right, down the slope from the tomb of Nagarano Otome and you will make a saving of some half a mile. The road is not very good; but a young gentleman like you would make a short cut.... God bless you for such generosity. Take good care of yourself, Danna-sama.”

CHAPTER III.

I had a queer time of it last night.

About 8 o’clock I reached the hotel. It had already closed up for the night, and was but dimly lighted. I could not, of course, tell, then, the plan of the house or the lay-out of its garden, to say nothing of its bearing on the points of the compass. I was led by the nose, as it were, through a long, long winding sort of passage, at the end of which I was put in a small room of about six mats. I could not at all tell where I was; the place had so completely changed since I was here last. After supper, and then a dip in the hot spring bath, I was sipping tea in my room, when a young girl came in, and asked me if she should make my bed.

What struck me as not a little strange was that it was the same girl who had come out to let me in when I arrived; it was this same girl who had brought me supper and waited on me; it was this same girl who had showed me to the bath room; and it was again this same girl who took upon herself the trouble of making the bed for me. This little woman seemed to have everything on her shoulders in this establishment; and yet she seldom spoke a word. I would have done her injustice, however, if I said she was country-looking. When she went before me, with her girlish crimson “obi”[(14)] tied unsentimentally on her back, and with an old-fashioned burning candle in her hand, taking me round and round along a corridor-like and stairway-like passages, when she with the same crimson “obi” and the same candle-stick, led me down places, of which it was difficult to say whether they were corridors or staircases, down to the bath tank, I felt as if I were myself a figure in a picture moving in a world of canvas.

When she waited on me at supper, she begged me to put up with the room I was in, which was, she said, one of family use, as the other rooms were undusted, no guests coming these days. When she finished making my bed she spoke humanly, wishing me “a good night of rest”, before she left my room. My ears followed her footsteps along the long wriggling sort of passage until they finally died out far away. Then stillness fell and the whole place seemed to have become deserted by all things human.

Only once before in all my life, I went through an experience like this. Long ago I crossed Boshu from Tateyama to the Pacific sea coast, and went on foot from Kazusa to Choshi along the sea shore. On the way I stopped overnight at a place. At a place, and I cannot say less vaguely as the name of the locality and of the inn where I lodged had both long since been forgotten. It is not even clear that it was really an inn where I passed the night. The house was very large but inhabited by only two women. I asked them if they would let me stop overnight. The older of the two said “yes” and the younger said: “This way please.” I followed the latter past many spacious but deserted and neglected rooms, and was finally shown up the innermost semi-two-storey flat. I mounted three staircases and was about to enter my room, when a gust of evening wind made a bunch of bamboos, growing bendingly under the eve, rustle against my head and shoulders, somehow chilling me to the bones. The wooden flooring of the verandah, I stepped upon, was almost crumbling with age. I remarked, then, the sprouts would pierce through the flooring and take possession of the room next spring. The young woman said nothing but went away grinning.

That night, the rustling of bamboos robbed me of all my sleep. I slid open the front paper screen and found myself looking over, in the clear Summer moonlight, a grass-grown garden, which had no boundary hedge or fence, but stretched into a weedy elevation, beyond which the great ocean roared with its tumbling breakers, menacing the world of man. I passed the whole night nervously awake, imprisoning myself in an apology of a mosquito net. My lot that night might be, I thought, a page from some weird story book.

I had never since felt as I did then, until my first night at Nakoi.

I was lying on my back in my bed, and my eyes accidentally caught sight of some Chinese writing mounted in a vermilion frame, hung high up a wall. It consisted of seven big characters which said: “Shadow of bamboos sweeping no dust rises.” It was signed “Daitetsu.” Then my fancy travelled for a while into the realm of autographs. A Jakuchu in the picture hanging niche next entered my eyes. It was a picture of a crane standing on one foot, a production of a bold sweep of brush, that pleased me marvellously. In a little while I fell asleep and was soon lost in dreamland.

The Maiden of Nagara appeared before me, in a long-sleeved bridal gown, crossing a mountain on a pony. The Sasabe Otoko and the Sasada Otoko suddenly slipped into the scene, and began struggling to carry away the maiden. Thereupon the girl changed as suddenly into Ophelia, mounting a branch of willow tree, and then floating down a stream. She was singing sweetly. Eager to rescue her, I reached a long pole and ran along Mukojima with it. She showed no sign of struggle, but was smiling and singing as the tide carried her down, down to where I knew not. I hallooed and hallooed to her, with the pole on my shoulder.

