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Title: In the land of the gods: some stories of Japan
Author: Alice Mabel Bacon
Release date: July 18, 2026 [eBook #79121]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79121
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE LAND OF THE GODS: SOME STORIES OF JAPAN ***
By Alice M. Bacon
IN THE LAND OF THE GODS. 12mo, $1.50.
JAPANESE GIRLS AND WOMEN. 16mo, $1.25. In Riverside Library for Young
People. 16mo, 75 cents.
_Holiday Edition._ With 12 full-page Illustrations in color and 43
outline drawings by Japanese artists. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00.
A JAPANESE INTERIOR. 16mo, $1.25. In Riverside School Library. 16mo,
60 cents, _net_.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
IN THE LAND OF THE GODS
IN THE LAND
OF THE GODS
SOME STORIES
OF JAPAN BY
ALICE
MABEL
BACON
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND
COMPANY MDCCCCV
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY
ALICE MABEL BACON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1905_
DEDICATION
TO MY JAPANESE FRIENDS, THROUGH
WHOSE EYES I HAVE SEEN, BY WHOSE
EARS I HAVE HEARD, WITH WHOSE
VOICES I HAVE SPOKEN, THIS VOLUME
IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED
A story book should need no introduction, but inasmuch as this one
deals with customs, beliefs, and modes of thought as yet unfamiliar to
American readers, a few preliminary words of explanation may be an aid
to sympathy and comprehension.
Since the great war has begun to show us something of the intensity of
Japanese national life, nothing, perhaps, has surprised the Occident
more than the spiritual force of the race,--the reverent but certain
attitude in which its members stand toward much that is to us unknown,
or at best intermittently believed. In no respect do the Japanese as
a nation differ more widely from Occidentals than in their actual
practical belief in the close relations existing between the visible
and the invisible, and in the continuity of this life and the next.
The pledge of “loyalty to the Emperor for seven lives” is not a mere
hyperbole. It voices the deepest religious feeling of the Japanese soul.
In the hope that somehow, by this effort to render vivid to American
minds some of the popular beliefs and superstitions of Japan, I may
be able to help my own people to a more sympathetic understanding of
our trans-Pacific neighbors, I have written out these stories. Many
of them are simply folk-tales, set, for our better comprehension of
the conditions, in the every-day atmosphere of Japanese home-life in
country or city. One, “The Blue Flame,” is an incident told me as true,
and as occurring in the very town in which the narrator lived. Two,
“The Favor of Hachiman” and “At the Shrine of Fudō,” while neither
folk-tales nor stories told to me, set forth beliefs that to-day
actuate the lives of some forty million wide-awake, progressive, and
intelligent people.
Three of the stories are devoted to the fox superstition, still found
among the peasants and among the lower classes in the cities, but that
no longer survives among the educated modern Japanese.
For a fuller understanding of the mysteries touched upon in this
volume, the reader is referred to the works of Lafcadio Hearn. His
book, “Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation,” is the most complete and
sympathetic study yet made of the spiritual side of the nation, and the
chapter “Kitsuné,” in volume one of his “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,”
relates in charming form the various phases of the fox belief.
HOLDERNESS, N. H.,
August, 1905.
CONTENTS
I THE FAVOR OF HACHIMAN 1
II AT THE SHRINE OF FUDŌ 39
III THE BLUE FLAME 73
IV THE INDEPENDENCE OF SABURO 85
V KITSUNÉ YASHIKI 105
VI CHOKICHI’S PILGRIMAGE 131
VII THE BUYER OF AMÉ 151
VIII THE PEONY LANTERN 169
IX THE LADY OF THE SCROLL 215
X HOW FUMI REMEMBERED 239
GLOSSARY 267
I
THE FAVOR OF HACHIMAN
Hachiman is the deified spirit of the Emperor Ojin,
son of the warrior Empress Jingo. He is now worshiped
as the God of War in many shrines and temples
throughout Japan.
It was the eve of the annual Feast of the Dead,[1] and O Kimi San had
just finished the construction and decoration of the “Spirit Altar.”
She had set the posts and hung the rice-straw rope, and swung from
it the fringe of vermicelli, green chestnut sprays, white paper, and
dried fruits and vegetables. She had shaped with her own hands, from
cucumbers and egg-fruits, the rude representations of cattle and
horses, and had set them, together with fresh food and wine, before the
quaint little shrine that stood now, completed, in the place of honor
in the house. And all the time as she worked she had been thinking of
Taro, and the tears came to her tired old eyes, and dropped sometimes
upon her work, as she thought of how, only three months before, he had
gone to the war, and then of how soon came back to his old father and
mother the word of his death, fighting the hairy Russians in Manchuria.
And so to-day, as she prepared to do honor to the visiting spirits, it
was of Taro that she thought more than of the ancestral ghosts for whom
she had kept the feast so many years. Taro, her brave, strong Taro,
who should have lived to make his daily and yearly offerings at his
parents’ shrine, was coming to them to-night, a spirit, to receive from
them the comfort and love that was all the happiness earth could offer
him now! As she worked through the hot August morning, her heart was
sore and sad, and there seemed no hope ahead for her and Gunkichi, her
old husband. Lonely they must live on until death came, and lonely must
their spirits be forever, for no descendants would offer to them the
affection and the daily gifts that disembodied spirits crave.
She stood now on the edge of her little piazza, and looked down the
length of the village street. A small white flag, in its centre a
blood-red sun, drooped idly from its slender bamboo staff before the
house. A great gray monkey, chained to a tree across the road, woke
from his noonday doze to blink at her sleepily, then closed his eyes
and humped himself once more into a fluffy ball. The heated air wavered
above the dusty road until the shops and hotels on each side of it
seemed to shimmer and shake like the background of a moving picture.
And--still like a moving picture--there came directly toward her the
figure of a woman, wavering, almost staggering, under the heat of the
August sun and the weight of a heavy baby tied to her back. The village
lay quiet, asleep or preoccupied with its own discomfort, while the
woman toiled on toward O Kimi San’s little rest-house. It was a tiny,
thatched, open-fronted cottage, just beyond the village, and almost
overhanging the mountain gorge along which the road was built. It was
cool and fresh with the foam of the torrent far below, and in the
shadow of a wooded rocky peak that towered above.
O Kimi San shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked into the
shimmering glare at the small burdened figure. Her kindly old face,
seamed and crisscrossed with the wrinkles of a hard life, grew
sympathetic. The traveler, as she came into the shade of the Tengu
Rock, breathed a deep sigh, and with a hitch of her shoulders tilted
the baby into a more comfortable position. O Kimi, from the little
matted platform that was the floor of her house, called out hospitably
to the newcomer,--
“It is very hot! Come in and rest a little; you must be tired.”
The mother looked up doubtfully and shook her head. “Thank you,” she
said; “it is hot, but I must go on. I must reach Shio no Yu to-night;”
and she struggled forward.
But O Kimi’s kindly soul was not content with such refusal. She slipped
from the platform into her sandals lying ready on the earth below, and
followed the traveler.
“Come in,” she said; “please come, for the baby’s sake if not for your
own. You cannot see how red and hot he is. He will be sick if you carry
him farther in this heat. Wait here with me until it’s cooler. You can
get to Shio no Yu if you start by four o’clock. The moon is full, and
you can walk late.” O Kimi fairly dragged the little woman back with
her to the house, her tired visitor demurring faintly. “Now sit down
here and untie the baby, and I will take him. Then you can rest your
poor tired feet with some of that hot water over there;” and O Kimi
pointed to a steaming, dripping pipe creeping along the perpendicular
upper edge of the road,[2] under which tubs were set to catch the
leakage.
The tired little mother, in a paroxysm of thanks and expostulations,
gave herself up to the kindly solicitude of her hostess. She sat
obediently down on the tiny, polished piazza, and untied the band which
held the heavy baby to her. O Kimi took him in her arms, hugged him for
a moment to her wrinkled breast, then laid him down and watched him
with greedy eyes while his mother was washing her face and arms and
blistered feet in the steaming hot water across the way.
“When he wakes he shall have a bath too,” said the old woman, as the
mother, refreshed, came and took her seat on the soft mats of the
little house; “but now you must have some tea and a fan, and then,
when you are rested, tell me something about yourself, and why you are
traveling all alone this way with your baby.”
O Kimi bustled off to her kitchen, and soon came back with tea and
cake. Then she disappeared again, and after a longer time brought in
a second tray with rice-bowl, pickles, fish, and iced vermicelli, all
as daintily served as the Empress herself could have wished. “It is a
poor meal,” she said, with formal self-depreciation. “My husband caught
the trout in the river this morning, and the vermicelli is but the O
Bon fare. I am sorry that I have nothing better to offer you;” and she
bowed low as she set the tray before her guest.
But though the food was dainty, though O Kimi San offered new helpings
of rice from the brass-bound wooden bucket with insistent hospitality,
the traveler was too tired to eat. She played with her chopsticks and
commented with enthusiastic politeness on the delicacies set before
her, but could hardly choke down the last of the rice in her bowl,--an
act which etiquette and religion both required of her,--and the fish
and vermicelli were left almost untouched. Her face was pale, and
under her eyes were blue rings. Every movement of the visitor showed
that she needed rest more than food. O Kimi’s sympathetic heart went
out to the poor stranger.
“Here,” she said, “lie down beside your baby, and I will hang my large
mosquito-net, and you can sleep awhile before you go on. You are too
tired to move yet.” With gentle insistence she gained her point. The
tired mother lay down on the mat beside her sleeping baby, and the
great green linen mosquito-netting, hung from the four corners of
the room, shut out the hard things of life for a space, leaving the
wanderers to the ministration of the green coolness, the soft air, the
murmur and rush of the torrent far below them.
O Kimi San continued with her household tasks. She carried out her
dishes and trays and rice-bucket to the kitchen, she swept the road in
front of the house, and watered it with a dipper from a wooden pail.
She filled the kettle with fresh spring water, and arranged the bits of
charcoal in the fire so that they should concentrate their heat at the
precise centre of the kettle’s bottom. Then she went back to her guests
who were sleeping under the mosquito-net, just as the baby opened his
eyes and began to whimper. O Kimi went down on her knees and gathered
him to her longing heart. “Botchan,”[3] she whispered, and cuddled
him and talked to him in the soft baby language until his little hand
stole into her bosom, and he began to chatter in reply like a sparrow,
looking up into her eyes and laughing with quaint baby humor. He was
a fat, sturdy, red-cheeked boy of three, who trotted about the matted
floor on chubby brown feet, and laughed and danced when O Kimi brought
him a bowl of rice. She fed him with chopsticks, he sitting on his
heels facing her solemnly with open mouth like a young bird, and
closing mouth and eyes ecstatically when the chopsticks, like the old
bird’s beak, pushed the food between his lips.
When the tired mother waked at last, O Kimi and the boy were great
friends. She had brought a tub of hot water from the pipe across
the road, and was taking off his scanty clothing in preparation
for the promised bath. He wore only a little cotton kimono, with a
diamond-shaped apron of many-colored _to chirimen_, or woolen crape,
beneath. Undressing was a small affair, and soon Botchan was sitting in
the wooden tub, splashing and chattering like a young duck.
“Such a boy!” said O Kimi San to the mother, who was sitting up now,
watching the operations of her hostess. “He is so like my son. It makes
me happy to have him near me.”
“And your son--where is he?” asked the visitor.
O Kimi San looked straight ahead of her and spoke very softly: “My son
has had the great honor to give himself to the Emperor. Alas! we must
light the O Bon lanterns for him to-night”-- Her voice broke, and she
hid her face behind her sleeve.
The visitor bowed low. “It is sad, and my heart is grieved for you,”
she said. “To my husband, too, has come such honor. He went down in
the Sakura Maru at Port Arthur, and even his body was not found. His
spirit, they say, is in the Shokonsha,[4] but”--
The elder woman bowed in her turn in the presence of a grief so like
her own, and there was silence for a space. At last she said softly,
“How is my heart grieved with your sorrow;” then, her eye resting
on Botchan, who was squatting now beside his mother, looking with
wondering eyes at his elders, she added comfortingly, “But your boy
will grow up to care for you, and to preserve his father’s memory.”
The visitor bowed again. “True, he will care for me when he is grown,
but how shall I care for him until he is grown? I am going now to my
husband’s brother in Shio no Yu, but he is poor, and has many boys of
his own, and I do not know whether he will receive me.” The woman’s
voice trembled, and she stopped for a moment, then went on in the
curious, even tone which in a Japanese woman betrays deep emotion.
“When my husband went, he said to me, ‘Suzu, I shall probably die for
my country. You must not mourn, you must be glad, and must teach the
boy to be glad that his father had so great honor.’ And when I said,
‘Oh, Yofu, how can I be glad? How can I live? I must kill myself if
you are killed,’ he answered, ‘To kill yourself would not be brave or
wise, if by so doing you should leave our boy to starve. If I die, you
must live and make a brave man of him.’ So I have lived, but it is hard
for me. And Botchan is a brave boy,--so brave and so strong. All this
morning as we came up from Nishi Nasuno, he walked by my side, his
little hand in mine. Sometimes he would stumble and almost fall, and I
would say, ‘Botchan is tired, let mamma carry him,’ but it was always,
‘Botchan is very strong. Mamma is tired.’ At noon we stopped to eat our
lunch, and when I looked at his feet, they were all blistered. I washed
them in cold water as we sat beside the road, but when we started out
again he could not walk. That is why I carried him. Yes, Botchan is a
soldier’s son, and he will be a brave man.”
Suzu hugged the stolid, chubby baby sitting so solemnly beside her,
until he giggled and shouted with delight. “And now, if indeed it must
be, we will go, for I must reach Shio no Yu to-night,” and Suzu bowed
her farewell to O Kimi with many expressions of gratitude for her
kindness, while Botchan gravely imitated her prostrations.
“Can’t you stay here with me to-night?” protested O Kimi. “There is a
storm coming. You should not try to brave a storm with that baby.” But
Suzu was set on her plan, and with a final hug of Botchan as she tied
him to his mother’s back, O Kimi set them forth upon the road.
“Cross the river about a mile above here where you see a little bridge,
then follow the road to the left, and Shio no Yu is about four miles
away.”
Suzu bowed and smiled, and O Kimi went back to her little house,
lonelier than ever for the baby’s visit.
There was a muttering of thunder from the hills above, a darkness and
stifling stillness in the air. O Kimi looked out uneasily. “It is time
Gunkichi was back,” she said. “He has been gone all day. If he gets
caught across the river, and the storm comes, how will he get home?”
But as she was bringing her vague fears to a point by speech, there was
a light pat-pat of sandals along the road, and Gunkichi, wrinkled and
smiling, with a great bundle of sprawling, straggling roots upon his
back, hailed his old wife with a cheerful greeting.
“It’s very hot,” he said, as he dipped his towel into the hot water and
washed the streaming perspiration from his face and arms and bare brown
legs and feet, “but we are going to have a great storm, and then it
will be cool.” He laughed and chattered, partly to himself, partly to
his wife, and partly to the great gray monkey perched on the tree above
him. “Heh! Mr. Monkey,” he said, “you are so lazy this hot weather that
you don’t care for anything. Heh! Mr. Monkey, wake up!” He poked at the
humpy fur ball until it turned its red face, grown redder with rage,
toward him and chattered viciously. “Now you are awake at last, and I
will give you something. Here, mother, will you hand me a cracker for
Mr. Monkey?”
O Kimi laughed, and brought him a toasted rice cracker. “Gunkichi,”
she said, “I believe you try to be a boy just to comfort me;” and she
looked at him affectionately, but with tears in her eyes.
Gunkichi said nothing. He was apparently absorbed in watching the
monkey, who was meditatively crunching the cracker. When he turned
again he cleared his throat a little before he went on to tell O Kimi
of his day’s successes.
Such a day as it had been! He had climbed the Tengu Rock and worshiped
at the little shrine of Hachiman, the war-god, on its top, and seen the
great black snake who lies always coiled up within the shrine except
when the god sends him forth with his messages. Then he had set out in
search of roots suitable for his use. For Gunkichi was an artist in
roots. His little shop beside O Kimi’s kitchen was filled with strange
productions of his fancy. By smoothing here and hollowing there, by
cunningly reinforcing and adding in another place, by a spot of red or
black or white paint judiciously applied, Gunkichi would evolve from
the most hopeless-looking roots and snags griffins, _tengus_, devils,
monsters of all sorts, which found a ready sale among the summer
visitors at the hot baths in the village. As he opened his bundle and
drew out his new-found treasures one by one, he discoursed eloquently
on the wonderful things that they would become in his hands.
“Look, mother, this will make a grand dragon!” He pulled a long twisted
root with many branches from the heap in front of him. “Here is his
head now, with horns and wide-open mouth. I will paint his mouth red,
and give him two great white eyes. Then when I have soaked his long
body in the hot water, and coiled it about, these branches will make
his legs, and this long slender one his tail. Perhaps some of the Tokyo
people will buy it. I wish the Emperor could see it! I’d give it to him
if I could.”
He stopped, abashed by the temerity into which his enthusiasm had led
him, and added humbly, “But of course it would not be worthy,” and
bowed low at the name that he had invoked.
“Father, you have given to the Emperor the only thing you had to give.”
There was a pride, carefully veiled, in O Kimi’s voice. Gunkichi, who
had by this time slipped out of his sandals and seated himself on the
mats, turned his head aside and vigorously rubbed his face with his
blue-and-white towel.
Just then the storm broke. With vivid lightning, a crash of thunder,
and the roaring as of a waterspout, it rushed down the mountain gorge.
O Kimi San drew the outer rain-doors of the house, sliding them along
their grooves on a full run. The monkey, a moment before a motionless
ball of gray fur on the top of his perch, scuttled down, with much
angry chattering and rattling of his chain, into his little house. They
were none too soon, for the rain, like a solid column of water, was
rushing and swirling about them, the river foaming and roaring beneath,
almost before O Kimi and Gunkichi could fasten the house securely.
Then O Kimi stirred about the kitchen preparing supper, while Gunkichi
smoked thoughtfully in the shuttered twilight of the little guest-room.
As O Kimi brought in the tray and the rice-bucket, she suddenly
bethought herself of her visitor. “Ma!” she exclaimed. “Poor Suzu! I
wonder where she is now!”
“What Suzu?” asked Gunkichi.
Then Kimi told him all the story of her afternoon, and of how Suzu had
left the house only just before he came home.
“If she got across the bridge before the storm came, she will be safe,”
said Gunkichi; “but if she tries to cross it in the storm, she may be
carried away with it.”
There was nothing to be done. Supper cleared away, the old couple sat
and talked. Once or twice O Kimi tried to light the O Bon lanterns, but
with a swirl and a rush the wind blowing through the funnel-like gorge
extinguished them each time. She was perturbed, and a look of fear
came into her eyes, a wail into her voice. “It will be dark for him,
and he will think we have forgotten him! Gunkichi, what shall we do?”
Gunkichi answered her gently, “Our Taro knows we would not forget him.