My hallooing awoke me. I was wet with perspiration. What a curious mixture of the poetical and vulgar, I thought. Priest Ta Hui in the Sung days of China, who claimed to be able to have everything his way after he had attained his Buddhistic emancipation, complained that he was nevertheless vulnerable to unworthy thoughts that cropped up in his dreams. He is said to have suffered long and greatly from this failing. I thought that was quite natural. It would do little credit to any one making art one’s life to dream a not more beautiful dream. One such as I dreamed would in greater part make neither a picture nor poetry worthy of the name. Thinking thus, I turned my body over in bed and saw the moon shining on the paper screen, casting on it the shadow of some branches of tree. The night looked almost bright.

Possibly just a fancy; but I thought I heard some one singing or rather chanting softly. I pricked my ears to know if it was a song that had escaped from dreamland into this world of reality, or a real voice flowing into dreams? I was sure there was some one singing. The voice was indisputably thin and low; but faint as it was, it was pulsating the Spring night, which was on the verge of sleep. The weird part of it was that, whatever its tune, its wording, of which there was no reason that it could be heard clearly, being not uttered near me, nevertheless came distinctly, the sinking voice repeating over and over the song of Nagarano Otome: “Even like the dew drop, that when autumn comes, lodges on grass leaves, must I roll off to die.”

The chanting sounded first near the verandah; but it gradually grew fainter and farther. What ceases suddenly produces a feeling of suddenness; but it leaves little room for sentiment. A voice that speaks peremptorily resolution rouses also a feeling of peremptoriness and resolution in others. But confronted by a phenomenon that had no definite limit but went on thinning and thinning until it would imperceptibly disappear altogether, you could not help feeling that you must mince up the minute and split the second, your sense of helplessness and hopelessness momentarily deepening. The chant sounded dying like a dying man, becoming more and more feeble like an outgoing light; and in that song that distracted the heart as if with the approaching end, there was a tune that spoke for all the sorrows of the Spring of the whole world.

I listened to the song, holding myself down in the bed; but as it went farther and farther, I felt, I must chase it, despite the consciousness that it was luring me out by the ear. The thinner it grew the more I felt that I should let my ear only fly after it. Just at the moment I thought, however hard I might listen, my ears would hear no more, I could constrain myself no longer and unconsciously I slipped out of my bed. The same moment I opened the “shoji,”[(15)] and stood out in the verandah, with the lower half of my body bathing in the moonlight and a tree throwing its waving shadow on my night clothes. These details did not occur to me, however, at the instant I opened the “shoji.”

But that dying sound? I looked in the direction toward which my ear was running. There I espied a shadowy form in the moonlight as it were, with its back to a tree, which, if in bloom, might be an aronia. The misty dark thing flanked right, stepping on the shadow of blossoms on the ground, even before it had left on me a clear impression that “it must be it.” A corner of the roof, thrown on the ground, of a room adjoining mine, seemed to move lithely, and the next moment shut out from view a tall figure of a woman.

I was lost to myself for many moments, as I stood thinly clad in my night gown, with my hand on the screen. The minute I returned to myself, I was made keenly conscious that a night of Spring in the mountain was decidedly chilly. As it was, I did not hesitate to permit myself to creep back into the bed from which I had crept out, and started on another train of thought. I took out my watch from under the pillow and found it pointing at ten past one. I put the watch back under the pillow, and returned to my thoughts. “It cannot be a spook,” I thought. If not an apparition, it must be a human being, and if a human being, it must be a woman. She might have been the O-Jo-san of this house. If so, it seemed rather defying propriety that a young woman, who had taken a divorce of her husband should, at that hour of night, be out in the garden, that ran into the mountain. In any case, sleep had become impossible, that watch of mine under the pillow ticking me to irrepressible wakefulness. The tiny ticking of my watch had never before troubled me; but on this particular night it seemed to say “No sleep for you to-night, but think, think, think.” It was outrageously extraordinary.