He knows that we would light the lanterns for him if we could, but the
wind-gods will not let us. You have set the food and trimmed the light
before the spirit altar. He has been away so short a time, he cannot
lose his way home, even if there is no light outside.”
“If I could only open the _amado_ a crack so that he could come
through,” O Kimi moaned, and pushed the shutter aside a little. But
the howling wind filled the house, and shook the flimsy structure as
a terrier shakes a rat. Both tugged together to close the door again,
and then sat down in the darkness, for the wind had put out their
light. Only the tiny lamp before the spirit altar continued to burn. It
flickered in the searching wind, and threw strange creeping shadows on
the walls.
And then there came a cry, a wail of terror from the stream below.
Gunkichi started up. “What’s that? Some one is in trouble in the
river!” He threw open the _amado_, and the wind and rain nearly took
his breath away. He felt the road with his bare foot. It was a running
torrent, but he stepped in, and out from the shelter of the roof. The
wind took him and pinned him fast against a rock, while the pouring
rain nearly drowned him. He could see the river by the pale light of
the full moon behind the clouds. It was boiling white among the great
black rocks far below, and he knew that to reach its level in the wind
and rain would be useless. Spent and water-soaked, he crawled back at
last to the house.
All night the wind blew, the thunder roared, and the rain fell in
torrents; but when morning came the clouds cleared away, the wind
blew fair, the sun shone, and every rock and leaf and twig seemed
new-created after the storm.
Gunkichi started out early, to go up the river and see what had
happened in the night. “If I can get across, I will go to Shio no Yu
and see if Suzu reached there safely,” he said, as he tied on his
sandals.
O Kimi set about her household tasks. She was thinking a great deal
about her own Taro, and then, again, of Suzu and her little Botchan.
Her heart ached to hold the chubby baby form close to her breast, to
put food between the soft baby lips, to hear the cooing baby voice; and
somehow Taro and Botchan seemed to mingle in her mind until she felt
that yesterday she had held her own boy in her arms, and then had sent
him away into the storm with an unknown woman.
She was sitting at her sewing, looking from time to time out into the
road, her eyes dim and misty, and with an occasional tear dropping upon
the blue cotton of Gunkichi’s new blouse. Did she see aright, or was
that mist before her eyes deceiving her? There was a great black snake
gliding down the road! She rubbed her eyes and looked. Never had she
seen such a snake. He was eight feet long or more, and of ample girth,
and his black, scaly body glistened in the sunshine. He came on to the
little rest-house, and paused before it, lifted his head, and waved it
back and forth, raising it higher and higher until his gleaming eyes
looked over the edge of the piazza right at O Kimi San.
“It is the messenger of Hachiman,” whispered O Kimi, and prostrated
herself in reverence, face down upon the mats. She raised her head, the
snake was still looking at her. Again she bowed, and when she looked
up there was still that shining waving head with the glittering eyes
fixed full upon her. Once more O Kimi bowed low, and in her heart was a
prayer to Hachiman that he would call his dread messenger back to his
shrine. When she lifted her head, no snake was there, but there was a
slight rustle on the side of the Tengu Rock, and O Kimi knew that her
petition had been answered.
“Did he send a message to me?” she thought. And then, in spite of her
grief and perturbation, she laughed at the audacity of her question.
“Of course he had no message for me. I am too low a person to have a
message from a god.” She went back to her sewing, her hand shaking a
little and her eyes dimmer than ever. Presently she looked up, brushing
her hand across her eyes as she did so. Would wonders never cease? What
was coming along the road now?
He looked very small, and very fat, and very bullet-headed, as he
walked nonchalantly along against a background of towering cliffs,
waving trees, and blue, white-flecked sky. He was dressed in a small
diamond of bright-colored cloth tied over his fat stomach, and he
carried in one hand a stick, while the other was crumpled tightly
about a struggling, gauzy insect. When he saw the rest-house standing
by the road he crowed merrily, and hastened his steps. O Kimi could
hardly believe her eyes. It was Suzu’s Botchan coming back to her! All
the love and longing of her bereaved soul went out to the brave baby
marching serenely toward her.
“O kaeri!”[5] she called out, afraid that he might go by her and out
of her life again. The baby stopped at the familiar voice, stood
motionless a moment regarding her, then bowed solemnly and nearly
double.
“Tadaima,”[6] he responded gravely, then toddled toward her holding
out his doubled fist, in which was firmly clenched a dragon-fly. “My
horse,” he explained cheerfully. “If I had a long thread, I would
harness him.” He caracoled ponderously on his small chubby feet. “I am
a soldier just come home from the war!”
“Mamma’s soldier boy!” said O Kimi in a rapture. “Come in, and we will
tie up the horse and give the soldier some rice.”
She seized him in her arms and hugged him, then carried him across the
way to the hot water pipe, where she washed the mud from his little
bare feet before setting him down on her clean mats.
He pointed with delight to the rude semblances of animals before the
spirit altar. “Taro’s horses!” he shouted, and clapped his chubby hands.
O Kimi looked at him with a curious awe. How could he know that those
things were set out for her Taro’s spirit? He was such a baby, he could
not have listened to their talk of yesterday. She questioned him:
“Where did you come from, Botchan? Where is mamma?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “You are mamma,” he said. “Taro come home
from war.”
She spoke very gently, half afraid at his strangeness. “But, Botchan,
don’t you remember mamma, who brought you here yesterday? Where is
she?”
His baby face quivered, and he looked woebegone at her obtuseness.
“Taro can’t remember yesterday,” he whimpered; “Taro come home to
mamma.”
O Kimi hugged him close. “Never mind, Botchan,” she said; “sit here a
minute and grandma will get you some breakfast.”
“Not grandma, mamma,” insisted Botchan, his round mouth puckering.
“Kimi! Kimi!” sounded Gunkichi’s voice up the road. O Kimi slipped into
her sandals, and ran to him as he came toward her on a trot. He was
breathless with excitement. “O Suzu San’s body is on the rocks, way
down below the bridge! She must have tried to cross after the storm
broke!”
“Poor thing! Poor thing!” wailed O Kimi. “I should never have let her
go! And now Botchan”--
“Botchan must have been drowned too,” interrupted Gunkichi, anxious to
tell all he knew. “His dress was still tied fast to his mother’s back;
so he fell and went down with her, that is certain. Then he was washed
down by the current. Poor baby! They will find his body farther down
the stream.”
“Father,” said O Kimi in an awe-stricken voice, “the baby is in our
house. I was getting him some rice when you called me.”
“Impossible, Kimi. If he went down with his mother, he must surely have
been drowned. Why, she was held fast, head downward against a rock, and
both must have been drowned as they fell.”
“Gunkichi,”--O Kimi’s voice was low and solemn,--“there is something
very strange that I must tell you before we go back and look at the
baby. Sit down here and cool yourself, and listen.”
They sat down at the edge of the road, out of sight of the little
house, while O Kimi told her story. She told of Hachiman’s messenger,
and of how he stopped and looked at her, and how she bowed three
times and asked Hachiman to take him away. “I think, Gunkichi, that he
really brought a message, and that Hachiman was pleased with your visit
yesterday to his shrine. For then the baby came, and what do you think
he had in his hand? A dragon-fly! and he said it was his horse!”
Gunkichi sat up, excited. “I have heard that dragon-flies are horses’
spirits!” he said.
“That is one of the strange things,” answered O Kimi; “and then he
told me he was a soldier just come home from the war. I thought he was
playing, and played with him, but when I brought him into the house, he
went right to the spirit altar, and when he saw the animals he clapped
his hands and said, ‘Taro’s horses!’ Then I began to wonder. How did he
know about Taro? How did he know those things were set out for him? So
then I questioned him about his mother, and he said I was his mother.
He couldn’t remember yesterday, only that he was a soldier just come
back from the war. He nearly cried when I called myself grandma. ‘Not
grandma, mamma,’ he insisted. Gunkichi, what does it all mean? You say
that the child was surely drowned, but he is here, or rather, his body
is here, but his spirit is changed. Hachiman has sent us back our Taro.
He gave his body in the war, and now Hachiman has let him enter a new
body so that he could comfort us.”
Gunkichi was doubtful. He had heard that such things used to happen,
but every instance that he had ever heard of was at least a hundred
years old. Things were different in those days. This was Meiji, the
Era of Enlightenment, and though strange things were still happening
daily, they were not of just this kind. There were two persons who
must be consulted before they could be quite sure what to do. One was
the policeman at the far end of the village, the other was the parish
priest.
He explained this to O Kimi, in whose mind no shadow of doubt now
existed, and while she hastened home to feed and fondle her baby,
he walked along to the police station. There, after bowing low and
offering many polite excuses for troubling his excellency, he told
the whole story to the dignified little man in his white, new-style
uniform. The policeman listened with interest, making notes the while
in his little book. Then he sallied forth, taking with him Gunkichi and
a number of the villagers, to study the situation. Poor Suzu’s body
was first recovered, and the opinion of the villagers, indorsed by the
policeman, was that the baby must have fallen with his mother, and been
washed out of his lashings and his kimono in the boiling current. How
he could have lived through it, no one could understand.
“And may we keep the baby, your honor?” said Gunkichi appealingly.
“If, when I have investigated, I find that the brother at Shio no Yu
does not want him, I think you can keep him,” was the guarded reply.
With many bows of deep respect, and effusive thanks for the hope held
forth, Gunkichi parted from the officer, and took his way toward the
village temple. It was a great, old, shabby sanctuary, with wide-eaved
curving roof of blackened thatch, and two stone statues of Jizo, buried
almost to the eyes in pebbles, sitting in mild serenity outside the
gate. Gunkichi stooped and threw a stone to each as he passed in,
murmuring a prayer to the gentle guardian of the children’s ghosts,
and thinking the while of the poor baby’s spirit, wandering beside the
river of death. He stood beside the veranda of the priest’s house that
adjoined the temple, and lifted up his voice in the polite “Excuse me
for troubling you,” that announces the presence of a guest. The old
priest came himself to greet him and bid him come in. Gunkichi bowed
and bowed, but remained humbly without, and told once more his story.
It was spiritual enlightenment that he wanted. Might he and O Kimi
believe that their Taro’s spirit, coming that first night of the Feast
of the Dead to visit his parents, had found the baby’s body lying where
the river had tossed it, and entered in, through the favor of Hachiman?
He gave all the quaint bits of evidence, the coming of the messenger,
the dragon-fly in the baby’s hand (“You know our Taro and his horse
were found shot down together,” explained Gunkichi with some pride),
the child’s use of the name Taro, his reiteration of the fact that he
was a soldier, his insistence that O Kimi was his mother.
The priest listened with reverent interest. “My son,” he said, “it is
plain that you and O Kimi San have been blessed by a miracle. The gods
have seen your kindness to the poor traveler, your worship of the great
Hachiman, your patience under your loss. And they have vouchsafed to
you this wonderful thing. Without doubt the spirit of your own Taro has
come back to you clothed in the body of poor Suzu’s baby. Give thanks
to Hachiman, whose messenger brought you your son again.”
Gunkichi fell on hands and knees upon the pebbled walk, and laid his
forehead to the ground. “Reverend priest,” he said, “since the gods
have indeed condescended to grant so great a gift to our unworthiness,
we would show our gratitude by some offering. What humble thing may we
do?”
And the priest made answer, “Upon the river bank, close to the spot
where Suzu’s body was found, build ye a shrine to the memory of her
and of her child. And at the full moon carry thither, you and Kimi and
Taro, offerings of food and wine to their spirits. And each year, when
the O Bon feast comes round, hang there a lantern and erect a spirit
altar, so that when they return they may not be lonely, but may join in
the good cheer of the festival. And teach Taro, and bid him teach his
children and his children’s children, that the shrine is holy, and that
they must continue throughout their generations the monthly and the
yearly offerings. For by the death of Suzu and her baby your family is
continued, and your spirits shall be loved and tended. Therefore, so
long as your generations continue must they love and tend the spirits
of Suzu and her son.”
Gunkichi lifted his forehead from the earth. “Surely,” he said, “we and
our children and our children’s children will pay honor to the spirits
of the mother and her child.” Then with grateful words of farewell he
went back, subdued and thoughtful, to his home.
Up and down the road in the bright sunshine galloped little Taro,
driving his great dragon-fly attached by a thread to a long bamboo
stick. “O uma!” (horse!), he shouted gleefully when he saw Gunkichi.
“O Totchan! O uma!” (Papa, horse!) O Kimi had hunted out from her
iron-bound chest of drawers a tiny blue-and-white kimono, in which she
had enveloped his chubby body, and she sat, the picture of cheer and
happiness, watching his play, and working, when she could take her
greedy eyes away from him, upon another small garment ready cut upon
her lap. When she saw Gunkichi she called out, “Father, his excellency
has been here again, and he says we may keep the baby. The man at Shio
no Yu doesn’t want him. His honor said for you to come and register at
the police station. Please go quickly.”
Gunkichi pattered eagerly away; Taro played on in the sunny road; O
Kimi San sat and crooned a nursery song as she worked on the little
garment; and in the shrine of Hachiman, on the top of the Tengu Rock, a
great black snake, coiled in the damp coolness, awaited another message
from the god.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The annual Feast of the Dead, or _O Bon Matsuri_, is celebrated at
the August full moon. At this time, for three days, the spirits of the
dead are believed to revisit their old homes, and special measures are
taken for their reception and entertainment.
[2] The pipe led the water from hot springs to the baths in the village.
[3] Literally, “Little Mr. Priest,” the universal title of the small
boy, probably on account of his shaven head.
[4] Literally, “Spirit-Invoking Temple” at Tokyo, whither the spirits
of soldiers who die in battle return, and where they live and receive
the honor and offerings of their grateful compatriots.
[5] “Honorable return,” the greeting to a returning guest or member of
the household.
[6] “Just now,” the conventional reply to the greeting.
II
AT THE SHRINE OF FUDŌ
It had come at last. Torao had been wondering all day how he should
tell his mother. The reserve regiment of which he was a member had been
ordered to the front, and he must go day after to-morrow. As he whirled
homeward through the Tokyo streets, his fast-trotting kurumaya
rushing headlong into the crowds with loud shouts of “He! He!” he
looked straight in front of him with knitted brows and unseeing eyes,
hoping one moment that she had not yet returned from her visit to her
sister, the next, that she would be waiting for him, and that he could
see her at once and have it over.
He had passed through the thronged avenues of Uyeno Park, now in its
full glory of cherry blossoms, and was winding along the narrow lanes
of the Negishi quarter, and he had not yet decided whether it would
be best to tell her to-night, or to let her have one more night of
rest and happiness without knowing what the future had in store for
her. He did not think of himself at all. All his life he had hoped, and
for months he had expected, that he would have his chance to serve the
Emperor, and if so it should be ordained, to die in that service. Now
that the time had come and he was called, if he had thought of himself
at all, it would have been with the exaltation that comes from the
near fulfillment of a high destiny. Nor did Fuyu, his young wife, add
greatly to the burden of his mind. She loved him, to be sure, with a
supreme devotion that would give him her very soul, if need be; a love
to which he responded with the condescending though sincere affection
that Japanese husbands are apt to bestow on their wives. But when he
thought of her, it was with a calmness that could reason out her future
and derive a comfort that was almost satisfaction from the forward
look. If he should fall, and their child, whom he might never see,
should live, Fuyu would find a hope and pleasure in its existence that
would go far toward cheering her life. If, through some mischance,
their baby should not live, Fuyu would then be free to return to her
father’s house. She was young, she could begin life anew, and might in
the future become again a happy wife and the mother of children.
But his mother,--his brows knitted more closely,--she was old; she had
reached the age of rest and freedom from care, after a long life of
labor and sorrow. His mind ran back to those days, long ago, when in
her early widowhood, ruined in estate by the same war that had taken
her husband from her, she had been father and mother, comrade and
friend, to his babyhood. How long the days seemed when she was away at
the government school in which she earned, by eight hours of absence
from her home and her baby, the pittance that kept them both alive!
Kind old Bāya, the nurse and general servant, would while away the
time for the little fellow as best she could, by songs and stories, by
taking him out for long walks to see the temples and the shops and the
flowers,--walks so long that sometimes his feet would falter and fail,
and she would have to pick him up and carry him on her back, holding
his dirty little clogs in her hand so that they should not soil her
dress.
Bāya was kind and amusing, and a very comfortable person for a small
boy to depend upon, but she was not his mother, and so he was lonely
all those days, and only at night did he feel that he was really
satisfied. For when she came home from her long hours of work, what a
wonderful coziness the little house took on suddenly! He would watch
for her every night in the front room, and when he heard her clogs stop
at the lattice, he would bounce quickly out and fling it open wide,
and shout “O kaeri!” and seize her bundle of books and pull her into
the house. And they had such good times together. She was never too sad
or too tired or too busy to listen with the most absorbed interest to
the story of his day, to laugh at the funny paper toys he brought home
to her for _o mi age_,[7] to explain to him all the strange things that
he had seen, and to cuddle him and make much of him until at last, when
Bāya had spread the beds upon the floor and he had crept into his, the
dim light of the _andon_[8] would shine upon his mother’s face close
beside him, the last and loveliest object upon which his sleepy eyes
rested.
Torao shut his eyes now to call up again that face of his
childhood,--smooth, oval, with velvet eyes and firm, beautiful lips
that flashed from their wonted seriousness into the most brilliant of
smiles in response to his baby wit or awkward boyish affection. The
abundant hair grew to a little point on the low, broad forehead, and
was combed smoothly back and cut short at the nape of the neck, the
cropped ends held in place by a clasp.
“Poor mother,” said Torao, thinking of the many years that she had
worn this sign of her widowhood, nor knew that he had spoken until the
kurumaya in the shafts turned his head over his shoulder as he ran, to
inquire, “Did the master speak?”
With an impatient phrase he answered the man, but the vision of his
early boyhood had faded from his mind, and in its place was the little,
worn, tired mother of to-day. The smooth, oval face was lined and
hollow-cheeked, the soft, deep eyes were dim, the abundant black hair
was thin and iron-gray, the sweet mouth, with its soft curves, had
taken on an expression of resignation and patient endurance,--signs of
the prolonged toil and continual self-sacrifice by means of which she
had managed to educate her son, until at last, in a good position in
the Bank of Japan, he was giving back to her in her old age something
of the care and service with which she had surrounded his boyhood.
Since his marriage, less than a year ago, the mother had become Go
Inkyo Sama, “the honorable retired one,” and free from the cares which
had been her lot for thirty years, she lived in her own portion of her
son’s house, honored and beloved by her son and her daughter-in-law.
Instead of the long days at school, she could devote her time to
visiting her friends or receiving them in her own rooms. There was now
abundant leisure for days at the theatre, for attendance at the temple
festivals, for excursions to the parks and gardens to see the flowers
as they came into bloom in the orderly procession of the seasons.