A frightful thing will make poetry when you regard it merely as the form itself of frightfulness; just as a weird eerie sight may be worked into a picture, if you treat it as something horrid in itself, independent of you. Likewise a disappointed love makes an excellent theme of art when gentleness, sympathy, worries and, indeed, even the very overflow of pains, it occasions, are turned objectively into visions before you, divorced from the actual torments felt in your heart. Nay, some people imagine that they are disappointed in love in order to enjoy the pleasure of agonising themselves. Ordinary mortals laugh at them as idiotic, as lunatic; but they are no more unbalanced, from the point of view of having their own artistic ground to stand on, than those who go into the ecstacy of living in a world of their own by creating scenery that nowhere exists.

Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common people, idiots, lunatics—whatever be their qualification in their daily life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit subjects for their canvas or for their pen. But they betray not even a shadow of grievance when they tell others of their experiences. They not only narrate gleefully the things they enjoyed and were delighted with, but are enthusiastic over events that once tortured them but now come back as sweet memories. Not that they mean to deceive themselves and others; but the truth is that when out on the road they see and feel as ordinary mortals do, but they become poets when they talk of their past. And this accounts for their inconsistencies. He may be called an artist, then, who lives in a triangle, built by knocking off a corner called common-sense of the four-angled world.

Be it in nature or in the world of man, artists thus discover countless gems and stones of inestimable value, in places which the multitude dare not approach. The secret of such a discovery is commonly called beautifying. But in reality there is no beautification about it at all, light and colour having in their brilliancy always existed in this mundane world; but because flowers fall from the sky in vain for common eyes; because worldly trammels are unshakable; because the thought of success and prosperity hang so heavy on the human mind, nobody has been able to see the beauties of a railway train till Turner showed them, and the world waited for Ohkyo to be shown the æsthetics of a ghost.

The shadow I had just seen had, as a phenomenon complete in itself and nothing more, something poetical about it that none could deny who saw or heard it. A sequestered spa in the bosom of a mountain—the shadow of flowers in a Spring night—The soft warbling of a song under a tell-tale moon—a dreamy figure in pale moonlight—every one of them would have made a capital subject for an artist. For all that, I was trying unnecessarily to see what might be behind the vision, and a blood-chilling sensation that had taken possession of me blinded me to the elegance of the situation, which was perfectly consistent in itself and the picturesqueness that could not be hoped for. I thought myself unworthy of my professed unhumanity and felt I must go through more training before I could proclaim myself a poet or an artist. Salvator Rosa of Italy came vividly before my eyes with his perilous tale of joining the banditti of the Abruzzi. I had wandered away from my home with just a sketch book, and I should be ashamed of myself, if I had not Rosa’s resolve.

How should I rehabilitate myself as a poet in such circumstances? All that is necessary is, I argued to myself, I may put myself in a condition that would enable me to take hold of my feelings, lay them before me, stand a step behind, and examine them calmly unprejudicedly as if I were another person, not myself. The poet is under an obligation, when he dies, to dissect his own body and publish the cause of his malady. There may be various ways of doing this; but the easiest and nearest is to make an instantaneous survey of everything you can lay your hand on, and reduce it into a seventeen syllable “hokku”. The seventeen syllable effusion is the simplest of poems, and you can have it, when you are washing your face in the morning, or when you are going in a tram car. It makes a poet of you most simply and most easily. To be a poet is to be enlightened, and I mean no disparagement, when I say, it is the simplest and easiest. The simpler the more beneficial it is, and should the more be respected. Suppose you lose your temper. You make a seventeen syllable “hokku” of your indignation. The moment seventeen syllables get into shape, your anger becomes something outside of you—you cannot be fuming with anger and composing a “hokku” at the same time. You are moved to tears; you make seventeen syllables, and they delight you. When your tears are changed into seventeen syllables, your tearful anguish has left you, and you have become a self only joyous of being a man capable of weeping.

This has always been the stand I insisted upon, and I now wanted to put it to a practical test. Lying abed, I set about making a series of seventeen syllables of the events of the night. A very deliberate enterprise as I was undertaking, I lay open my sketch-book near the pillow, to jot down in it as fast as I got the lines, lest they might become lost as fugitive thoughts, hard to recapture.

“Kaidono tsuyuo furu-u-ya monogurui,”[(a)] I wrote down as my first production. If the reading of it did not strike me as particularly captivating, neither did it give rise to any uncomfortably creepy feeling. I next jotted down: “Hanano kage, onnano kageno oborokana.”[(b)] It was faulty with a redundancy. I forgave myself for it; because all I wanted was to recover calmness and humour myself into an easy frame of mind. For the third piece, I ventured: “Shoichi-i onnani bakete oborozuki.”[(c)] It sounded droll and amused me.

All was right at this rate, I thought, and getting into the spirit of the thing, I scribbled down all that follow, one after another:

“Haruno hoshio otoshite

Yowano kazashikana.”[(d)]

“Haruno yono kumoni

Nurasuya araigami.”[(e)]

“Haruya koyoi

Uta tsukamatsuru onsugata.”[(f)]

“Kaido no seiga

Detekuru tsukiyokana.”[(g)]

“Uta oriori gekkano

Haruo ochikochisu.”[(h)]

“Omoi kitte fukeyuku

Haruno hitorikana.”[(i)]

Sleep was stealing over me by the time I had finished committing the last piece to the sketch-book.

I was half asleep and half awake, in a condition, to describe which was invented, I thought, the expression “as in a trance.” Nobody is conscious of self in a sound sleep; but in wakefulness the world outside is never forgotten. Between the two regions lies the borderland of vision, where things look too misty to be called awake, and yet too animate to be in sleep. It is a condition in which “up awake” and “lie asleep” are put in one and the same cup and stirred and mixed up with the straw of poetry and song. Shade off the colours of nature into all but a dream, push this universe of reality adrift into the sea of haze, and smooth into curves all sharp angles with the magic hand of the genie of sleep. Breathe slow pulsation into the world so tempered. Imagine clouds of smoke crawling the surface of such a world, unable to fly away though it would; imagine again your soul about to depart lingering, unable to leave its shell. Such is the condition I mean. It is again the state in which the soul is lambently struggling, and finally unable to preserve its entity dissolves into an ethereal existence and clings and hangs about with no heart to depart.

I was traversing this borderland of dreamy consciousness when the “karakami”[(16)] of my room opened, as if of its own accord, and in the opening appeared the figure of a woman, like a phantom. The apparition did not cause me surprise, nor did it frighten me: I simply looked at it with easy pleasant sensation. Perhaps I put it too strongly to say I “looked at”; for the truth was, the shadowy thing slid with no permission of mine behind the lids of my eyes, which were closed. The phantom slowly came into my room, with the smoothness of a fairy queen walking across a placid surface of water. The matted floor gave no sound of human foot steps. I could not tell distinctly as I was looking through closed eyelids; but she looked fair, with a wealth of hair and a long well-shaped neck, making me feel as if I were throwing my eyes on a vignette of latter-day vogue, held up against a light.

The vision stopped before a cupboard in the rear of the room. A karakami screening the cupboard was pushed open and a slim arm visible in the dark came out of a sleeve. The screen closed then and the phantom sailed noiselessly back to the opening, which, in the next moment, closed of itself. Sleep now gathered faster and faster on me. The dead must feel as I did then, I obscurely imagined, before being reborn into a horse or an ox.

I did not know how long I had been wandering between man and horse; only I opened my eyes. The curtain of night had apparently been raised long since, and the world was light from end to end, with the bright Spring sun printing darkly bamboo lattices on the window “shoji,”[(17)] leaving no room, as it appeared, for any spooky things to lurk about on the face of the earth. The mysterious apparition must have hied into the far, far away world on the other side of the Styx.

I went straightway down to the bath-room for a morning dip. I just held my head above water for a full five minutes, perfectly will-less to wash my face or to be getting out. How could I have gone, I wondered, into such state of mind as I did last night and how could the world go head-over-heels so completely by merely crossing the boundary line of night and day.

I was too lazy to dry myself and was coming out of the bath-room almost wet, when to my surprise, simultaneous with my opening the bath-room door from within, a voice—that of a woman—outside said: “Good morning, did you sleep well last night?”

I had expected no one on the other side of the door, and the greeting came with such absolute suddenness that I was at a loss for an answer. The voice then said: “Put this on and be good; so there.” This was said as the person, from whom the voice proceeded, went behind me and put gently on my back a kimono deliciously soft to the skin,[(18)] Then and only then did the command of words return to me sufficiently to enable me to blurt out: “So kind of you, thank you.” The woman withdrew a step or two backward as I turned to say this.