Torao, even as he groaned inwardly over the sorrow that must come to
darken these sunny days of old age, could not but smile as he thought
how difficult it had been for his mother to acquire the rest habit. It
was hard for her, who had waited upon herself and her son for thirty
years, to sit still and let Fuyu do the little things that were now her
care. From early morning, when the _amado_ were to be opened and the
house made ready for the day, till bedtime, when the _futons_[9] must
be spread on the floor and the night lights lighted behind their white
paper shades, O Fuyu needed to be brisk indeed, if she would attend to
her work before Go Inkyo Sama could attempt it. And as for the visits
and festivities which Torao had hoped that his mother would enjoy in
the freedom of her new position, she had so long been forced to leave
her home each day, whether she would or no, that to her there seemed
no pleasure comparable to sitting down with O Fuyu when the morning
work was done, and sewing, chatting, reading, writing, and smoking tiny
pipefuls of tobacco from time to time, through the pleasant, restful
days. And now the prospect of a grandchild had made her so solicitous
for O Fuyu’s health that she had taken almost the entire work of
the house upon herself, so that Torao had been driven to add to the
family a little girl to wait upon his mother; and O Kō San, a child of
fourteen, neat, smiling, slender, and most anxious to learn the polite
ways of the gentry, had been imported from their native province to
save Go Inkyo Sama from her own zeal.
The high, breathless “O kaeri!” of the kurumaya, as he dashed in at
the gate, roused Torao from his reverie. Panting and dripping, hat in
hand and blue wing-sleeves rolled to the shoulder, the kurumaya bent
double beside the little carriage as his master stepped to the ground.
There was a pattering of feet within the house, and as Torao sat to let
the man unlace his shoes,--for he wore his business dress with all its
foreign accompaniments,--O Kō San slid open the _shoji_ and prostrated
herself face downward in the vestibule, murmuring her “O kaeri!”
“Has my mother returned?” he asked.
O Kō San lifted her head and bowed again. “Go Inkyo Sama returned not
half an hour ago, and is now awaiting the master in her room. She
brought many gifts home from her sister’s.”
“Torao,”--it was O Fuyu now who was bowing and smiling with the
pleasure of his return and of the gifts that Go Inkyo Sama had
brought,--“Torao, forgive me that I was not at the door to meet you,
but mother has just returned and I was with her.”
She looked up at him after her low bow, and caught from his face some
premonition of the coming sorrow. “Oh, Torao! What is it? What has
happened? Why do you look so strange?”
His voice was gentle as he answered her, “Come, we will go to mother’s
room, and there we can talk it all over.” There was no question now of
when or how he should tell the news. Certainty was better than the
fear that came into O Fuyu’s eyes when she saw his face.
Go Inkyo Sama was sitting in her room, surrounded by the presents that
her sister had heaped upon her after the all-day visit she had been
trying so long to make. The great box of cake, the bolt of soft gray
silk, the wooden case containing a rare curio, each wrapped neatly
about with a sheet of white paper, tied with red-and-white strings,
and adorned with a _noshi_,[10] relieved the spotless simplicity of
the matted room, giving it almost a furnished aspect. The old lady sat
by the _hibachi_,[11] for the day was cool with the damp chilliness of
the springtime, and with tiny pipe in hand was taking her comfort in a
leisurely smoking bout while she awaited her son’s return.
“O kaeri,” she said, as he and Fuyu entered, and it was only after his
face was lifted from the bow with which he responded “Tadaima,” that
she could see the cloud upon it.
“Mother,” he said, and he paused a moment.
“Yes, my son.” The look of patient endurance that the years had taught
her was behind the caressing smile that always came to her lips when
she spoke to him.
“Mother,” he began again; then with a plunge, “I have been ordered to
the front. I must go the day after to-morrow.”
Even Torao’s years of closest intimacy with his mother had not prepared
him for the change that swept across the gentle, refined old face.
It was as if a light had been suddenly lighted from within; as if
the faith and patience of a lifetime had been at last crowned by
fulfillment. She bowed in reverence, her face between her hands upon
the matted floor.
“How great is the honor vouchsafed to us by our lord the Emperor!” she
murmured softly,--“to us, who have waited all these years to make
atonement!”
Torao listened in amazement. O Fuyu at the threshold bowed in grief
and awe, while little O Kō San in the passage beyond snuffled audibly
as she crouched with her nose flattened against the polished floor. Go
Inkyo Sama lifted her head at last. Her eyes were bright and tearless,
her withered cheeks slightly reddened with the excitement.
“Listen,” she said, “and I will tell you. You know about the troubled
times after the foreigners began to come into the country, when the
Tokugawa house had fallen. His Majesty was hardly more than a boy,
and none knew who were the friends and who the enemies of the Son of
Heaven.[12] Your father believed that the great Saigo was right when
he withdrew to Kagoshima and took up arms against the new party that
had surrounded the Emperor, that had drilled a heimin[13] army, that
would take from the samurai the prerogatives that they had held for
a thousand years. He believed that Saigo was right, that the Emperor
was listening to evil councilors,--and he died fighting to restore
the older councilors to their places, and to give back to his own
class their ancient privileges. But after it was all over, and he had
yielded up his life for his cause and the great Saigo lay dead upon the
field, we who remained, and who suffered more than those who gave their
lives in battle, learned little by little how blind had been the fight
against the will of the Emperor, against the Era of Enlightenment and
all it means to Japan. And when at last I knew, I desired most of all,
Torao, that you should give to the Emperor and to Japan your life as
an atonement for your father’s mistake. You are going, by the grace of
his Majesty, to the front. Do not forget that your father’s spirit has
through all these years been waiting for you to make his atonement.”
Her voice, which had been throughout her long speech curiously
monotonous and inexpressive, so carefully had she maintained her
self-control under the strong emotion that possessed her, died away,
and she bowed once more to the floor.
“Mother,” said Torao, “I am thankful. It was of you and of your grief
in losing me that I thought as I came home. But if to you my going is
the fulfillment of a lifelong hope, then I go gladly, and my father
shall see that his atonement is made. The Son of Heaven himself has
said, ‘Duty is heavier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a
feather.’[14] If I do my duty, my death is nothing to be mourned.”
Little O Fuyu, lonely and desolate in the presence of the rapt
exaltation of mother and son, was shaking now with the sobs that she
could no longer control. The sun of her life seemed to be setting,
and here were these two talking of hopes fulfilled, of honor, of
atonement, of duty and death, with no word for her, or for the dear
baby whose life and well-being had seemed until now of such consequence
to the whole household. At the sound of her sobs Torao turned to where
she sat humbly behind him close to the threshold.
“Fuyu,” he said gently, “do not grieve. Mother will take care of you
and you of her, and soon you will be happy with our baby to live for.
I should not be worthy to be a father if I were not glad to make
atonement for my father’s error. And if I come back, how proud you will
be to show me the little one! Remember you are a samurai and the wife
of a samurai, and soon to be the mother of a samurai,” and he patted
her shoulder gently.
“Poor little O Fuyu San.” Go Inkyo Sama’s voice was very tender. “I
know how hard it is. I am old now, and this life and the next are very
close together. That is why I can let Torao go without a tear. But
when I let my husband go, it was different. Life was long then, and I
could not look forward to it without him. It has been long, but it has
been lived, and the happiness after all has been more than the sorrow.
Oh, Fuyu, we women must bear things bravely when they come to us, for
courage is in itself happiness.”
O Fuyu lifted her pretty face from behind her sleeves and bowed humbly.
“I was wrong, mother, to weep. I will be brave now,” she said simply,
and even as she spoke, she forced her trembling lips to smile.
“There speaks a daughter of the samurai!” Go Inkyo Sama smiled
approvingly. “And now, if Torao is so soon to leave us, we must prepare
all festival dishes for to-morrow. Call O Kō San, and we will make some
plans.”
So ended the dreaded interview, and Torao retired from his mother’s
presence to the refreshment of a hot bath and the loose Japanese
garments, while the women turned their thoughts from the burden of
great emotions to the restful details of petty household arrangements.
In the bustle of the morrow, when friends came and went all day making
farewell visits, when there were all the preparations for departure
to be made and all the arrangements for the little household in its
master’s absence, Go Inkyo Sama and O Fuyu San were calm, collected,
smiling. They set before each guest a tray of festival food. They
chatted and bowed and received with every sign of complete satisfaction
the conventional congratulations upon the honor that had come to them.
They acted their parts in a way worthy of their pride of race. And
though, when it was all over, and the _amado_ closed for the night,
O Fuyu could no longer control herself, and retired, for lack of a
better place in the small house, to the clothes-closet, there to pour
out her soul in tears, Torao, when he found her, a forlorn, crouching,
shaking heap, had no word of blame for her weakness, but drew her out
and comforted her, and brought back to her face at last a damp and
precarious smile.
In the gray of the morning they were all astir, and before the day had
fairly dawned the kuruma, with Tetsu standing beside it hat in hand,
was ready at the door. There were no tears, or sighs, or kisses; but
followed by many bows and tender smiles and low-breathed “Sayo naras,”
Torao passed out through the little lattice door and became a part of
the great war.
It was then that O Fuyu’s nerve gave way, and all day long Go Inkyo
Sama and O Kō San worked over her and petted her and comforted her; and
when night came and she was tucked away among the _futons_, she slept
at last, worn out with grief, nor knew anything more until the sound
of opening _amado_ roused her and O Kō San from their slumbers in the
chill before dawn. O Kō San bounded to her feet to see Go Inkyo Sama,
lantern in hand, wearing the conventional dress of ceremony, pattering
along the stone-paved walk to the street. Where was she going? and at
such an hour!
Shivering and frightened, O Fuyu San and O Kō San dressed and set
the house to rights, although it was only four o’clock, then sat and
awaited the old lady’s return. They talked in a desultory way of the
war, of the sufferings of the soldiers, of the ferocity and stupidity
of the Russians, and in the intervals of silence O Fuyu surreptitiously
wiped the tears from her eyes.
At last, about seven o’clock, when they were beginning to be worried
about her strange absence, Go Inkyo Sama came. She was smiling and
serene, but her worn face looked more worn, her slender shrunken body
more slender and shrunken. In response to their eager questioning, she
told them of her early morning visit to the shrine of Fudō.[15]
“It is time for me to pray,” she said simply, “and Fudō Sama is wise
and powerful. We all need strength and courage,--Torao and you, little
O Fuyu San, and I, so I shall ask it for us all every day.”
In the months that followed, Go Inkyo Sama never failed to rise at
four, and after a complete ceremonial cleansing in cold water, to
walk the three miles to the Fudō shrine, offer there her prayer, and
return in time for the day’s work, whatever it might prove to be. When
letters began to come from Torao, and he told of his life at Port
Arthur and of the terrible sufferings and great courage and enthusiasm
of the soldiers, Go Inkyo Sama added to her daily prayer for her own
a petition for all the soldiers of Nippon, and threw herself with
feverish energy into the relief work for the families left at home.
When, in July, the baby came,--a sturdy brown boy, so like his father
that he gave new courage and hope to mother and grandmother alike, she
took him as a direct answer to her prayers, and grew stronger than
ever in her faith. To the whole of the sad little household the baby
was a joy and a delight. “Gunjiri” (Soldier Boy), they called him while
they waited for the true name that his father should send him when
they had had time to hear from him; and the pet name clung even after
the baby had been formally carried to the temple and presented to the
tutelar god of the parish under his real name of Heitaro.
The days were never too long for Go Inkyo Sama and O Fuyu San, even
though they began at four o’clock, for there was always something
to do, and the baby furnished an unfailing subject of care and
conversation. When O Kō San carried him out to walk tied to her back,
the bereaved mother and grandmother would sit at home and talk about
his present charms, his future greatness, what his father would say
when he saw him, while their busy fingers flew over stockings that they
were knitting for the hard winter that the soldiers had ahead of them
in Manchuria, or on the sewing of hospital kimonos or clothes for the
orphaned children, or some other work of helpfulness for those who were
suffering for the country.
But when the baby came home, his little black slits of eyes usually
tightly closed, his head atilt like a sleepy flower on his slender
neck, there was a great rush to take him from O Kō San’s back, to
hug him and cuddle him and make much of him, and Go Inkyo Sama was
almost jealous of O Fuyu because it was to her at last that he must go
for food. But as she sat and watched the little mother, and saw the
ineffable tenderness of motherhood steal into the girlish face, her
heart would lose its soreness, and she would feel once more Torao’s
baby head pillowed on her own breast.
“It is what we are glad to give our lives for, isn’t it Fuyu?” she
would say; and Fuyu would smile and answer shyly, “It is, indeed!”
The long walks, even in the cool mornings of the hot summer days,
seemed to tell a little upon Go Inkyo Sama. She grew more delicate,
more worn, as her sweet old face grew more ethereal. O Fuyu, young and
inexperienced as she was, watched the change with anxiety, but could do
nothing.
“Mother,” she said one day, “do you feel quite well? Aren’t you tiring
yourself with your long days and your hard work?”
“Fuyu, can we speak of being tired when we know what our soldiers are
doing?” was all the answer that the old lady would give.
“But, mother, Torao told me to take care of you,” persisted the little
wife.
“Yes, child, I know, but we must do what we can for the brave men at
the front, and for the little ones they have left behind.”
Go Inkyo Sama’s eyes wandered lovingly to the brown baby lying asleep
on his quilt close beside her, one crumpled rose-leaf hand, palm
upward, thrust outside his wrapping. She leaned over and patted him,
and a tear fell and splashed on his unconscious cheek,--a tear that
Fuyu could not see.
As the autumn came on, and the mornings grew colder, there was no
relaxation of Go Inkyo Sama’s austerities. Every morning, long before
day, after the cold water purification, she trotted shivering through
the sleeping streets to the temple of her devotion, offered her prayer,
and returned, sometimes too tired to eat the warm soup and rice which
O Fuyu San set before her. But she was never too tired for the long
day of work, for a smile or a pleasant word to her daughter and to
O Kō San, for a hug and a pat to the baby, who grew stronger and
redder-cheeked every day.
Torao’s letters came regularly, telling not much about what was being
accomplished, but something of how they lived and how they fought, and
what they hoped and prayed might come from the daily sacrifice of
lives offered gladly for the Emperor. Go Inkyo Sama read them again and
again, sometimes aloud to O Fuyu San, sometimes alone in her room with
streaming eyes. “I will do my best,” he wrote, “and you must not grieve
if I change into a spirit at Port Arthur. Even though my perishable
body may nevermore be seen in this world, I shall not forget ‘loyalty
to our Emperor for seven lives.’”
By the end of October the weather had grown cold and bleak; the early
morning walk was taken through dark and silent streets with the aid of
a bobbing paper lantern.
“Let O Kō San go with you,” pleaded O Fuyu San.
“No, child, let O Kō San do her duty, this is mine;” and Go Inkyo Sama
set forth alone in the darkness.
Along the entrance-way to the great temple, between the rows of
shuttered booths that all the day long were gay with toys and notions,
and thronged by purchasers, she passed to the heavy gateway on either
side of which the gigantic figures of the Two Kings[16] glowered and
writhed behind their bars. The dying moon cast strange shadows, the
sweeping curves of the temple roof hung over the great lacquered
pillars and the dark spaces between. She paused before the shrine where
Fudō, the immovable, encircled by flames and carrying in his hands the
sword and the robe of justice, sat enthroned. As she knelt with bowed
head, closed eyes, and rosary rubbed between her folded palms, chanting
in subdued tones the invocation, her whole soul went out in the prayer
that Fudō, the immovably just and wise, might grant to her the wish of
her heart. She knelt longer than usual, in an ecstasy of devotion, and
when she reached home at last, it seemed to poor little anxious O Fuyu
San that she looked so frail, so ethereal, that the worn body could
scarcely do the will of the lofty spirit that was driving it on.
Go Inkyo Sama hardly tasted her breakfast, though O Fuyu San served it
daintily and urged the old lady to eat. At last the young wife retired
sorrowfully with the tray and the rice-bucket, handed them to O Kō San
in the kitchen, and stopped a few moments in her own room to look after
little Heitaro, asleep on his quilt in the corner. As she bent over him
she heard Go Inkyo Sama call,--
“Fuyu, come quickly! I must tell you something.”
O Fuyu slid open the door, and crouched at the threshold of the
mother’s room.
“Here I am, mother; what is it?”
Go Inkyo Sama’s face was very pale, her eyes were bright, her breath
came quickly. “O Fuyu, my prayer is granted. Torao will come home again
to you and the baby. All these months I have prayed to Fudō Sama that
he would let me die in Torao’s place, and to-day the time has come.”
She fell forward as she spoke and said no more. O Fuyu did all she
could. She put her to bed with O Kō San’s aid, and sent for the doctor,
the relatives, the near friends. All day there was coming and going at
the little house, and Go Inkyo Sama lay breathing faintly. At midnight
there came a change. The unconscious face was suddenly transfigured by
a radiant smile, and she sat up and spoke, knowing no one of all the
weeping relatives who knelt about her.
“Torao, come with me!” she said, and that was all.
Next day the great white lanterns[17] were hung before the door, and
little O Fuyu San offered the daily and hourly honors of food and
incense to the brave spirit that had passed so suddenly from sight.
“How can I ever tell Torao?” she said to herself again and again,
while the tears flowed unchecked, for there was no one to be made
sadder by her grief.
* * * * *
On the steep slope of a beleaguered Russian fortress, mingled with
heaps of dead and dying, lay Torao, breathing faintly through that long
October day. Above him shrieked and roared the shells of both sides,
about him fell from time to time stray bullets, but his ears were dull,
his eyes dim. The sun went down, the search-lights from the forts
played over the ghastly scene, the firing never ceased, and still he
lay unconscious of it all.
Then, from out the far distance,--a distance of hundreds of miles, it
seemed, and of years too remote for memory’s reach,--there came to him
a voice.
“Torao,” it said, “come with me.”
Slowly the languid eyes opened. A light that was neither search-light
nor rocket, but a clear, steady, bluish flame, was moving toward him.
Lazily he watched it, then sat up with a start. Was he dreaming, or was
he dying? How could she be here on this ghastly field of death? For
there before him was the beautiful young face of his boyhood; not worn
or lined, but smooth and fair and oval, the sweet lips smiling, the
velvet eyes searching through all that horrible place for him.
“Torao, come,” she said; and at the word, wounded, weak, bleeding, amid
the glare of search-lights, the hail of bullets, the boom of guns,
Torao rose to his feet, staggered forward, following the guidance of
his mother’s voice, and fell at last, safe from danger, behind the
shelter of an abandoned trench.
There they found him in the morning with a great hole in his side, but
still alive. When, two weeks later, there came to him in the hospital
at Dalny O Fuyu’s letter telling him of his mother’s death, he knew,
even as she had known, how Fudō answers prayer.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The present given to one who stays at home by a member of the
family returning from a pleasure trip.
[8] The paper lantern used as a night light.
[9] The heavy quilts used in making a Japanese bed.
[10] A bit of bright-colored paper folded about a strip of sea-weed and
slipped under the string of a present.
[11] The fire-pot used for heating purposes in a Japanese house.
[12] Go Inkyo Sama refers to the famous Satsuma Rebellion of 1877.
[13] The common people, as distinguished from the military or samurai
class.