Now, it is an unwritten law for novelists, from time immemorial, to give the minutest portrayal of their hero or heroine. If words, phrases, clauses, and effusions employed by ancients as well as by moderns, of the East and of the West, in describing and speaking of beautiful women, were collected, they might, indeed, out-volume even the great Buddhist Sutras. The words might mount up to a countless number, if I were to pick out, from this overwhelming accumulation of adjectives, those that would fit the woman, who was standing three steps from me, with her body slightly twisted half way round toward me and looking at me from the corner of her eyes, as if enjoying my amazement and embarrassment. To confess the truth, I had never yet seen an expression like this woman’s in the thirty years of my life. According to the Greek sculptural ideals, the artists say, calmness seems to be that state of force in which it is ready for, but has not yet gone, into action. Roused into action it may awake the winds and clouds and bring down a thunder-storm. But one does not know what, and it is precisely the consciousness of this profound and unseen potentiality that makes the Greek art live for centuries and centuries with its unchanging powers of fascination. This serene calmness with its electric possibilities, it is which forms the source of what the world calls dignity and augustness. But once in motion the force must take one form or another, and once in form it can no longer retain its mystic powers, nor can it recover its perfection. There is always, thus, something low and mean in motion. This one word motion, it was, that made failures of Unkey’s Niwo and Hokusai’s comic pictures. Motion or rest? That is where the vital question hangs for us artists. The qualities of beautiful women, from the oldest of times, may be brought under either one of these categories.

But the woman before me was a puzzle, her expression defying my power of judgment. Her lips were tightly sealed, and yet they seemed to speak. Her eyes were ceaselessly on the alert, indeed, motion itself. Her face was a lovely oval, somewhat fleshy downward and altogether calmly composed. Her brow was narrow, not quite in keeping with her generally classical features. Especially noticeable were her eyebrows that almost joined, and the nervous twitching going on between them as if a drop of mint oil were drying there. Not so with her nose, which was neither too thin and sharp, bespeaking flippancy nor beetle-like, indicating dullness, but was of such shape as would make a fine picture. In short, her features, taken separately, had each its own point of significance, and it was no wonder I was at a loss as they all at once crowded into my eyes with no claim to harmony.

Supposing an earthquake occurred, convulsing the earth. Suppose that awakening to the fact that motion is against one’s nature, one strives to recover one’s former repose; but carried by the force of lost balance, one keeps on in motion, in spite of oneself, and wants in desperation to be now agitated with a vengeance. Suppose one is capable of an expression reflecting such a state of things, then it was precisely such an expression that I saw in the woman before me.

Thus it was that behind her look of contempt, I could see a flicker of yearning, and the gleam of a careful mind from under a mocking air. She looked as if she thought nothing of a hundred men, when she let loose her wit and rode on her high spirits. There was no unity of expression. I might have said, light and darkness of mind were living under the same roof, quarreling. The fact that there was no unity in her expression was evidence, as I took it, that there was no unity in her mind. That there was no unity in her mind must be the consequence of there being no unity in the world in which she had lived. Hers was the face of one struggling to overcome the unhappiness that was weighing down upon her. She must be a woman standing under a star of ill-luck.

“Thank you.” Repeating the words, I lightly bowed to her.

“Your room is dusted. Go back and you will see. I will come to you later.”

No sooner had she said this than she nimbly turned round and lightly hurried away along the passage. She had her hair done up in the “butterfly” style. I could espy her fair neck under the black hair. Quite striking was her black satin “obi,” wound round her shapely waist. Perhaps the satin lined only one side of the sash, I reflected as I stood watching her.

CHAPTER IV.

With absolutely no thought of any kind in my head, I returned to my room, and found it dusted clean and tidied up carefully. Then I recalled last night’s apparition, and felt an irresistible curiosity to look into the closet. I went up to it and opened the paper screen. I found inside an under-sized chest of drawers, with a woman’s obi draping down its side, suggesting that somebody had carried away in haste some clothes on the cabinet. One end of the obi was in a layer of folded kimono of feminine colour. Some books on shelves occupied one corner of the closet, one of the Zen[(21)] priest Haku-un’s works, and the classical Isemono-gatari, standing out conspicuously among them.

Giving myself no reason, I resumed my seat on the cushion at the low teak wood table, which served as my desk. On the table was my sketch book, carefully placed in the centre, with a pencil between its leaves. I took up the book, wondering how the things I wrote in dreams would look in the morning.

“Kaidono tsuyuo furu-u-ya monogurui.”

Somebody wrote this under it: “Kaidono tsuyuo furu-u-ya asa-garasu.”[(j)] Scribbled in pencil, the style of writing was not as clear as it might be; I thought it too stiff for a woman’s hand but too flaccid for a man’s. Anyway, it was another surprise to me. I went on reading the next piece:

“Hanano kage onnano kageno oborokana.”[(jk)]

This had under it: “Hanano kage, onnano kageo kasanekeri.”[(k)] The third piece:

“Shoichi-i onnami bakete oborozuki,” was revised beneath into: “On-zoshi onnani bakete oborozuki.”[(l)] Were they meant to be imitations, or corrections, or a vindication? Was the party a fool, or was it an attempt to fool? I gave a puzzling shake to my head.

“Later” she said, I told myself. She might put in her appearance, when the meal was brought in, and I might get some light, then. What time could it be? I looked at my watch, and it was past 11 o’clock. Such a long sleep I had, I thought. To do with only two meals would at this rate be good for my stomach!

I pushed open a paper screen on the right side of my room, and looked out for a sign of last night’s phantasy. What I took for an aronia was indeed a tree of that name in blossom; but the garden was smaller than I fancied. The whole place was grown over with dark-green moss, apparently so nice to walk on, and almost burying five or six stepping stones. On the left a red-barked pine tree, growing out from between rocks, some way up the slope of a mountain, stood slantingly overhanging. A little behind the aronia was a thicket and still further beyond, a grove of tall bamboos, scraping the sunny Spring sky. View to the right was shut out by a ridge of roof; but judging from topography, I should say the ground descended in a slow gradient towards the bath-house.

The mountain had at its foot a hillock and the hillock was surrounded by a belt of level land, about half a mile wide. This belt glided on the outer side into the bottom of the sea, and rose sharply again forty miles away, forming the islet Maya of thirteen miles in circumference. This was the geography of Nakoi. The spa-hotel is built at the foot of the hill, with its back terraced as closely as possible against its steep side, taking in half of its craggy slope for the scenic effect of its garden. The building is two-storeyed in front; but only one at the rear, and sitting at the edge of my verandah, the heels touched the velvety moss. It was no wonder, I had thought last night, that the house was a strangely planned one, with so many steps to go up and down, and up and down.

I now opened the window in the left flank. A natural hollow, a couple of yards, both ways, in a big rock, had turned into a pool of water, one does not know how long since, and was reflecting calmly in it a wild cherry tree in bloom, while a bunch or two of giant-leaved creeping bamboos decked a corner of the rock. Yonder a hedge of what looked like box-thorns fenced in the garden. A road from the beach sloping upward, for climbing the hill, seemed to pass outside the hedge, and passers talking could be heard now again. Off the other edge of the road, orange trees covered the ground that fell Southward, the declivity ending in a great bamboo jungle, that flared white. I learned for the first time, then, that the bamboo leaves shine like silver, when looked at from a distance. Above the jungle, the hill on the other side abounded in pine trees, and five or six stone steps were clearly visible between their red trunks. Probably a temple stood on the hill.

I went out into the verandah and found that it turned square with its railing. An upstairs room across an inner court in the front section of the building filled up space, which should, as I judged from its bearings, give a view of the sea. It was jolly that leaning against the railing, I was upstairs as high. The bath tank being situated in the basement, and from the standpoint of taking a bath I might be said to be living on the third floor.

The house is quite large; but the living quarters and kitchen apart, shutters were down in nearly all the rooms, except the up-stairs one in the front section, another next to mine by turning to the right along the verandah, and my own, of course. Evidently I was the only guest stopping there. The rain-doors were all closed; but judging from the look of things I might wager pretty safely that once they opened those doors they would not go to the trouble of shutting them again, even at night. One might even suspect they did not bother themselves about locking the entrance door. I should say, an ideal place for an unhuman sojourn.