[14] From the Imperial rescript to the soldiers.
[15] The Buddhist God of Wisdom. His name means “The Immovable.”
[16] Ni-ō, or “Two Kings,” Indra and Brahma, who keep guard at the
outer gates of Buddhist temples to scare away demons.
[17] White lanterns are hung before the door of a house where a death
has taken place, much as crape or black ribbon is used with us.
III
THE BLUE FLAME
The incident of this story is connected with the disastrous
“snow-march” of February, 1901, when the
Japanese army was testing its ability to meet Siberian
winter conditions.
It had been snowing for weeks in the province of Aomori, and the little
city was almost hidden under drifts. The mud-walled, boulder-covered
houses were white mounds, the streets were tunneled valleys. As you
looked down on the city from the hills above, you could see no signs of
life except the wreaths of blue smoke curling into the air.
And yet there was cheer and comfort enough in one of the quaint little
houses. O Yuki San was very busy with preparations to receive her
husband. She had built a big charcoal fire in the _kotatsu_,[18] for
she knew that he would be cold after his two days of snow-marching with
his company. In the kitchen the red-cheeked cookmaid was broiling
a fish over the coals, preparing a savory soup in a porringer, and
keeping an anxious eye on the big rice-pot, to make sure that the staff
of life was boiled just right, neither too hard nor too soft,--just as
the master liked to have it. O Yuki San must watch the cook, and see
that she did everything exactly as she should, and she must make ready
her husband’s tray with her own hands. Lovingly she placed in their
respective corners the porcelain rice-bowl, the lacquered soup-bowl,
the dainty plate on which the broiled fish was to be served, and the
chopsticks of clean white pine, joined together at the ends to show
that no one had ever used them.
Old Jiiya, the man-servant, decrepit but faithful, came in suddenly
out of the driving snow, as O Yuki San, on her knees in the matted end
of the kitchen, was cocking her head on one side to make sure that
her arrangement of the tray was quite symmetrical. He pulled his feet
noisily out of his clogs, and came down on the loosely rattling boards
of the floor in a crouching position at the sight of his mistress.
“It’s a cold night, mistress!” he ejaculated, by way of greeting, and
dropped his face between his hands on the floor.
“Yes, Jiiya, it is cold, and how it snows! When do you think your
master will come?”
Jiiya’s face came up for a moment. “It is thought at the garrison that
the troops may be in at any time now. They had only fifteen miles to
march to-day, and they would start early. The master will probably be
here in a few minutes more.”
O Yuki San rose to her feet. “There, the tray is finished!” she said.
“O Kayo, when you hear the master’s voice, bring in his supper; and,
Jiiya, be ready to help him off with his boots as soon as he comes, for
they will be wet and stiff.”
Jiiya and O Kayo bowed low, and murmured the “Saio de gozaimasu”[19]
with which the respectful Japanese servant always receives his master’s
commands; and O Yuki San returned to her little sitting-room. On the
floor in one corner lay a little heap of bright-colored comfortables. O
Yuki San bent over it, turning back the quilts that she might see the
round, rosy face, the crumpled, slender hands, and the closely shaven
head of her baby boy.
“Oh, baby, how you sleep!” she said. “Don’t you know that papa’s coming
home to-night?”
She patted him lightly, and he smiled and gurgled in his sleep; then
she covered him tenderly and made a tour of the room. The hanging
scroll on the wall bore a picture of a plum-tree in blossom, sign
of the spring that was only one month away,--for even in Aomori the
plum-trees blossom in March,--and sign, too, of long life and good luck
and happiness. That was why the little wife had taken it to-day from
the fireproof storehouse and hung-it up to greet her husband on his
return. “He will want to think about the spring when he comes in all
tired and cold from his snow-march,” she had said to herself as she
unrolled it. She laughed gleefully now as she looked at the picture,
and sang a little song that had been running in her head all day,--
“When the spring wind is blowing sharp and chill,
Like snowflakes fall the plum-blooms on the hill.”
“Snowflakes now,” she said to herself, “but plum-blooms next month for
all of us!”
There was a sound at the outer door, and the sliding lattice flew
sharply back. “He has come, Jiiya,” called O Yuki San, as she hurried
to the door and flung it wide. She could see the gold-trimmed soldier
cap as her husband fumbled with his boots. “Let Jiiya help you,” she
said; “he is right here.”
He raised his head and she saw his bearded face. It was so white that
it frightened her. The beard was covered with snow, and icicles dripped
from the hair and eyebrows.
“Come in! Come in!” she cried. “Never mind the boots or the snow. You
are freezing. Come in and let me warm you.”
He looked at her strangely, and his eyes were sunken and dull. Jiiya,
who had come around the house, and was bowing obsequiously in the
doorway, started and turned pale. The master sat down, and Jiiya seized
his boots, but the feet were like stones and the boots would not come
off. O Yuki San, wild with anxiety, pushed and pulled her husband into
the sitting-room, made him sit down by the _kotatsu_, and pulled the
warm comfortables about him. The baby moaned in his sleep, but she had
no time to hush him now. She hurried to the kitchen to bring the tray,
saying to the red-cheeked cook, “Hurry! Hurry! He is so cold! He will
die if you do not hurry!”
Jiiya came shuffling in at the back door just as she took the tray from
the hands of the cook and hastened away with it.
“What is the matter with the master?” asked O Kayo of Jiiya.
The old man shook his head doubtfully. “It is hard to say,” was his
noncommittal answer. “Strange things happen in this world.--Hark! What
is that?”
A shriek rent the air, and another, and then another. Man and maid
stood for a moment looking at each other, then Jiiya started to the
rescue. Flinging wide the paper screen that separated the kitchen from
the sitting-room, they saw nothing there but the baby, who, wakened
by the sounds, had rolled out of his comfortables and lay kicking and
screaming on the floor. The door beyond was open, and they heard the
mistress calling, “Jiiya, come quick! He is gone!” Out through the open
door into the snow tunnel that joined the house to the street, they
went, seeking. A pale blue flame danced in the tunnel, the mistress lay
on her face in the snow, stretching her arms toward the dancing light.
“He was here, and then there was nothing, only that light,” she cried,
and her head fell and she knew no more. The flame danced and flickered
and disappeared, and with it went the light of O Yuki San’s life.
* * * * *
Four days later, when the news began to come in of the disaster that
had overtaken the snow-march, and the first and only men saved from
that terrible tragedy were brought back, maimed and almost dead from
the long exposure, Lieutenant Maruki told to some of his fellow
officers all that he knew of the death of Lieutenant Saito.
“We pushed on together,” he said, “looking for a sign of the village.
It was the second day, and we had been wandering, without a path, in
snow up to our arm-pits, for more than twenty-four hours. I could see
that Saito was freezing. His face was crusted with ice, and his hair
and beard fringed with icicles. At last he turned to me and said, ‘I
can’t go any farther, Maruki. You must not let them waste any time
looking for me. I will tell my wife, and there is no one else who
cares.’ Then he dropped and gave up. I tried to rub and shake him back
into life, but I knew it was no use when I saw a pale blue flame[20]
hovering over his body. I had seen such a flame once before, when my
father died,”--his voice sank almost to a whisper,--“and I knew that
his spirit had passed. The light moved away across the snow until I
lost it in the thickness of the night. I followed the direction it had
taken as well as I could. Perhaps that is why I am here to-day.”
“The poor little wife is gone, I hear,” said a listening comrade, “and
the old man at the house tells a strange story of the master’s return,
and of a blue flame that vanished through the snow tunnel.”
“Then Saito was right,” said Maruki, with a sigh; “he did go and tell
his wife. Poor little woman! She was not a widow very long!”
FOOTNOTES:
[18] A fire-box in the floor, over which is set a rack, and the whole
covered by a heavy comfortable.
[19] “It is honorably so.”
[20] It is a common belief in Japan that the recently freed soul is
visible in the shape of a luminous ball or blue flame immediately after
death.
IV
THE INDEPENDENCE OF SABURO
It was the month of June, and a great festival of the Sanno Temple was
in full swing. The streets were alive with excitement and brilliant
with lanterns. The whole length of Kojimachi-dori was lined with gay
booths and crowded with sightseers. Here and there the beat of drums,
the clashing of cymbals, and the antics and grimaces of mummers held
the crowd for a moment before some fantastic festival car. Off in the
side streets were to be heard the rhythmic shouts of boys, who rushed
about with square red lanterns, bearing a miniature festival car high
on their shoulders.
To Saburo Nozaki, sitting alone at home, in charge of his father’s
shop, the cheerful sounds carried nothing but misery. He sat at his
little table figuring out the day’s accounts by the light of a small
hanging-lamp. The shop front was wide open to the narrow, dark side
street, and now and then a wandering jinrikisha-man’s lantern flashed
by, but for the most part the street was empty, for it was away from
the centre of the festival, and every one who could leave his work
had gone to the great celebration. Only Saburo seemed left of all the
populous neighborhood, and as he fingered his _soroban_[21] and wrote
out his accounts, the cheerful hum of the festival just around the
corner simply increased his sense of desertion.
Saburo was thoroughly tired of the shop. He had been born in it,
or rather in the room just behind it. His babyhood had been passed
watching its business over his mother’s shoulder; and when he had been
removed from his perch on her back to make room for a baby sister, he
had at once begun to make himself useful. At first he could only run
back and forth between the fireproof storehouse and the salesroom,
carrying rolls of silk and cotton. Later, he had pulled a small
hand-cart about the streets, acting at once as horse and delivery
clerk. And now, since he had learned to count with the _soroban_,
he sat all day on his heels, bowing and smiling and propitiating
customers, measuring and counting and writing out bills, until it
seemed to him that he could bear it no longer. His older brothers, Taro
and Jiro, good, honest, unambitious youths, adapted themselves readily
to the routine of the shop, but Saburo chafed under it and longed for a
change. He was eighteen now, and still his only view of the world was
what he could see of the street from under the heavy black curtains
that draped the front of the salesroom.
How irksome the life was to a proud spirit that felt itself set apart
for better things! And now to-night, when the greatest festival in a
cycle of sixty years was going on close by, and on the great last
night of all the three, his father had taken the rest of the family
to see the sights, and had left poor Saburo alone at home to guard
the shop and wait upon improbable customers. It was too much! Saburo
counted and wrote and counted again, but the bursts of gayety from
Kojimachi confused his reckoning, and he gave up at last and settled
down to listen and wish.
Suddenly the wish became the father of a thought--a great thought--an
audacious thought. It had sometimes come before into Saburo’s head,
though he had never seen the way clear to its accomplishment, but
to-night was the very night for it.
The boy reached out from where he sat to a drawer in the wall, and drew
from thence a heavy, iron-bound box, the till of the establishment.
This he opened with a key from his girdle, counted out fifty yen with
methodical exactness, set down his name in the account-book opposite
to that amount, then closed and locked the box and returned it to its
drawer. The money he tucked away in his belt. Then he rose, carried the
key into the back room and hung it on the wall, slid all the wooden
shutters but one into place across the front of the shop, stepped
out into the street, closed the last shutter, and walked off into
the darkness, away from the lights and noise of the festival. He did
not care where he went. All he wanted was to get away from the close
confinement, the unvarying monotony of the shop.
For an hour or so he wandered about dark and narrow streets, not daring
to show himself in the wider, brightly lighted thoroughfares, lest he
should be recognized by some chance acquaintance and his great plan be
frustrated at its beginning.
It was ten o’clock, and even the business streets were putting up their
shutters for the night, when the youth drifted aimlessly into a broad
avenue, almost deserted at that hour, which he recognized as the one
that led to the northern railway station. Then a new thought struck
him, and he pushed forward with the energy of a definite purpose. When
he reached the station a bell was ringing, and the north-bound train
was puffing on the track. He purchased a third-class ticket, selecting
his destination--Nishi Nasu-no--at random from the time-table hanging
on the wall, rushed through the gate, and curled himself up in the
corner of an empty carriage.
By noon of the following day, Saburo found himself, after a long
morning’s walk, close to the beautiful mountain region that surrounds
the gorge of Shiobara. His morning had not been one of unalloyed
pleasure in his independence. The girls at the tea-house, where he had
stopped and called for breakfast, had met his air of assumed importance
with derisive giggles and mocking obeisances, and had given him, not
the cool, retired upper room that he had demanded, but a place close to
the street, noisy and sunny, where he had eaten his meal in full sight
of the public, and of all the employees of the hotel kitchen. Then the
morning’s walk had been hot and tiresome,--a straight, shadeless road
pointing directly toward the mountains.
Saburo found himself tired and hungry enough when he sat down to rest
and eat his lunch in front of a tea-house that stood just where the
road entered a beautiful mountain gorge.
“Elder sister, where does this road go?” he asked of the bright-eyed,
red-cheeked girl who waited on him.
“To Shiobara,” she said; adding, “It is seven miles to the first
village.”
As Saburo looked at the steep, rocky road ahead, he felt sure that
he needed some stimulus to carry him over those seven miles to the
village, and he ordered from the “elder sister” a gourd full of saké,
which he hung at his belt. Then he pressed on, and the mountains closed
about him.
He seemed to be entering the very bowels of the earth, and the roaring
of the torrent below him, the awful grandeur of the peaks above,
impressed his unsophisticated soul with a strange uneasiness. He
remembered all the weird tales that he had heard from his childhood,
of the mountain gods and goblins, of the spirits of the dead that mow
and gibber by the roadside, of the foxes and badgers that work strange
enchantments on unwary travelers, and as each horrid detail came before
his mind, he took a pull at the saké bottle to brace up his courage.
And so, as the day waned, his steps grew heavier and heavier, and his
brain more and more confused, until, at last, he felt sure that he
could not reach the village for which he was bound before the night
fell.
He sat down by the roadside and wondered what he should do, and how he
should pass the night; and as he sat there, he saw a young girl coming
out of the woods, carrying a bucket of water. She was dressed after the
country fashion, with her kimono tucked up to her knees, showing her
red petticoat below. She wore white silk leggins and straw sandals, and
she walked lightly and gracefully with her load, in the dog-trot of the
mountain peasant.
Saburo rose as she passed, and she stopped and set down her bucket.
“Honorable maiden,” he said, “can you tell me of any house near here
where I can get a meal and a bed?”
She bowed and smiled as she answered, “I have a very humble roadside
booth just beyond the turn of the road where your honor can obtain
refreshment, though of poor quality.”
Saburo started up, his tired, unsteady legs reeling under him, and
followed the girl a few paces, to a spot where the smallest of roadside
eating-shops had been placed, almost overhanging the torrent. How cool
and inviting it looked! Screens of bamboo across the front shut it
off from undue publicity. A small stream of water from a bamboo pipe
plashed pleasantly into a stone tank close by, and over the _hibachi_
the kettle was bubbling. Cups and plates and various comestibles showed
that the small establishment could furnish a meal, and it was with a
sigh of relief that Saburo slipped his tired feet out of his clogs,
bathed them in the cool sparkling water from the tank, and seated
himself on the matted platform that made the guest-room.
“While I am preparing the poor meal, would your honor condescend to
drink a cup of ama-zake?”[22] said the silvery voice of the girl.
“Thank you, I shall be glad to take it,” answered Saburo, holding his
head up with an attempt at dignity, as he felt that now he had found
some one who addressed him with the deference due to his independent
position.
The girl, who to Saburo’s eyes grew more beautiful every minute,
brought a steaming bowl of the thick white liquor and set it down in
front of him. He drank it, sucking-it down with gulps and smacks of
satisfaction.
“That is food and drink both,” he said, as the maiden brought him
another brimming bowl.
Cheered by the gracious glow which the comforting draught diffused
through his entire being, Saburo sat and watched his beautiful friend
while she attended to her lowly tasks. At last he spoke, and his voice
was husky with emotion.
“It is strange and sad, that so beautiful a maiden as you should waste
her life up here in these wild mountains. Why do you stay in such a
place? If you went to Tokyo, you would soon make a good marriage.”
The girl looked at him before she answered, and Saburo felt as if his
soul were on fire.
“Sometimes I have thought I would like to go out and see the world,”
she said, “but I am the only child of my old mother, and she would not
consent to my going,” and she wept, holding her sleeves before her
face.
“And now my mother is dead, and I have no brother, nor any friends.”
She wept quietly behind her sleeves for a space, her body shaking with
the violence of her emotion; then she uncovered her face. Saburo felt
her eyes looking deep into his heart. “If you do not object to my
humble birth,” she continued, “and since you sympathize with my grief,
please take me with you to Tokyo, and teach me how to sweep and wash
floors.” Then she hid her face once more behind her sleeves.
Saburo’s head was fairly turned by such a show of confidence, and he
reached forward and patted the poor girl’s shoulder as she sat with
covered face on the edge of the matted platform.
“Do not feel so sad,” he said; “I will find you a place where you will
be much better off than here.”
The maiden looked with one eye from behind her sleeves. Saburo gently
pulled down her hands until her whole face was visible. “How can I
ever reward you for your kindness?” she whispered.
By the time he had eaten supper it was quite dark, and Saburo began to
wonder where he could spend the night, for the little tea-house was
simply an open booth.
“Where do you live?” he asked of his entertainer.
“Quite near here,” she answered, “and if you can endure my rude and
squalid home, I can give you a bed there for to-night.”
She extinguished the coals in the _hibachi_ by dropping them into a pot
of water, using for the purpose a pair of fire-sticks, one of bamboo
and one of bone. Saburo’s superstitious soul shuddered a little when he
saw her do it, for he knew that in Tokyo such sticks were used only in
collecting the ashes of the dead. But he remembered that she was only a
country girl, and could not be expected to know all the Tokyo customs.
Then she closed the shutters about the little guest-room, and taking
a white lantern[23] in her hand, she led the way into the woods. To
Saburo there was something uncanny about the white lantern. It was like
a funeral procession, he thought, but he said nothing.
There was a muttering of thunder among the hills, and zigzag lightning
flashed from a black cloud overhead. The way seemed longer than Saburo
had expected, but at last his guide stopped, just as a flash of
lightning revealed a miserable dilapidated cottage. The paper of the
sliding screens was flapping like ghostly garments in the wind, the
plaster of the walls had fallen in places, showing the bamboo skeleton
of the house, the roof seemed breaking down under its load of stones,
and the floor gave and creaked dismally as they stepped up on the dirty
mats.
On one side of the room was a broken screen, inverted;[24] two of the
floor mats had been taken up, and a clean new tub, bucket, and dipper
stood on the rotten boards in the place thus left bare.[25] Saburo
shuddered. What did all this mean? His legs, which had been painfully
weak for several hours, nearly gave way beneath him.
“My mother lies there dead,” said the girl in explanation. “I have
not been able to bury her yet, but I will bury her to-morrow before
we start. Wait here a little while, for I must go and find a priest
to attend the funeral,” and the maiden disappeared in the darkness,
leaving Saburo alone with the dead.
He tried to call, but his voice was choked; he tried to move, but his
legs refused to carry him. He could only sit and wait for the return of
his hostess, the horror of the place freezing his blood the while.
It was deadly silent in the woods. He would have been grateful even for
a thunder-clap to break the silence, but the storm had passed. Suddenly
the clouds parted, and the moonlight streamed through a hole in the
roof right into the room.
Saburo found himself filled with a strange desire to look behind the
screen, to see whether the girl had told him the truth. Slowly, on
hands and knees, he crept across the floor. Softly he moved the screen
away. It was too true! There, on the floor, covered with a white quilt,
sat a rigid figure, its knees drawn up to its chin.
Saburo crept closer and removed the covering from the face. Horror
of horrors! It was the face of his beautiful hostess. But even as he
looked at it, the hair became snowy white, the eyes grew hollow, the
parchment-like skin stretched tense across the nose, and the face
changed to that of a demon.
Poor Saburo, not daring to turn his back on the awful object, retreated
backward. The dead, raising her head, hitched forward across the floor.
Saburo backed again. Once more the thing moved toward him, and once
more he backed. It came close,--closer,--then suddenly, opening its
mouth wide, it sneezed, and Saburo, forgetting his fatigue, turned and
ran madly away from that terrible place.
Next morning a peasant, leading his shock-headed pony loaded with grass
along the mountain road, saw, far beneath him, close to the brawling
torrent, what looked like the body of a man. Scrambling down, he found
poor Saburo, not dead, but badly bruised. With much labor and suffering
he was at last dragged up to the road.
How familiar the whole place looked to him when he opened his eyes!
There was the turn in the road near which he had sat down, there the
footpath along which the girl had come with the bucket of water. A
great terror came over him.
“Do not take me to the rest-house beyond the turn,” he begged of his
kind-hearted rescuer.
“What rest-house? There is no rest-house near here,” said the
bewildered peasant.
Then Saburo told him his story, but the man only shook his head. “There
is no rest-house here, nor ever has been,” he said, “but there are
foxes that live in the temple of Inari Sama[26] up in the woods there,”
and he pointed toward the footpath. “They have bewitched you, and you
should thank the gods that you have escaped alive.”
Two days later, Saburo, bruised and tired, stepped out of his clogs and
prostrated himself on his face in his father’s shop. “I have returned,”
he said, as he bowed to his parents. Then he went back to his measuring
stick, his _soroban_, and his account-books.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] The abacus used in the East by all merchants in reckoning.
[22] A thick, sweet, slightly fermented rice-soup.
[23] White lanterns are used only at funerals.
[24] Sign of the presence of a corpse.
[25] Preparations for washing a corpse.
[26] Inari Sama, the god or goddess of rice, whose messenger the fox is
supposed to be. Sometimes known as the Fox-God.
V
KITSUNÉ YASHIKI
_Kitsuné Yashiki_, “The Foxes’ Mansion.”
Minokichi sat on the edge of the little open shop, his feet in his
clogs, his staff in his hand, ready for the afternoon’s work. His face,
bearing the curiously refined expression that belongs to the blind, was
turned toward O Koto San, who, with her baby tied to her back, sat on
her heels behind the minute stock in trade. So small and so cheap was
it that five dollars would probably have bought it all. A few pairs of
straw sandals, a pattern or two of blue-and-white toweling, a pile of
broad-brimmed hats, a small variety of cakes, and some eggs,--these
were the entire contents of the shop. But O Koto San sat at the receipt
of custom, as proud and happy in her new business as if she were
conducting the great Mitsui[27] silk-store on Ginza.[28]
Minokichi was a blind _amma_, or masseur, who earned a certain but
scanty living by his trade. Every afternoon, when the great bell of
the temple tolled out its four slow strokes, Minokichi, staff in hand
and whistle in mouth, walked up and down the streets of Ushigomé,[29]
stopping wherever called, to smooth and rub and soothe and pat any
tired body who, after the hot bath, might feel the need of further
comforting. Some days, when he was fortunate, he earned as much as
twenty cents. Once he had been summoned to a great house, where he had
worked for an hour or two over a man whose silken garment proved that
he was prosperous, and had pocketed for his fee a fifty-cent note; but
such luck had never come to him again. It had taken him a long time to
save enough to marry, and when the wedding was over, the go-between
and the fortune-teller paid, the presents sent to the bride’s family,
the tiny hired house new-papered and fitted up with the very few
articles necessary for Japanese housekeeping, and the wedding feast
paid for, not only was the long-saved hoard all gone, but he had been
obliged to put in pawn every garment he possessed that was not at the
time in actual use.
And so O Koto San, a red-cheeked, curly-haired country girl, whose
round body seemed always trying to work its way out of her garments,
came into the humblest of homes and took up the task of making life for
two cheaper and happier than life for one. A good little wife she had
proved to be,--in every respect exactly as the go-between had said. She
kept the tiny house as neat as her willing hands could make it. She
managed the scanty supply of charcoal so that every piece did some work
for the family, no grain of rice was ever wasted by her in cooking or
in clearing away, and the additional luxuries of the Japanese table,
soups, fish, beans, greens, _mochi_[30] at New Year’s, and vermicelli
at O Bon, made their appearance with due regularity. She took in
cigarettes to roll in her spare time, and added to Minokichi’s earnings
the tidy little sum of a dollar to a dollar and a half a month by her
own labor. Minokichi brought her all his wages, and whenever he wanted
money there was some in her hands for him. He always had wherewith
to pay for a hot bath at the public bath-house; his tobacco pouch
was never empty; he could entertain his friends at an eel-house, or a
macaroni-shop, or in his own home, and O Koto San never told him that
there was no money for such foolishness, as did the thrifty wife of the
carpenter next door when her husband went to her for change to meet
emergencies of like nature.
Surely Minokichi was a lucky man, in spite of his blindness. He had
been married nearly two years now, and a baby boy had come to cement
the union even more closely. O Koto San worked, if such a thing were
possible, more diligently with her baby tied to her shoulders than she
had at the beginning. Her rosy face was perhaps a thought less rosy,
her curly hair a trifle less abundant, but she was just as cheerful and
energetic in her care for two as she had been when her husband was her
only thought. The little shop was her idea, and the stock in trade the
saving from her cigarette work. They lived on the very edge of Tokyo,
just where the city streets turn into narrow lanes and then into the
dyked roadways across the rice-fields. Koto’s shrewd business sense
realized that if she had to offer to passing jinrikisha-men just such
things as they might need when starting out for a long country run or
returning, she might make a profit from her savings. And so the things
had been bought and set in place, and already more than one kurumaya
had discovered the smiling face of the shop-keeper, and had bought from
her, exchanging at the same time a few pleasant words, for the sake of
her bright eyes, her shining teeth, and her low bows.
Minokichi was waiting for the temple bell to strike, and as the first
deep boom sounded he rose to his feet, struck the ground with his
staff, and felt his way out into the narrow road.
“If I am late,” he said, “close the shutters, and I will call you when
I come. I am going to try a new part of the district. Perhaps I can
find that rich man again who gave me so much money once. He was over
near Koishikawa.”[31] He moved cautiously down the street, rapping his
stick on the ground and blowing his whistle, signs to all passers that
a blind _amma_ was on the march.
It was nearly six o’clock, and the sun was low at his back, when
Minokichi, tapping and whistling, reached the northeast corner of
Ushigomé, close to the Koishikawa district. He had spent about an
hour at one of his regular places of call, rubbing and kneading the
head and shoulders of an overworked newspaper-man, preparing him for
his night at the office. For this service he had received, with many
bows and protestations of gratitude, the sum of eight cents, carefully
folded in white paper. Then he had felt his way, by the sun at his
back and the autumn wind on his left cheek, along the narrow, crooked
streets, to the very border of his own district. Here he paused,
wondering whether it would be better to go on to Koishikawa, or to
return by devious routes to O Koto San, trusting to chance for one or
two more calls on the way.
As he stood in hesitation he heard a voice, a sharp, boy’s voice, of
curiously staccato utterance. “Amm’ San!”[32] it said.
Minokichi cocked his head in the direction from which the sound came
and answered “Hai!”
Then he heard the soft pat-pat of bare running feet. They sounded like
a dog’s feet, he thought, as they came near him, and he was almost
surprised when the boy’s voice close by said “Come,” and a small, firm
hand took hold of his and began to lead him, not toward Koishikawa,
nor yet toward his home, but northward across the rice-fields along
the city’s edge. He walked for miles, clutched by the firm little
hand. “The master is ill,” was all the answer that his guide gave to
his inquiries. The sun had long been down; he could feel the chill of
the autumn evening, and hear the shrill piping of the autumn insects,
before they reached their destination.
“Careful! Amm’ San,” called the shrill staccato voice, and Minokichi
reached with his stick to feel the stone threshold of a gateway. Then a
muffled bell sounded, and he felt against his cheek the slight stirring
of the air caused by the bell-rope in the hands of his guide.
“Is it a temple or a _yashiki_?”[33] asked Minokichi of himself, for
he had long before ceased trying to get information from his taciturn
young escort. “That bell and rope seem like the entrance to a temple.
Perhaps it is a priest who is ill, and this is his acolyte.”
Then came the swift rattle of a sliding lattice, and as he bowed and
entered the narrow doorway that he knew must be in front of him, he
heard the soft, sibilant purr of sliding _shoji_, and the patter of
_tabi_-shod feet upon matted floors.
“Good-evening,” he said, sucking in his breath and bending double as he
stood at the entrance of the house.
The small, firm hand that had led him relaxed its grasp.
“Amm’ San,” came the sound of a woman’s voice, “you are welcome! Enter,
if you please!”
Minokichi slipped from his clogs to the polished wooden step, then
up to the floor above, and fell on his knees with his forehead to the
mats, sucking in his breath, and murmuring in politest terms his desire
to be of service to the master.
“Come quickly, please!” It was the woman’s voice again, so anxious, so
hurried, with utterance so clipped and abrupt, that Minokichi could
hardly understand her words. A soft hand slipped into his, and he was
led by passageways with polished wooden floors and through spacious
matted apartments, sweet-smelling with the odors of fresh straw and
aromatic cedar.
“A great lord’s _yashiki_,” thought Minokichi, as he sniffed the air
and felt the polished wood beneath his feet.
“This is the master’s room. Enter,” said the woman’s voice again, and a
sound of sobbing followed.
Once more Minokichi fell on his face and with his forehead to the mats.
The sobbing ceased, and in the silence he heard long, gasping breaths,
as if some one lay dying close beside him.
“This is the master,” said the voice again. “Do what you can to make
him easier.”
With deft and tender touch Minokichi placed his practiced fingers on
the quivering body at his side. In spite of his awe and sympathy,
a pleasant thought came to his mind. The master wore a wadded silk
kimono, and visions of his former princely patron came before him to
make him work with redoubled skill and patience. He felt the rigid
muscles relax little by little under his hand, the convulsive quivering
cease, the labored breathing grow soft and regular.
For hours he worked over the sufferer, and at last, as he stopped to
wipe the streaming perspiration from his face, the woman’s voice,
quieter and less anxious, said to him, “That is enough, Amm’ San. You
are very skillful. The master is really resting now. Come with me and
rest yourself awhile. You must be tired.”
Minokichi bowed, and murmured very softly his formula of
self-depreciation. Then a soft hand took hold of his and led him from
the room.
“Forgive our rudeness,” said the voice again, “in that we offered you
no refreshment when you came. The master was suffering so that we were
forgetful of all else. Kindly accept this tea, and smoke your pipe, and
soon there will be some humble repast ready for you before you leave
us.”
Minokichi was glad enough to sit in the quiet of the room to which he
had been led, to smoke his tiny pipe and drink the tea set before him,
and reflect on the events of the evening and the possibilities of his
fee, while he rested from his protracted efforts. The time seemed very
short to him before soft footsteps on the mats and the gentle shoving
of trays toward him told that the promised refreshment had arrived.
“It is a poor meal,” said the woman’s voice once more. “Please pardon
it, for we have been so troubled by the master’s illness.”
Minokichi had never tasted such food as the “poor meal” thus politely
offered. Fit for the gods, it seemed to him. He ate sparingly, however,
for he did not wish to seem a rude and churlish person, who knew no
better than to eat up clean all that was set before him. When he had
finished, he returned thanks to his unseen hostess, bowing low with
face to the floor in the direction whence came the sound of quick
breathing, so rapid that it seemed to him like the panting of a dog.
“Poor lady,” he thought, “she is still worried about the master.”
As he left the house, a heavy folded white paper was placed in his
hand, and a wooden box, containing, as he knew, the remains of his
feast, was given him. In an ecstasy of thanks and protestations he
committed himself to the firm clutch of his first small guide, whose
shrill voice uttered the single word, “Come.”
So fast the little feet at his side pattered along, that Minokichi was
nearly out of breath when at last his companion relinquished his hold,
and with a jerky “Say nar’”[34] left him standing alone, staff in hand.
Just then a great bell began to toll, and he knew that he was near his
own home, on the north edge of Ushigomé. Slowly, with leisurely waits
between the strokes, the ringer beat out the hour. It took a long time
to reach the tenth stroke, and Minokichi was sure then that it was
through.
“Koto will be fast asleep, and I shall have to wake her,” he said, and
started to feel his way home. “Eleven” boomed the bell, and Minokichi
hurried faster. “Poor Koto! If she is not asleep, she will be anxious
about me.” “Twelve,” and the whirring, buzzing reverberations seemed
close to his ear, so near was he to the temple. With clattering clogs
and tapping staff the blind man broke into a run, and in a few moments
was standing by his own house.
“Koto,” he called very softly, so that the neighbors should not be
disturbed. His quick ear caught the rustle within, and he knew that
she was awake. He heard her scratch a match and speak a soothing word
in response to the baby’s sleepy murmur, then the wooden shutter was
pushed gently aside, just wide enough to admit the _amma’s_ slender
body.
“It is very late,” he said softly, as he entered, “but I have had such
an evening!” and he told her what had befallen him. “The fee should be
a good one,” he said when he had finished his story, “for they were
very grand people. A great house, and, oh, such a supper!”
As he spoke, he drew the folded paper from his bosom. “Let us see what
it is,” he said. “It’s very heavy! Perhaps they paid it all in tempō
sen!”[35]
He laid the bundle on the floor and opened it. O Koto’s eyes shone
as she saw the yellow glint of the great gold pieces--five of
them--antique oval ōban,[36] such as no one saw in these days, except
in pictures, or in yellow tin counterfeits hung to the masts of the
“ships of fortune.”
“Minokichi, it’s all in gold!” she said solemnly. “Surely it must have
been a great prince who called you in. No one but a prince would give
such a fee to an _amma_!”
“Surely, it was a prince,” said Minokichi joyfully. “I thought so from
the house and the _go chiso_.[37] And now, let us look at the _go
chiso_,” and he took up the wooden box that he had brought with him.
“Open it, Koto. You never tasted such food in all your life.”
O Koto San opened it, and as she saw the contents, her face fell and a
look of terror came into it.
“Taste it, Koto, and see if it’s not good,” insisted Minokichi, but
Koto made no answer. “What is the matter, Koto? Why don’t you say
something?” Her husband turned his blind face toward her expectantly.
“Minokichi,” she said, and her voice was strange and scared, “there is
no food here, nothing but grass and leaves. You have been fooled, and
may the gods protect us, for I believe that it was to the foxes you
went to-night, and that you have been bewitched.”
“There is the money,” said Minokichi. “This box was packed with grass
and leaves by mistake. The gold is here to prove that I was not
bewitched,” and he clinked the gold coins together reassuringly.
But O Koto San, who was from the country, and who knew much more about
the ways of foxes than did her city-bred husband, shook her head, and
murmured something about “to-morrow.”
They did not sleep a great deal that night, Minokichi for thinking of
his good luck, Koto in dread of some strange trick that the foxes might
have in store for them all. When morning came, they were glad to rise
early and go about their common, every-day tasks. Neither spoke of last
night’s experience until the shutters had been opened, the beds folded
and laid away in the closet, the floors swept, the _shoji_ dusted,
and Minokichi seated at his breakfast, with Koto by the rice-bucket,
waiting to refill his bowl. Then he spoke:--
“Koto, just get that paper that I brought home, and see if your eyes
deceived you last night about the gold. If you are right, there will be
nothing here this morning but grass, or at most, tempō sen.”
Koto fetched her little iron-bound cash-box, opened it with the key
which she wore always hung about her neck, and drew out the white
paper. Her face brightened when she heard its golden chink, while her
husband laughed triumphantly. As she opened it the coins shone bright
and yellow, no copper tempō sen, but gold ōban, without a doubt. She
dropped them one by one upon the mat, counting as she did so. “One,
two, three, four”--She shook the paper, felt in her belt, her sleeves,
her bosom, searched the box, got up and shook herself. Where was the
fifth? One green leaf lay on the floor and four gold pieces.
“How many did we count last night?” she asked of Minokichi.
“Five,” he answered.
“There!” she cried, “it was the foxes that bewitched you, and one of
those pieces is a green leaf this morning!”
“Nonsense!” said Minokichi. “You must have made a mistake in your
counting last night. You were sleepy, and probably you saw more than
there were.”
He laughed affectionately. Koto was so clever and business-like that it
was rather pleasant to catch her in a mistake once in a while. But Koto
would not accept his theory. She was sure of her own, and worried lest
all their gold should depart as had the fifth piece.
When Minokichi was ready for his afternoon start, Koto, her baby firmly
tied to her back, slipped into her clogs and stood beside him. “If you
go to your fox-place again, I am going with you,” she said decidedly.
“I at least can see, and the foxes will not find me quite so easy to
fool. O Kin San from next door will mind the shop, and I can walk as
far and as fast as you.”
Minokichi demurred. It was not customary for an _amma_ to go about his
work escorted by his wife and baby. His princely patron, if they should
be lucky enough to find their way to him, might not be willing to
employ a man so accompanied. But Koto was firm. She would not interfere
with her husband’s business. She would follow him at a discreet
distance, and pretend she had nothing to do with him. But go she would,
and so they started, Minokichi tapping and whistling in front, Koto
and the baby clattering along a few paces behind. As they passed the
house of the newspaper-man, a servant who had been watching for the
_amma_ called him in, and so it happened that the sun was low when the
trio reached the spot where the day before Minokichi had been accosted
by the shrill-voiced, barefooted messenger.
O Koto San, who, while her husband was rubbing the newspaper-man, had
visited a neighboring temple and made an offering and a prayer to
Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, felt fairly bold and cheerful by now.
The chink of the gold was in her ears, its glitter dazzled her eyes. It
was at her suggestion that Minokichi turned northward, and struck out
by the dyked roadway in the same direction that he had taken the night
before under guidance. They walked a long, long way. The sun went down
and the moon came up over the rice-fields, the wind blew chill, the
dead leaves rattled on the trees by the wayside.
Poor Koto shivered, and called out to her husband walking in front,
“Let’s go home! There is no _yashiki_ here,--only rice-fields and a
clump of trees ahead. Come home! Don’t you know by now that you were
bewitched last night?”
“Just a little farther, Koto,” pleaded Minokichi. “I am sure we are
almost there.”