It was almost noon by my watch, and I was beginning to feel somewhat empty. But there was no sign of any tiffin forthcoming. Imagining myself a wanderer in the familiar line of poetry, “Void the mountain, not a soul seen,” I thought I might do without a meal or so cheerfully. I felt too lazy to paint. As for the poetry, I have been living it, and it appeared to me decidedly unwise to try to compose one. I have brought with me a few books tied into my tripod; but even that I felt in no mood to untie and read. Lying with the shadow of flowers on the verandah, with my back basking in warm sunshine of Spring, I was in the height of worldly delectation. I shall fall off if I thought and a motion was dangerous. If I could help it, I did not want even to breathe, I felt like remaining immobile for a fortnight or so, like a plant growing out of the floor matting.

Presently I heard somebody walking along the passage, and then coming up-stairs. As the footsteps neared, I judged there were two. No sooner had they stopped outside my room than one of them went back the way he or she came, without a word. The karakami opened and I expected to greet her of this morning. I felt as if I had missed something, when I saw that it was only the young maid of last night.

“Sorry, Danna-sama, we kept you waiting.” So saying the girl placed a portable dinner table before me, with not a word of reference to the missing breakfast. On the table was a dish of broiled fish with something green, and a lacquered bowl, which, on taking off the cover, revealed a clear soup with some young ferns and some red and white shrimps. The colours of shrimps, were so lovely that I kept looking at them a while.

“You don’t like that, Danna-sama,” asks the girl.

“Yes, I am going to take it,” I said; but in my mind I was loath to eat so charming a thing. I remembered reading in a book, that taking some salad into his dish, and looking at, Turner said to one sitting next to him at dinner, that its colour was refreshing and was the one he used. I wished very much that I could have let Turner see the shrimps and the ferns. In my opinion, there is nothing beautiful in colour in Western dishes, excepting perhaps salad and radishes. I cannot, of course, say anything from the nutritious point of view, but I must say that theirs is very uncivilized from the artist’s point of view. On the contrary the Japanese dishes are all superbly beautiful, be it the soup, the pastry or the sliced raw fish. You may come away without taking a single chopstickful of things set before you, but you may consider yourself fully repaid for having been at a tea-house, from the point of view of having feasted your eyes.

“There is a young lady, here?” I asked the girl, as I put down the soup bowl.

“Yes, sir.”

“Who is she?”

“She is the young Mistress.”

“Is there any elder Mistress besides her?”

“She died last year.”

“And the master?”

“He lives here, and the lady is his daughter.”

“That young lady?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are there any other guests?”

“No, sir.”

“Only myself, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What does the young Mistress do every day?”

“Sewing....”

“And?”

“She plays samisen.”[(19)]

How unexpected! However quite interesting and so:

“What else?” I asked.

“She goes to the temple,” answers the girl.

Unexpected again. The samisen playing and the temple going are decidedly a curious conglomeration.

“Does she go there to worship?”

“She goes there to see the Osho-sama.”[(20)]

“Does the Osho-san take lessons in samisen?”

“No, sir.”

“What does she go there for?”

“She goes there to see Daitetsu-sama.”

It dawned on me that Daitetsu must be the priest who wrote the framed calligraphy on the wall. Judging from its wording Daitetsu must be a Zen priest, and Haku-un’s book in the closet must belong to him.

“Is this a living room for any one of the family?”

“Yes, sir; the Mistress lives here.”

“Is that so? Well, then, she had been here till I came in, last night?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry, I have robbed her of her room. And what does she go to see Daitetsu-san for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything else?”

“Many other things.”

“What many other things?”

“I don’t know.”

This put an end to my catechism, and also to my tiffin. The girl took away the little table. As she pulled open the wall-papered screen, I saw through the opening the young woman of butterfly coiffeur, resting her chin in her hands that were supported by arms which had their elbows on the railing of the up-stairs verandah, overlooking a inner court shrubbery. The “butterfly” was gazing downward with the pose of a modernised goddess of mercy. In contrast to how she struck me this morning, she was serenely calm. Looking downward as she was, I could not tell how her eyes were moving. I could only wonder if any change had come into her expression. An ancient says that nothing speaks better for a person than his pupils. He is right. How can a man conceal? There is, indeed, no organ in human body so alive as the eye. Two real butterflies flew upward twirling around each other from under the railing, on which the human butterfly was leaning quietly. It was just at this juncture that the girl opened the fusuma[(22)] of my room, and the noise made the woman yonder lift her eyes from the butterflies, and direct them toward me. Her eyes shot through the space like a shaft of rays, and hit me between my own. My heart throbbed; but the same moment the girl closed the screen. The momentary spell broke and I returned to the noon tide of balmy Spring.