They walked on, Minokichi feeling the way very carefully with his
staff. When they reached the clump of trees, he turned aside, fumbling
with his stick until it sounded on stone. “Here it is,” he said, and
passed under a low, red _torii_[38] that stood hidden among the giant
cedars.
O Koto followed, trembling. It was a little Inari[39] shrine, and
before it sat two grinning stone foxes. Minokichi went swiftly forward
on the stone-paved walk, sure of his way now, and passed between the
guardian images. He lifted his hand and swung the cobwebbed, knotted
rope that dangled before a gong above the entrance. A dull, metallic
boom smote the silence, but there was no sound in answer to the
summons. O Koto shuddered, and the baby struggled restlessly in its
wrappings.
At last Minokichi turned sadly. “I am afraid the master is dead, for
the house is closed. We will go home now.”
Just then Koto, whose fears had not dulled her wits, noticed a dark
object lying close to the foundation of the temple. Her first thought
was to seize Minokichi’s hand and run, her next, to find out now what
this mystery might be. Controlling her desire to shriek, she went on,
to take a nearer look at the crouching body, and by the moon’s bright
light, shining through a gap in the trees, she saw that it was a great
dead fox, with gray lips drawn back from his toothless jaws in a
ghastly grin.
“Poor Minokichi,” she said, “here is your prince. The grandfather of
all the foxes he must have been. Even your skill could not save him.”
Minokichi walked on in silence, nor did his wife lag far behind, for
across the deserted rice-fields came to her ears a dismal yapping and
wailing, the mourning of the foxes for “the master.”
To this day O Koto San does not know whether her husband believes
in his own bewitchment. The four ōban remained as they were, and
Minokichi, who is a rich man now, thanks to the gold and to O Koto’s
clever management, dates all his good luck from that night when he was
led out across the rice-fields to minister to the dying man. And when
O Koto shakes her head and talks of “Kitsuné Yashiki,” he laughs, and
warns her that fox-gold may turn to leaves over night.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] One of the great merchant firms of Japan.
[28] The principal business street of Tokyo.
[29] One of the districts of Tokyo.
[30] Rice-dumpling, a special festival dish.
[31] One of the districts of Tokyo.
[32] _Amma San_, “Mr. Amma.” The clipped utterance in this and in
other speeches is quite un-Japanese, and must have sounded foreign to
Minokichi.
[33] A great house, belonging to a noble or samurai of high rank.
[34] _Sayo nara_, “Good-by,” another example of the curious clipping of
speech that characterizes foxes masquerading as human beings.
[35] A large oval copper coin, worth about eight mills.
[36] A large oval gold coin, worth about eighty dollars.
[37] Honorable feast, a term applied to any special delicacy served to
guests.
[38] An erection in the form of a gateway that marks the approach to a
temple or sacred place.
[39] The god of rice, whose messengers are foxes.
VI
CHOKICHI’S PILGRIMAGE
The whole year had gone wrong for Chokichi. When, at the close of the
old year, his bills had come in and he had paid them off,--as every
Japanese must if he would go on into the future at all,--he had not
only been left without money, but had been forced to offer his stock in
trade at absurdly low prices; and--for purchasers are few and sellers
many at that season, and in a small village only as many _tabi_[40]
can be absorbed at once as the population has feet to cover--he had,
after all, been driven to carry a large part of his wardrobe to the
_furugi-ya_[41] and sell it for what it would bring, in order to
satisfy his creditors.
And then, after beginning the new year with narrowed resources, he
had been further afflicted by the illness of his wife. Money spent
on doctors and medicines was of no avail, and she had gone steadily
from bad to worse, until at last she had died and left him with no one
to attend to the house or the shop, just as things were looking up a
little and custom coming in.
Then he had taken an apprentice,--Tōshi, the son of a neighbor who
had more boys than he needed to carry on the hereditary business of
tub-making, and who was glad to put into Chokichi’s care the most
mischievous and good-for-nothing of his lithe, laughing, bullet-headed
progeny. Tōshi, with his smooth brown face, his black slits of eyes,
his short blue kimono folded neatly about his muscular young legs,
would sit meekly on his heels by his master’s side, sewing at the
_tabi_ that had been cut and put into his hands, a very model of all
the virtues. But if Chokichi left the house for an hour or two in
Tōshi’s care, trusting for the moment to the guileless expression and
exemplary behavior of his apprentice, he was more than likely on his
return to meet the miscreant in the street at the head of a procession
of boys marching with flags and singing war-songs with brazen voices,
while in the shop all would be disorder, the unfinished socks scattered
about the floor, the cat curled up in the tumbled bolt of white cotton
from which the _tabi_ were to be cut, or a live coal from the _hibachi_
burning a hole in the newly covered mats.
What was a poor _tabi_-maker to do? Chokichi spent much time in
meditation upon this problem, and at last, when August came and pilgrim
parties were starting from all the villages to make the tour of the
sacred places, a thought came to him that soon urged him into action.
If everything went wrong, it must surely be that he had somehow failed
in his duty toward the gods. He could not make a grand tour with the
clubs that went out, after a year of saving and preparation, to be
gone a month or more, and reap much spiritual benefit by propitiating
as many of the gods as possible,--he fairly shuddered to think of
what might happen to the shop and Tōshi in such an absence,--but why
not take a day, close the shop, send Tōshi home to his mischievous
brothers, and make a pilgrimage to the shrine on the top of Miyamoto
Yama? He had heard his father tell of how once his grandfather had made
pilgrimage thither, and of what wonderful good luck had come in answer
to his prayers.
It took Chokichi some time to reason this all out while he sat over his
work, cutting, basting, directing Tōshi, sewing on the cheap German
hand-machine that he had bought one lucky year when he had found a
pleasant little surplus in his till after all his debts were paid. But
when he had thought it out, there was no delay about decision.
“Tōshi,” he said suddenly, “would you like a holiday?”
Tōshi’s black eyes gleamed, his ivory teeth shone, but he kept on
demurely with his work.
“Yes, master,” he answered, “if your honor would condescend to give one
to my unworthiness.”
“I shall close the shop to-morrow, for I must go away on business of
importance. You may return to your father’s to-night, and come back to
me early in the morning of the day after to-morrow, in time to open the
shop.” Chokichi was very condescending and important in his manner. He
wished Tōshi to understand that the holiday was no reward of virtue.
Very early the next morning, Chokichi, a box of luncheon tied up in a
_furoshiki_,[42] dangling from one hand, a stout staff in the other,
his kimono turned up above his knees and tucked into his belt, his
bare feet shod with sandals tied tightly about his ankles by strings
of twisted straw, walked quickly out of the village, taking the
straight highroad that pointed toward the mountains. The mists lay
in low, level bands against the sides of the great range, the sun was
hardly above the horizon, but the peasants were already at work in the
rice-fields, their broad hats showing like rows of giant mushrooms on
the square green patches of growing rice.
Chokichi swung along jauntily, making good time in the morning
coolness; for the red-faced sun behind him promised a hot day on the
plain, and he was anxious to reach the shelter of the wooded gorges
before the heat was full upon him. And thanks to his vigorous pace,
it was not more than nine o’clock when he found himself traveling
along the rugged mountain path, a precipice above him, a green ravine
beneath, through which roared and tumbled a small river, swollen and
white from the August rains. How delightfully cool and damp it was! He
stopped beside a stream that leaped from the precipice in a sheet of
foam into a basin cut for it beside the road, then gurgled and hissed
under a culvert on its way to the river, below. He bathed his hands and
arms and feet and legs in the clear, cool water.
“It was a great thing to do,” he said to himself. “Such a day for the
walk! I almost wish I had brought Tōshi, though, for it is pretty
lonely!”
He stopped and listened. All the cheerful valley sounds were gone,--the
children shouting at their play, the women singing at their looms, the
squawking and chatter of fowls, the peasants calling from field to
field, the bump-bump of the great mill-wheel, the clatter of clogs
and patter of bare feet. There was no sound except the gushing and
rushing of water, the swish of green leaves over which the breeze
was passing, the murmur of the pines as the wind came their way. As
Chokichi listened he shivered a little, for he was used to the social
village life, and he seemed so far from human companionship. But he
cheered himself with the thought of his grandfather’s luck. There
would be little merit to be gained if his day of pilgrimage were all
pleasure. And the fact that he was alone would make his luck all the
greater,--there would be no one to share it.
And so he trudged along,--one moment wishing for company, the next
glad he had none,--until he had reached a goodly height. He stopped
to breathe and wipe his face and arms with his blue-figured towel,
and stood a moment to look at the square green rice-fields far below
him, and the village from which he had come, with its huddled thatched
roofs like haystacks on both sides of the narrow road. He was engaged
in trying to pick out his own among the gray cottages, and heard no
sound of approaching feet, so that a fresh young voice with a ripple of
laughter in it startled him, though it uttered only a polite “Good day!”
He turned quickly and looked into a bright, roguish pair of eyes a
little below the level of his own,--eyes that flashed from under a
blue-and-white towel coquettishly tied about puffs of shining black
hair.
“Good day!” he answered, looking with undisguised pleasure upon the
picturesque maiden before him.
She seemed about sixteen years old, and was dressed in the simple
country costume,--a dark blue kimono and a red-figured _obi_. Her skirt
was turned up, and showed a bright red petticoat reaching a little
below the knee. Her legs were bare, shapely, and white; she wore rough
straw sandals on her feet, tied about her slender ankles. Her face was
merry,--red-cheeked, with laughing lips which showed no trace of care
or trouble or evil temper.
Chokichi ventured to remark that it was a warm day,--very warm for a
young lady to choose for mountain-climbing.
“Truly, it is very warm,” answered the girl, “and I have lost my way.
Can you tell me which path leads to the Miyamoto shrine?”
“Assuredly, honorable young lady. I am going there myself, and shall
be only too glad if you will condescend to let me accompany you.”
The girl bowed low in thanks, and then the two walked on together,
Chokichi ahead, the maiden modestly following. They scrambled a little
way in silence up the steep path; then Chokichi, who thanked his lucky
stars that he had not brought the mischievous Tōshi, stopped and seated
himself upon a rock.
“Let us rest here a little,” he said. “The shrine is not far distant,
but the road is steep, and we must get our breath before we begin the
last pull.”
The girl sat down across the path from him, and her eyes danced as she
looked at him, then she dropped them to the ground and sighed. Chokichi
could not but think what an adornment so fair a maiden would be to his
lonely house. He began tentatively,--
“And the young lady’s home--is it far from here?”
The girl looked up as she answered, “My humble home? Indeed, it is far
away--beyond Futago Yama,” and she pointed to a great double peak that
rose out of the north. “I have been walking since before light, and
have seen no one since I started until I met you.”
“But why,--if you will permit me to ask so impolite a question,--why do
you walk so far all alone to this lonely mountain shrine?”
The girl lifted her hand to her face so that her long sleeve hid her
mouth, and her bright eyes softened a little.
“My mother is very ill,” she said gently, “and we are poor and have
no money to buy medicine, so I am going to the shrine to ask the gods
to give her health.” She hid her whole face behind her sleeve, and
Chokichi where he sat could hear her sobbing softly.
“Do not be sad,” he entreated, rising and going to her. He laid one
hand on her shoulder, patting her lightly. “The gods will surely
grant the prayer of so sweet a pilgrim, and I have money enough to buy
medicine for your mother when we come down.”
“Come! Let us go!” she said, rising briskly.
Chokichi was astonished at the sudden change. The roguish light came
back into her eyes. She hurried on ahead, looking back at him over her
shoulder from time to time. Chokichi was fairly infatuated.
“Wait! Wait a moment!” he called, for her shapely white legs were
speeding so fast that he could hardly keep up with her. “Wait for me! I
have something to tell you!”
The girl stopped, laughing gleefully. Chokichi, puffing from the chase,
came up to her.
“Might it not be”--He stopped, embarrassed. When he had courted Kiku,
all had been done through go-betweens. This was new work for him. He
began again, “Might it not be that if you had a husband to take care
of you, you would not need to take such long journeys all alone to
strange shrines?”
Her roguish eyes went up at the corners until they were almost lost in
her hair.
“Truly,” she answered, “it might be; but now I go to pray. When we
return, we will talk of other things.”
The way wound dimly now through thick woods,--great cedars with trunks
like temple pillars. Ahead of them, across the path, stood the heavy
_torii_ that marked the beginning of the holy ground. Suddenly the girl
stumbled, then gathered herself together with a groan.
“What is the matter? What have you done? Let me help you!” Chokichi
cried, hurrying to her.
“I have hurt my ankle and twisted my knee,” she said faintly, leaning
against a tree. “My sandal string is cutting me, and I cannot stoop to
loosen it!”
“Let me fix it for you,” said Chokichi, squatting beside her and
touching lightly the injured ankle.
As he touched it, suddenly it changed under his hand. It was no longer
the shapely, slender foot of a young woman, but a great hairy, muscular
paw like that of a bear. A yell of demon laughter was in the air. He
looked up to see that his companion had grown to the height of a giant,
and was staring at him with terrible eyes from a monkey face. Only
the dress remained to show that this fearful monster was the charming
maiden of the moment before.
Mad with fright, Chokichi fled through the _torii_ into the shrine
itself that stood with mossy roof in the dark grove. An old man was
sitting in the priest’s room adjoining the temple, and over a _hibachi_
by his side a tea-kettle was boiling merrily. The homely sight and
sound were reassuring, and Chokichi felt a little better for the
pleasant human companionship.
“Welcome! Welcome!” called the old man. “Come in and take a cup of tea
and have a whiff of tobacco. The day is hot, and you must be tired with
your long climb up the hill.”
So gentle, so polite, so smiling was his host, that Chokichi sat and
talked with him, forgetting the prayers that he had come so far to
offer. At last he told him all about his strange adventure on the
hillside. The old man chuckled as he described the girl.
“Ay, truly!” he said, wagging his head knowingly.
Then Chokichi told of the great hairy foot.
“Was it like this?” shouted the old man, with a yell, rising suddenly,
and Chokichi saw that same foot thrust out in front of him, while far
above his head, with staring, terrible eyes and monkey face, was the
monster from which he had fled. Around him echoed peals of derisive
laughter.
This time it was rage rather than fright that moved Chokichi, and he
sprang at his tormentor like a wounded tiger. Gripping the great hairy
leg tightly with both hands, he held on until he lost consciousness.
A hunter, passing the shrine late in the day, found him lying on the
ground just within the _torii_. He was bleeding from a cut on the head.
In one hand he held a bunch of reddish hair. It took some time to bring
him to his senses, and then he told his story.
“I’ve got something to show for it,” he said manfully. “I tore this out
of the monster before he threw me down.”
The hunter looked at it curiously.
“That is fox-hair!” he exclaimed. “You were bewitched! I know those
foxes, they come from the Inari shrine on the other side of Futago
Yama!”
Slowly Chokichi toiled down the mountain-side through the darkness;
sadly he let himself into his silent house.
When Tōshi returned to his work the next morning, he found his master
with a bad cut on his forehead, but welcoming his apprentice with a
joy that caused that mischievous youngster some surprise.
“And did the master’s business prosper yesterday?” he inquired humbly,
but with a twinkle in his eye that showed he had his own suspicions.
“Tōshi,” answered Chokichi enigmatically, “if a man would see his
business prosper, let him mind it himself, nor clamor to the gods for
aid.”
FOOTNOTES:
[40] The mitten-shaped sock worn by Japanese.
[41] The old-clothes dealer.
[42] A square of cloth used for wrapping bundles.
VII
THE BUYER OF AMÉ
_Amé_, a sweetmeat made from wheat gluten, very
nourishing and wholesome for children.
Old man Genjiro was sitting over the last coals in his _hibachi_,
warming his hands and blinking sleepily. The shutters of the little
sweetmeat shop were closed for the night. The street outside was quiet.
Even the footsteps of the few belated wayfarers who were still abroad
were muffled by the soft, heavy snow that had wrapped the city as in a
garment.
The old man nodded over the dying embers, jerking himself awake from
time to time to poke the few coals together with the iron fire-sticks,
or to rake and pick over the mound of ashes. His worn old face was
seamed and crisscrossed with wrinkles, but they were the tracks of
kindly emotions, not of the fiercer passions. His wadded blue cotton
garments were wrapped tightly about his small, withered body, and his
rough, red, bare feet were doubled up under him as he sat on the
matted floor. He shivered a little as the red coals grew smaller and
smaller.
“What a cold night it is!” he said to himself. “I am glad I do not
have to be out pulling a jinrikisha;” and he laughed cheerfully, as he
looked about with some pride on his little shop, and his stock in trade
spread out in the front of it in small glass showcases.
Genjiro felt that he was living like a lord in his old age after his
years of toil, first in the rice-fields, then in the shafts of a
jinrikisha. He had lived honestly always, and had brought up three
sons, who were now his pride and joy,--strong men all,--two, pullers of
jinrikisha like their father before them, and one, the baby, serving
his time in the army. When he grew old his sons had set him up in the
little shop, and he managed to make a comfortable living off of the
small coins that the children in the neighborhood paid him for his
wares.
Genjiro’s old wife, Fusa, was pottering about the back room, making the
bed for the night. He could hear her snort and snuffle about her work,
for she was asthmatic, and the heavy winter comfortables that she was
handling were almost too much for her strength.
“Put on all the comfortables that we have,” he called to her; “I am
coming to bed in a minute. No one will come to buy _amé_ on such a
night as this.”
Fusa grunted in response and went on with her work. Genjiro sat still
over his fire, too sleepy and warm to leave it for the cold little back
room, even with the prospect of all the comfortables in the house to
lure him to his bed. He heard the great bell of the temple close by
boom out the hour, but he was too sleepy to count the slow strokes.
It was Fusa’s voice from the next room that roused him with the words,
“Some one is at the door!”
He jumped up with a start and heard a very thin, weak voice calling,
“Excuse me,” just outside the shop. He pushed open the shutter in
surprise that any one should come at that hour for _amé_. A woman stood
in the street. He could not see her clearly in the darkness and amid
the falling snow, which covered her dress and lay upon her disheveled
hair and seemed to whiten even her face. She glided rather than stepped
into the shop.
Genjiro hardly knew what to say, but he bowed politely, on all fours,
lifting his head at intervals from between his hands to remark that
it was a cold night, that it was the first time that he had had the
pleasure of seeing his visitor, and that he hoped he might be able to
serve her.
The woman’s face was very sweet and sad, as she bowed in response to
Genjiro’s greetings. “I would like to buy a little of your _amé_,”
she said, and she pointed to a long, bright-colored paper bag of the
confection, such as is sold to mothers when they bring their babies to
the temple for the _miya mairi_.[43] Genjiro handed it to her, and
received in return a curiously blackened and mouldy coin. Then the
customer glided out into the street, and the old man closed his shutter
and retired to the back room.
“What was it?” said Fusa, for Genjiro was shaking all over.
“Only a woman who wanted to buy _amé_,” he said; but he shuddered as
he crept into bed, and it was a long time before he was warm enough to
sleep.
The next day the old man was pale and distraught. When the baby of
the clog-seller across the street came toddling over, holding out a
rin[44] piece with a square hole in the middle, he was so absorbed
in thinking of his strange customer that he did not see her at all,
and her dirty round mouth began to pucker, and her fat little bosom
to heave up and down under its red wadded gown, before he turned his
abstracted gaze upon her. To be sure, he comforted her with a beautiful
long piece of _amé_ jelly and a little paper flag with a round red sun
in the middle; but her faith in him was only partially restored, and
she trotted home so depressed that she nearly ran under the wheels of a
passing jinrikisha, and wailed loudly when the runner threw her aside
as if she had been a pillow. And when the boys came home from school at
noon, they were surprised to see that their friend Genjiro, instead of
sitting in the front of the shop, bowing and smiling over his tempting
wares, was hugging his _hibachi_, smoking gloomily, and staring into
the street with vacant eyes. It took two shouts and much jingling of
small coin to wake him from his reverie.
That night, Genjiro and his old wife went to bed early, and the shop
was closely shuttered and quite dark when the temple bell sounded ten.
Genjiro was not asleep, however, and he lay listening to the sounds in
the street, with Fusa wheezing and snoring beside him. And then, again
he heard the weak, pleading voice.
“Excuse me for troubling you,” it said.
Genjiro lay and shivered, but his kind heart at last got the better of
his fears, and he rose and went into the shop. Softly he slid open the
shutter, and his last night’s visitor stood before him.
“I am making you great trouble,” she said, “but I would like some
more of your nice _amé_,” and she bowed, and pointed as before to a
bright-colored paper bag.
Genjiro gave it to her, she slipped into his hand again a rusty coin,
and glided away. Trembling, the old man closed the shutter, crept back
to bed, and lay cowering with cold and fear.
Every night for five nights the same thing happened, and Genjiro, what
with fear and bewilderment, was a changed man. His business suffered,
for the boys now patronized the itinerant sweetmeat vender who came
into the street every noon and stood close to Genjiro’s shop with his
little cart of sweets, blowing a bubbly brass horn and dancing at
intervals for the crowd of children that flocked about him. Genjiro was
too forlorn to make an effort to hold his trade. He only sat in the
back of the shop and watched the small coins that ought to be his drop
into his supplanter’s money-box.
At last Genjiro forced himself up to a high resolve. He would follow
the stranger and see what became of her. He never went to bed now until
his weird customer had made her nightly purchase, but sat and shivered
over his _hibachi_ until she came. Fusa was sure that the visitor was
a fox-woman, and that her husband was bewitched; and when he told her
that night that he was going to follow the stranger, the poor old woman
groveled on the floor, entreating him not to be so rash.
“She will only lead you into some great danger. You will never come
back if you follow that fox-woman,” she cried; but though Genjiro
shuddered, he remained firm, and all day Fusa mourned him as one
already dead.
When the woman came that night, she looked paler and sadder than ever,
and she bowed very low and wept as she handed Genjiro the rusty rin in
payment for her purchase. When the old man saw her distress, he was
firmer than ever in his resolve to follow her and discover her home and
her grief. He had put on a clean pair of jinrikisha-man’s shoes, so
that there should be no sound from his footsteps. As he stepped down
from the shop platform to draw the shutter, he closed himself out into
the street, and glided along in his soft foot-gear almost as silently
as the retreating figure that he followed. He had to run at a dog-trot
to keep up with her, so quickly did she move. They passed the temple,
the great curves of its roof throwing dark shadows in the moonlight,
then on into the graveyard beyond.
There was a faint smell of incense in the air, and a few coals burned
dimly on a tombstone. Genjiro hesitated,--a graveyard is not a
pleasant place to enter so late at night,--but his strange guide seemed
to feel his hesitation, and turning, looked at him sadly and beckoned
to him. Genjiro followed manfully. “Poor thing! She wants something of
me!” he said to himself. They came to a great tree girdled with a straw
rope, under which was a grave, and there the woman disappeared.
So he had been selling _amé_ every night to a ghost! Surely Genjiro’s
fears were justified! He was weak and trembling when he reached home,
and it was only after several cups of saké, which Fusa brought him when
she saw his condition, that he could speak connectedly enough to tell
his story.
Far into the night they talked the matter over, but they could not
tell what to do next. At last Fusa said, “You must go to the priest
to-morrow, and he will know who is buried in that grave. Then,
perhaps, we can find out what the ghost wants.”
Very early the next morning Genjiro and Fusa went to the temple, taking
with them the six rusty coins that their ghostly visitor had paid. They
found the place alive with worshipers, for it was a feast day. The
priests were almost too busy to attend to the humble pair, but at last
a gentle old ecclesiastic took pity on their evident distress, called
them to the priests’ house close by the shrine, and asked them kindly
what their trouble was. They told the story, passing it from one to
the other in their excitement over its details, and handed over to the
priest the coins, neatly folded in a piece of white paper.
The holy man looked grave. “Where is the tomb?” he said. “Can you show
it to me now?”
“Surely, your reverence,” answered Genjiro eagerly; “it is just under
the sacred cedar tree,--the great tree with a rope around it.”
“Show it to me,” said the priest, and together they went to the
graveyard. The grave was a new one; only a wooden post bearing the
posthumous name of the deceased marked the spot.
“This is the grave of Kiku,” said the good man, and tears of pity stood
in his eyes. “She was the wife of Chokichi Sato, and she died less than
ten days ago. I myself performed the ceremony when we laid her and her
unborn child here under the sacred cedar. Without doubt the gods have
sent her to you with a message.”
Then Genjiro and Fusa stood, awestruck, before the grave, while the
priest returned to the temple to tell what had come to pass. And when
the priests and the people heard the story of the woman ghost that had
come nightly to Genjiro’s shop to buy _amé_, they came in a great crowd
and stood about the grave.
And one who heard the story went to Chokichi, the husband of Kiku,
and told him, and he hastened to the place just as he was, in his
white-lettered carpenter’s blouse and blue tights. And when he saw the
priests and the people standing, he said, “Will you permit that we
open the grave, and learn whether there is any reason why my wife has
visited the _améya_[45] every night for a week?”
And the priests answered, “We will permit it, and we will, ourselves,
watch the opening and say prayers for the repose of O Kiku San’s
spirit.”
Then picks and hoes were brought, and the earth, wet and heavy with
melted snow, was moved from the grave, until at last they came to the
great cask in which the dead had been placed for burial.
And Chokichi said, “If it please your reverences, I will open the
coffin, that I alone may be polluted by the touch of the dead.” And he
opened the coffin, the priests chanting a mass for the repose of the
young wife’s soul.
And when the cover was removed, a little gurgle came from within the
coffin, and all the people saw the dead mother sitting within, and at
her feet a tiny living baby, smiling and gurgling, and sucking a piece
of _amé_. And Chokichi lifted out the baby, all naked as it was, and
folded it from the winter air in his bosom. “My little son!” he said,
and he wept.
Then said the old priest to all the people as they stood amazed, “Now
ye can see how great is mother love, that will, even from the grave,
watch over and feed its offspring. Behold how for her baby’s sake this
poor mother hath given to the _améya_ the six rin[46] which she needed
to keep her from entering naked into the spirit world,” and he placed
reverently in the coffin the paper containing the six rusty coins that
Genjiro had given to him.
Then he turned to Genjiro, and said, “The kindness of this man,
opening his door night after night to the mother’s ghost, has given
back to Chokichi his son.” And Genjiro and Chokichi returned to their
homes, each followed by a wondering crowd.
From that time on everything that Genjiro did prospered. From all the
city people came to buy _amé_ of him, and to hear his story. Mothers
sent their children to spend their stray coins at his shop, for
they said, “He is a kind man, and will always give you good _amé_.”
And the rival _améya_ with his bubbly trumpet came no more into the
neighborhood, but danced and played in the next ward, where there was
no Genjiro to hold the trade of all the street.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] The presentation of a baby at the parish temple, a ceremony that
takes place when the child is about a month old.
[44] A coin something like the Chinese “cash,” worth about half a mill.
[45] One who sells _amé_.
[46] On the banks of the River of Death an old hag waits to strip the
souls of their clothing as they pass by. Therefore with the dead must
always be buried six rin, with which to propitiate the old woman.
VIII
THE PEONY LANTERN
Old Hanzo stood at the front door bowing double and sucking in his
breath as his master stepped into the jinrikisha and stood for a moment
to be firmly wrapped about by the dust-robe that the kurumaya held in
his hands.
“Good-by, Hanzo,” called the young man gayly as he whirled away.
“Do not expect me back until late to-night, and mind that you have
something good to eat ready for me when I return.”
The old servant bowed, and clattered off on his clogs to discuss with
his wife the carrying out of the master’s order.
Tēichi Ogiwara was a gay young fellow, who, with more wealth than was
quite good for him, was living carelessly and idly in his pleasant
little house in the Negishi suburb of Tokyo. Of samurai descent,
brought up in the stern traditions of his ancestors, he had come to
Tokyo a few years before from the castle town of Wakamatsu, an earnest
youth, on fire with zeal to so educate himself as to be of use to his
beloved country. While his parents lived, their delight in his progress
through the University, their joy in the letters in which he breathed
forth his high resolves, had kept him steadily at his work and away
from the temptations that are set for the feet of unwary students in
the capital.
But things had changed greatly for him within a year. His parents had
died, leaving to him a substantial little income; and after the first
grief was over, the young fellow, looking about him for companionship,
had made friends with one of his classmates in the medical school,--a
brilliant scholar and amusing talker, popular with classmates and
instructors alike, and always ready to engage in any enterprise that
promised either pleasure or profit to himself. Tēichi, by nature
silent and reserved, was attracted by the gayety and energy of
Komura, and Komura, himself of low birth and small financial resources,
was only too delighted to be taken up by a young fellow of independent
means, and of a social position far higher than his own. And so the
friendship grew apace, Komura gaining daily greater influence over
Tēichi, until, at the expiration of a few months, he had subtly sapped
the high ideals and brought the younger and more innocent man as nearly
as possible to his own level.
“You have brains enough and money enough. Why do you dig so at your
studies? If I had your chances, wouldn’t I have a good time? Leave
the hard work and plain living to us of the heimin. We have to do it
because we have neither money nor place. I’d show you how to use your
money so as to get some good out of it, if you’d let me!”
This was the general trend of Komura’s influence, and to Tēichi the
temptations of a luxury and dissipation that he had always been taught
to shun grew irresistible. It seemed as if the asceticism of his early
life, the plain living and high thinking that are a part of the samurai
creed, had been the mere restraining shell of his pupa state, from
which he emerged suddenly as a full-grown butterfly, seeking pleasure
wherever it was to be found.
It was at Komura’s suggestion that he had taken the dainty house at
Negishi, hidden behind a bamboo fence from the quiet lane that was its
only approach, and with a lovely garden shaded by pine and cherry, cool
with running water, picturesque with mossy lanterns, rustic bridges,
azalea-covered mountain ranges, and pebbly walks. Here, by Komura’s
recommendation, old Hanzo had been installed as major domo in a lodge
at the gate, where he lived with his old wife Koma, keeping guard in
the master’s absence and caring for his comfort when he was at home.
Hanzo and Koma were both discreet, and said nothing to any one of
the high revels that went on within the house,--of kurumas that came
bringing not only gay young blades like Ogiwara himself, but daintier
freight in the shape of bright-eyed, black-haired, brilliantly robed
geishas, who plied the saké bottle, and danced, and bandied wit, and
entertained the uproarious young fellows far into the night. Then there
would be times when Hanzo had a long rest, and his master never came
home at all, but spent his days and nights wandering about the city to
various questionable resorts, or seeking new stimulus for his jaded
senses by trips into the country to places famous for the pleasures
offered to travelers. If Tēichi ever thought in those reckless days
of his stern old samurai father, of the joy of his mother in his high
ideals, it was to push the thought out of his mind as quickly as
possible, and obstinately shut the door against its reëntrance.
To-day he trundled merrily along in his jinrikisha to meet Komura
at Kameido, where, after viewing the plum-blossoms and spending a
sentimental afternoon in writing poems to hang upon the branches
of the gray old trees, they hoped to pick up a jovial party for an
evening together at an eel-house near Megané Bashi. Through the damp
greenness of Uyeno Park he sped, along the front of the great temple
and pleasure-ground of Asakusa, across the Sumida River, and into the
Kameido grounds, where, by the quaint semicircular bridge that arches
over the “Pond of the Heart,” he found Komura awaiting him, a big
bundle in his hand wrapped in a purple _furoshiki_.
“Hulloa! old fellow, I thought you were never coming. I haven’t seen
a soul that we know yet, but I’ve brought some good company along,
anyway,” and he shook the suspiciously shaped bundle, from which came a
gurgle that explained his meaning. “We shan’t lack inspiration for our
poems even if the plums are not in bloom.”
It was early in the season, and the great gray trees of the plum-garden
showed only here and there a pink bud pushing its way outward. For
a real poet the suggestion of beauty to come might mean more than
its later fulfillment, but to the two thoughtless youths who seated
themselves upon a blanket-covered bench beneath the trees, clapping
their hands loudly until a red-cheeked maid brought them tea and
cakes, then took out their writing-cases, poem-cards, and saké-bottles
to seek a borrowed inspiration, the bare, gnarled trunks gave little
material for composition. For a while they thought and wrote in
silence, but the quiet and beauty of the place did not appeal to their
excitement-pampered tastes, and it was Komura at last who dashed his
effort to the ground, shut up his writing-case with a snap, and jumped
into his clogs.
“Come on, old man, I can show you an adventure worth two of this,” he
cried,--“an adventure that Yoshitsuné[47] himself might envy!”
Tēichi rose to the bait, glad enough to leave a place in the seclusion
of which unwelcome thoughts kept crowding and would not be driven out.
“I’m with you, boy, lead on!” he shouted. “Wait till I pay the
tea-money, and then we’re off.”
In the long jinrikisha ride to Fukagawa that followed, Komura took the
lead, and Tēichi, sleepy with the saké he had taken, sat loosely in his
little carriage, with red face and closed eyes. At last they stopped at
a neat gateway in a green bamboo fence, and Komura roused him from his
slumbers with a shake.
“Here we are now. Collect yourself and put on your prettiest manners,
for we are to make a call upon a real lady,--one whom even you, with
all your aristocratic notions, would be glad to marry if you could.”
Tēichi, prepared for any adventure with a young person of doubtful
reputation, shrank back at his friend’s words.
“But her father! What would her father think?”
“Old Iijima, her father, is far enough away. No fear of him! He’s taken
up with a young wife, and leaves his daughter here alone because the
two women cannot live in one house. He’ll never know. Trust the girl
to keep her secret. I’ve called on her once or twice before,” and he
winked in a meaning way.
Still reluctant, for some spark of honor yet remained to him, but
curious to see the young woman, Tēichi pocketed his scruples. Komura
rang the bell at the gate, and soon, on clattering clogs, an elderly
maid-servant answered the summons.
“Welcome, Dr. Komura,” she said, bowing and smiling. “Come in and
bring with you your honorable companion.”
Komura, with an air of professional gravity, entered the gate,
introducing his friend as Dr. Ogiwara.
“And how is your mistress since my last visit?” he inquired. “Her
father bade me call again and make sure that she was improving.”
“Truly, she is much better, doctor, but still she is restless and
feverish at times, and sometimes I fear that all is not well. I will
call her and let you see her.”
“Remember, O Kuni San, give her no hint that I am a physician. Tell her
only that a friend of her father has come with a message from him.”
“Indeed, doctor, I will give no hint,” answered O Kuni, bowing
profoundly as she left the room.
Komura and Ogiwara discussed their tea and cake in silence while the
maid was gone, for paper walls have ears, and eyes as well, and
discretion in speech and act is a necessary precaution in a Japanese
house.
Soon there was a double pattering of feet without, the sliding doors
were pushed open, and a graceful, slender girl, dressed in the
_montzuki_ or ceremonial dress, crouching at the threshold, bowed
humbly to the two young men, greeting them as friends of her father and
murmuring polite and hospitable phrases.
Komura bowed in return, introduced Ogiwara, gave a long hypothetical
message from her father, and inquired deferentially after her health.
When at last the bows and speeches of ceremony were over, the real
visit began. Komura, as usual, was the leader of the conversation, but
Ogiwara, sitting almost in silence beside him, used his eyes to good
effect. Never had he seen such beauty in a woman, never such charming
ways, such bashful, winning smiles. He compared her in his mind with
the creatures to whom of late his attentions had been given, and
with a revulsion of feeling despised himself that he had thought them
fascinating. And through his mind went ringing Komura’s words,--“a real
lady--one whom even you would be glad to marry.”
Komura, heated by saké and flushed with the success of his adventure,
chatted gayly on, growing more and more familiar, less like the
gentleman he affected to be, until there came upon the face of his
little hostess, and of her maid as well, a look of disgust not
unmingled with terror. Little by little he dropped the niceties of
language, the subtle use of honorifics that marks the intercourse
between persons of gentle breeding, and talked to the little lady
with the easy, coarse, patronizing familiarity that he was wont to
use toward the women of his acquaintance. Tēichi was wakened from his
reverie by seeing his companion lean forward and lay an impudent hand
upon the shoulder of his shocked and shrinking hostess. Instantly the
samurai training of his youth came to the front. He seized Komura by
the wrist.
“Dog!” he hissed between set teeth, “would you insult a lady in her own
house?”
Holding him in an iron grasp, he turned to little Tsuyu, crouching
frightened with Kuni behind her.
“If the young lady will kindly retire with her maid, I will see that
this rude fellow troubles the house no longer.”
With hasty bows and hurried apologies for the trouble they were causing
him, the women withdrew, and Ogiwara, partly by force and partly by
persuasion, dragged Komura to his kuruma, tumbled him in, and ordered
the runner to take him to his lodgings. For himself, the day of
careless pleasure was ended, and he went to his home as fast as his men
could carry him, thinking the while with remorse of the timid smiles,
the frightened, pleading eyes of his little hostess.
For Tēichi, though at first he did not know it, was in love. Day
and night the small house by the river, with its charming mistress,
seemed calling him. He had relapsed into his old loneliness, for the
thought of Komura was hateful to him; and though the two men met at
lectures and other university work, they did nothing more than exchange
greetings. All intimacy had vanished since the struggle in O Tsuyu’s
quiet guest-room. As the months went by, old Hanzo, seeing his master
moping alone at home, reading the Chinese classics, studying from huge
foreign books, eating sparingly and without relish, drinking not at
all, grew alarmed. He had enjoyed the old days of wild dissipation; he
did not care for so stern and grave a master, who wanted nothing and
was pleased with nothing, and brought no friends nor presents to the
house.
“Is the master ill, that he goes abroad no more?” he suggested
deferentially.
“Nay, Hanzo, not ill, only sad and lonely.”
“But if you will permit the suggestion from one so unworthy, would
it not be well for the master to seek relief from his sadness and
loneliness by going out and seeing his friends or some of the sights of
the town?”