I again stretched myself full length on the matted floor, and soon I was reciting:

“Sadder than the moon’s lost light,

Lost is the kindling of dawn,

To travellers journeying on,

The shutting of thy fair face from my sight.”

Supposing I was in love with the “butterfly” and felt deeply the flash of joy or the pang of a sudden parting like the one I just had, at the very moment when I was dying to meet her, I should have unquestionably poetised in a strain something like the above. Furthermore, I may have added,

“Might I look on thee in death,

With bliss I would yield my breath.”

these two lines. Fortunately, I had long since left behind me the common glamour of love and amour, and could not feel pangs of this kind, even if I would. Nevertheless, the poetical significance of the event that had just happened was well brought out in the six lines. Not that there was any such heart’s anguish between the “butterfly” and myself. I felt it highly entertaining to think of our present relations in the light of these verses. Nor was it unpleasant to interpret the meaning of these lines as reflecting our present condition. There was, indeed, an invisibly thin line of cause and effect, binding us together, making real, at least, part of the conditions sung in these lines. The thread of cause and effect occasions no worry when as thin as this. Besides, it is no ordinary thread, but is like the rainbow spanning the sky; like the haze screening horizon; and like the spider-web sparkling with dew. It may break at any moment if wanted to be broken; but it is exquisitely beautiful while it remains and is seen. But what if the thread should, all of a sudden, grow thick and stout as a halyard? No fear: I am an artist and she is not of a common kind.

Suddenly the fusuma opened again, and I rolled my body round to look that way. There was standing in the opening, the “butterfly,” the other end of cause and effect, holding up in her hand a celadon porcelain bowl on a tray.

“Lying down again? It must have been annoying to you to be disturbed so often, last night, ho, ho, ho,” she laughed. She betrayed not the least sign of having been impressed with fear or of fearing, still less with a bashful feeling. The only thing was, she got the start of me.

“Thank you, this morning,” I said my thanks again. This was the third time I made acknowledgment for the dishabille, and each time it consisted of the two words “Thank you.”

I made a move to sit up; but she was quicker; she had sat down on the matting close to where I was lying:

“Oh, please don’t stir. You can talk as you are, Sensei.”[(23)]

I thought her quite convincing and only changed my pose so far as to lie on my belly, with my chin on the ends of two arms, planted in on the tatami-mat.

“I have come to make tea for you, Sensei, thinking you must be tired of doing nothing.”

“Thank you.” I said it again. I saw, in the sea-green cake-bowl she brought, some isinglass paste “yokan.” I love yokan. Not that I am eager to eat it, but to me it appeals decidedly as an objet d’art, with its fine, smooth surface, that glistens semi-transparently as the light strikes it. Especially pleasant-looking is the one of light-green, with its lustre and its appearance of being wrought with marble and gyoku-stone. In a celadon bowl, it looks as if just born out of it. It makes me feel like putting out my hand and feeling it. No Western cake, that I know of, produces such delicious impression as the yokan. Cream is agreeably soft in colour, but there is something heavy and thick about it, while jelly with all its look of a precious stone, trembles so that it is devoid of the weightiness of the yokan. It is an insuperable abomination when it comes to a tower of flour, milk and sugar.

“Oh, very nice.”

“Gembey has just brought it back from the town. I hope it is good enough for your taste.”

Gembey must have stopped overnight in the town, I thought; but I made no answer. It made no difference to me where the thing was got or by whom. The thing being beautiful, I should be content with thinking that it is beautiful.

“This celadon bowl is exquisite in shape and superb in tint. It makes a worthy match to the yokan.”

The woman smiled a smile that betrayed a shadow of contempt playing about her mouth. It was probable that she thought I was jesting. If that is the case, my words, I must confess, fully deserved contumely. When a witless fellow tries to be jocular, he generally lands himself on a sorry exhibition of this kind.

“Is this Chinese?”