“Indeed, Hanzo, your care for me is most commendable, but I have
already seen too much of my friends and of the town. A little rest is
what I need most;” and Tēichi relapsed into silence.
Hanzo sat pondering, his head bowed, his hands drawn up within his blue
cotton sleeves. At last he spoke again:--
“Will the master pardon my stupidity if I make a suggestion?”
“Say on, Hanzo, I am listening.”
The old man bowed his head upon his hands.
“Master, I know a man. He is of low birth and a most unworthy person,
a cousin of my own. He has a poor, mean boat, with a matted deck-house
amidships, and in this boat he sculls along the river, taking out
pleasure parties by the day. If it is desired to fish, he will supply
the bait and tackle. Would it not save your honor from his sadness to
spend a day thus upon the river?”
“Good Hanzo,” said the young man, touched by his servant’s
thoughtfulness in his behalf, “send for your cousin. Perhaps a day upon
the river is what I need. If he has no other engagement, we will go
to-morrow.”
And so it came about that the next day Ogiwara, lying on the mats of
a house-boat of spotless white wood, and propelled by strong arms,
found himself on the river Sumida, watching with lazy interest the
crowds of small craft that fill the stream above the iron bridge. Small
steam ferry-boats towing strings of passenger barges sputtered along
on their way to Mukojima and Hōrikiri, well patronized to-day, for the
great iris-beds were in full bloom. Women and brightly dressed girls
were there in plenty, and Tēichi scanned them eagerly in the hope
that he might catch some glimpse of the sweet face that haunted his
dreams. Other house-boats too, like his own, were there, in which whole
families sat and gossiped on the mats, sipping tea, smoking pipes,
playing games, and taking vast delight in the life and movement of the
river. Fast racing barges, too, came scurrying along under the impulse
of the strong young arms of their student crews, picked men from the
University, the Naval School, and many other of the higher schools of
the city.
As they dropped downstream the pleasure-boats grew fewer, and the
cargo-boats--junks, schooners, and small coasting steamers--were moored
or anchored near the storehouses from which the city is fed. And then,
still lower down, they came into a place where small houses stood in
gardens running down to the water’s edge.
Ogiwara left the fishing to Hanzo, and spent his time in a meditation
that was still conscious of the continually changing scene through
which they moved.
“Look, Hanzo, is not this Fukagawa we are passing?”
“Truly, master, it is Fukagawa.”
“And, Hanzo, do you see that gate that opens toward the river? Bid your
cousin bring the boat close to the gate, that I may see therein.”
Softly the boat glided to the open gate, and Tēichi looked into a
little garden, green and damp and shady, with an iris-bed in full bloom
close to a miniature pond. As he stepped from the boat O Kuni came
running to him, her clogs making no sound on the soft, mossy earth.
“Welcome,” she said; “please enter our humble cottage. My young lady
has been waiting so long for you, and you did not come! Now she is very
ill. She cannot eat, and she is growing thinner every day. She will be
so glad that you have come!”
Tēichi walked up through the pleasant garden, stepped upon the polished
piazza, and as O Kuni pushed aside the _shoji_, bowed low, murmuring
polite phrases of pleasure at meeting O Tsuyu again. As he lifted his
head and looked at the lady of his dreams, his heart, just now madly
elated, fell like a lump of lead in his breast; for it was the same
sweet face and smile, but pale and wan; the same graceful figure, but
so thin that the loose robe she wore seemed to have nothing within it.
“Oh, I am so glad,--so glad,” she said, and tears rose in her eyes and
rolled down her hollow cheeks. “It is long since you were here! Why did
you not come before?”
Very gently he soothed her, and in a long, long talk they told their
love. How swiftly the hours passed! It was only when the setting sun
turned the river into molten gold that they remembered anything of time
and place. Then Tsuyu started with a shudder:--
“Oh, go! go!” she said. “What if my father should find you here!”
“Give me, then, some token of your love,--something to draw me back to
you,--a pledge that you are mine and I am yours.”
Hurriedly she drew from a little cupboard in the _tokonoma_ a white
wooden case, and from it took a gold-lacquered incense-box.
“Here,” she said, “this was my mother’s. I have always kept it with
me until now. The half of it I give to you,--a pledge of love through
seven lives.”
He took it from her with eager hands, lifted it to his face and touched
it reverently to his forehead, then hid it in his sleeve.
“Through seven lives I will be true,” he said.
Just then there was a loud whirr of kuruma wheels without, a clatter of
clogs upon the stone walk. With a hissing rush the sliding-doors flew
open, and a man’s face, distorted with rage, was looking down upon them
both.
“Fellow, who are you who dare to enter my daughter’s house in my
absence?”
There was a rush, a struggle,--Ogiwara felt himself overpowered, and
was awaiting death from the sharp, short dirk of his adversary, when O
Tsuyu’s soft arm was thrown around him, her gentle voice cried:--
“Father, oh, father, kill me instead! I am the wicked one.”
The voice died in a gurgle, and Ogiwara shouted hoarsely at the wretch,
who had buried his knife in the soft round throat of his daughter.
“Master,”--it was Hanzo’s well-trained servant’s voice,--“master,
a dream is troubling your slumber, and the boat has reached her
mooring-place. Will it please you to permit me to pay my worthless
cousin and seek kurumas for our return?”
Tēichi, opening his dazed eyes, saw about him the busy river,--the
pleasure-boats, the little steamers, the holiday-makers returning from
their flower-viewing,--and knew that it was only a dream. With a sigh,
partly of regret that he had not really seen his beloved, and greatly
of relief that he might hope to find her some day in the land of the
living, he rose, and soon was rattling through the prosaic modern
streets toward his home in Negishi.
As he took off his clothing for the night, he felt a flat, hard
something in his sleeve, and searching there he found a piece of golden
lacquer, the lid of an incense-box. Upon it had been painted by some
great artist of the past the seven flowers of autumn, and here and
there, on the polished, gleaming surface, slight spots, as of mould,
had begun to show themselves. “A pledge of love through seven lives!”
Surely it was a dream, and yet--this lacquered box--where did it come
from?
Hanzo had no special reason to be proud of the successful issue of his
effort for his master’s entertainment. Ogiwara grew more silent and
ascetic. He spent long hours alone in his room with closed doors, and
once, when the old man had placed his eye to a tongue-made hole in
the paper of the _shoji_, he had seen him looking at a gold-lacquered
box-lid like one demented.
“The master is surely crazy,” he said to Koma. “I will go to his friend
Komura San, and tell him about it.”
Komura heard the story of Ogiwara’s strange freak with unchanging
face and half-closed eyes that looked not once upon the humble Hanzo,
crouched at the threshold and bowing at the end of every sentence. When
he spoke, it was only to chide Hanzo politely for his officiousness,
and tell him that he need not fear for his place.
“The master will soon recover,” he said patronizingly. “I have seen
young fellows before who thought they were in love. When he knows the
girl is beyond his reach, he will be himself again.”
Not many days later, Komura, pocketing his pride, called at the villa
in Negishi.
“What’s happened to you, old fellow?” he said to Ogiwara, after the
first greetings were over. “You look as if you had been living with
ghosts until you were all ready to become one yourself!”
Tēichi started. The color rushed to his face, then left him pale as
death. Komura rattled on, observing but giving no sign:--
“You have been shy of all the fellows since our last adventure, at
Fukagawa. You need society. What do you say to some kind of a spree
to-night?”
Tēichi shuddered. He could not look Komura in the face when he thought
of his coarse manners and low behavior, and O Tsuyu’s frightened eyes.
He muttered something scarcely intelligible about his studies and the
necessity for hard work if he would get his degree with his class.
Komura was angry. Here he had gone more than half way, and now Ogiwara
refused to take one step toward renewing their old comradeship.
“When you get your degree, if you ever do,” he said with a sneer, “I
hope it will bring you better success as a physician than you have had
so far. Do you know the effect of your last professional call?”
His companion was at last roused to interest.
“Komura,” he said, “if you are not ashamed to speak of that day, I need
not be. Tell me what you mean.”
Into his eyes rushed the spirit of his race. Komura remembered the
stories Ogiwara had told him in his roistering days of the practice in
jiu-jitsu, in sword-play, in archery, and with modern firearms, that
had been his training under his father’s roof. The sneer changed for a
wheedling tone of apology as he watched Tēichi’s strong brown fingers
twitching with emotion.
“Why, Ogiwara, how long is it since you have become so dignified that
you cannot take a joke? I meant no harm, but that hot samurai blood of
yours is always on the lookout for an insult. I only meant that the
girl was dead. She died a few weeks after our visit.”
“Dead!” Tēichi looked at Komura as if only half comprehending. “Dead!
Then it was not a dream! He did kill her after all!”
“No one killed her,” rejoined Komura testily. “How you do go ahead of a
fellow’s words! She just died. Kuni told me, and said she grew very ill
after our visit, and when she died your name was on her lips.”
“My name!” Tēichi’s voice rose into a wail. “No wonder that I dream of
her by night and think of her by day. It is her spirit that comes to
me,--her spirit that cannot rest because I love her so.”
He buried his face in his sleeves and his whole body shook with sobs,
while Komura, a fierce grin of satisfaction on his face at the revenge
that was his, sat and watched him.
When Tēichi lifted his head, Komura, his features moulded into an
expression of sympathetic gravity, was still sitting near him.
“Why, Ogiwara, old man,” he said, “I had no idea that you were so hard
hit. Can I do anything for you? I have got you into this trouble, and I
would do anything to help you out.”
“Go, call me a priest,” said Ogiwara. “I would have masses said for
that sweet soul, for it cannot rest.”
“Ogiwara,”--Komura’s voice was as smooth as the rustle of silk, and he
laid his hand sympathetically upon his companion’s arm,--“if you will
permit one who shares your grief to advise you, let me speak before I
carry out your will.”
“Say on,” answered the younger man, “and if you have aught to suggest
that will be of help to her or to me, be quick with it.”
“Ogiwara, it is you she loves, and your companionship she seeks. The
sing-song prayers of a thousand priests will be nothing to her. Don’t
you know that one visit to her grave, one offering of incense and fresh
water and flowers from you, will be dearer to her than your whole
fortune spent in masses?”
“Let us go to her grave! Come quickly!” Tēichi leaped to his feet and
seized Komura. “We will go at once.”
“But we cannot go now. I do not know where she is buried. Rest here
quietly for a few days while I find out. Then I will come and lead you
to it.”
Komura’s voice was softer than the murmur of the summer breeze through
a garden. Tēichi looked into his eyes, which answered back his gaze
with the innocent unconsciousness of a kitten, then released his hold.
“I will wait,” he said, “but come soon, for I cannot bear a long
delay.” His mouth was twitching, beads of perspiration stood on his
forehead, and a deadly pallor followed the flush of anger.
Komura bowed and slipped away, thanking his lucky stars that he was
alive, and vowing that it would be a long time before he trusted
his precious skin with that lunatic again. Nor would he have been
reassured if he had seen his friend shut himself tightly in his room,
draw from his sleeve a gold-lacquered box-lid, and sit looking at
it with streaming eyes until the long summer day died gently into
twilight, and Hanzo with silent step stole into the room to find his
master’s head fallen upon his little desk, while in his hand he still
clutched the bit of lacquer.
And so the wretched days slipped by, and August with its steaming heat
and myriad odors hung over the drooping city. Only the great white
lotus[48] blossoms in the Castle moats, drawing their beauty from the
black and evil-smelling slime, basked in the sultry sunshine.
“Flowers of the dead,” thought Ogiwara, “spirits that rise like hers
from the foulness and evil below, and bear without scathe the heavenly
glory that wilts all others!”
The festival of O Bon[49] has come, and along the city streets are
kindled fires to light the returning spirits to their homes; on every
porch and balcony are hung lanterns, glowing balls of light, some with
long streamers that wave and flutter in the breeze, or bits of glass
that tinkle as if ghostly hands were making music; and in every home,
before the ancestral tablets are set special offerings of fruits and
fresh vegetables; while in the graveyards, tombs are cleared from moss,
newly served with food and drink, and decorated with lanterns.
In the little house in Negishi, Ogiwara had set beside the tablets of
his father and mother a new and costly one on which the name of Tsuyu
was engraved. And as he made the offerings which filial piety and
his own affection enjoined before the other two, he offered yet more
abundant gifts to the memorial of her whom he had come to call his
“spirit bride.” He was alone. Hanzo and Koma had for once left their
small house in the yard to visit the graves of their parents on the
other side of the city. He sat on the veranda, looking into the damp
greenness of the garden that seemed resting from the stifling heat of
the day. The lanterns above his head glowed softly, great fireflies
flickered among the shrubbery. Peace such as he had not known for
months stole over his spirit.
There was a clicking of clogs and a sound of gentle voices in the
lane. Tēichi started. There was something strange yet familiar in
their tones. He stepped down from the veranda into a pair of garden
sandals, and walked noiselessly to the hedge, through which he peered.
Two figures were moving toward the gate, one of them carrying an O Bon
lantern and leading the other by the hand. The light shone upon their
white faces, and he could see as they drew near that the lantern-bearer
was O Kuni, and by her side walked little Tsuyu.
There was no fear nor hesitation in his walk as he hurried to the gate
to welcome them. There she was, not as he had seen her in his dream,
pale and hollow-cheeked, but bright, girlish, charming, as she had been
on the day of his visit to her home. When she saw him, one little hand
went shyly to her face, and her flowing sleeve hid all but her shining
eyes from his enchanted gaze.
“Welcome,” he said, bowing low. “Welcome to my humble home. Enter, if
it please you, and let me offer you some slight refreshment.”
With many formal bows and deprecating phrases they were at last
installed in his guest-room. The lantern, a translucent globe of white
paper, with trailing streamers and a bunch of many-colored peonies at
the top, was hung from the eaves, where it glowed and waved its paper
streamers in the cool breeze that had sprung up at their entrance.
With curious eyes O Tsuyu looked at the tablets on the sacred shelf.
The tiny streams of smoke that had been rising straight as needles
toward the low ceiling, now wavered and twisted into strange shapes.
“The tablets of your honorable ancestors?” she said.
“Yes, truly,” answered Tēichi, feeling uncomfortable as he thought of
the offerings he had just made to the spirit of one who was now beside
him in the body.
O Kuni San bowed, and in a humble voice began the story of all that had
happened since the memorable visit to the cottage in Fukagawa.
“My young lady,” she said, “could never forget you and how bravely
you had saved her from Komura San’s indignities. She hoped that you
would return, and waited sadly for you, until at last she grew so
ill that her father was anxious. I do not know who told him of your
visit,--Komura San, perhaps, for he was very angry at you,--but he
learned about it, and then he said that there was nothing to do with
such a forward girl but to marry her to the first man that offered.
And then”--O Kuni’s voice trembled slightly and O Tsuyu’s head bowed
low behind her sleeves,--“he came one day and said that Komura San
was willing to marry my young lady in spite of all that had happened,
because now you were dead and could not make any further trouble. O
Jo Sama[50] could not bear it,--she had always hated the man,--and
so at last she escaped, and I with her. She has now a small house at
Aoyama, so small a house that perhaps you could not find it if you were
to look, but she is happy, and I am still with her to care for her as
I have done since she was a baby. But still she thinks of you, and
to-night we came to worship before your tablet.”
Ogiwara listened to this recital with growing amazement. It was so
like, yet so unlike what he had heard before.
“Komura San told me that O Tsuyu was dead,” he said, “and I have prayed
and offered gifts to her spirit. I might have known that he was lying,
and that he had some evil plan behind that gentle voice of his. But
nothing matters now. We are both alive and together, and no one can
part us again.”
It was not until the wan light of the morning had begun to break
that Ogiwara let his visitors out and watched their figures vanish
softly through the mist, nor knew that Hanzo from his garden lodge had
seen the women as they passed. There was a faintness, a smoky, misty
look about them as they disappeared from sight that set the old man
thinking. Bidding O Koma attend the master if he called, and serve his
breakfast, Hanzo slipped into his clogs and clattered along the street
and up the hill by wide flights of stone steps to the temple of Kwannon
that stood amid its cedars not far away. The priest’s house stood
beside the temple, and the old man, stopping before it, bowed low and
cried in a humble voice:--
“Excuse the trouble I am making you.”
A little black-robed acolyte, with chubby face and neatly shaven head,
answered his summons and bade him enter. Hanzo, sitting on his heels
close to the door, waited until, in flowing silken vestment, ready for
the great temple service that was soon to begin, an old priest came to
learn his need.
“Your Reverence,” he said, “it is on behalf of my master I am come.
He lives not far from here, and I am troubled lest evil spirits have
bewitched him.”
As Hanzo told his story of the change that had come over his master,
the priest listened with an occasional sympathetic exclamation, and
when at the end the old servant described the vague, cloud-like figures
that had emerged from the house at dawn, the holy man shook his head.
“Clearly,” he said, “some evil ghost is troubling him. For sin
committed either in this life or in the past, he is bearing now the
punishment. Could you persuade him to come here to me, to study the
Master’s Law and learn the control of the flesh, all might yet be well
with him.”
Hanzo shook his head. “Your Reverence,” he said, “my master is a man of
proud and impetuous spirit. His old servant could hardly persuade him
to become a monk,” and he smiled between his hands as he bowed himself
to the mats, thinking how little such a course would make for the
servant’s welfare. “Is there no other way?”
“A way there is indeed, which may avail, if the young man’s soul is
not already knit to the spirit that haunts him. The words of the Lord
Buddha have power to drive out evil ghosts, if he whom they seek does
not will them to enter.”
Armed with a talisman, the good words of the Law written on white paper
by the priest himself, Hanzo went home, to find his master already out.
“Where did the master go?” he asked of O Koma, who had seen him off.
“He told the runners to take him to Aoyama, but gave no street or
number.”
“And was he any more sad and strange than he has always been of late?”
“Nay, Hanzo, he was bright and merry, and waved me good-by, and said
that he should probably bring guests home with him.”
Still perturbed in spirit, but somewhat cheered by Koma’s account
of Ogiwara’s mood, Hanzo pottered about his work; while the master,
bowling along behind two fast-running kurumayas, was saying to himself
with each revolution of the wheels, “I’ll find her house if it takes
all day.”
Through narrow streets and wide, across moats and canals, by
grass-grown fortifications topped with leaning pine-trees, along the
sentinel-guarded wall of the Crown Prince’s Palace and across the great
parade ground where white-clad regiments were drilling, into a suburb
of green lanes, bamboo fences, grassy fields, and here and there a
rice-swamp, he came at last. Here he dismissed his men and, alone and
on foot, wandered from house to house, reading the name-boards that
hung before each gate. It was a fruitless search. No Iijima Tsuyu Ko
was to be found among them all. His gayety was gone. Tired out with
heat and disappointment, he turned at last toward home. In the sultry
August afternoon the little open-fronted shops were drowsing under
their overhanging eaves. No kuruma was in sight, hardly a foot-traveler
was visible. Tēichi stood before the gate of the great cemetery.
Within, it looked cool and quiet and green. There was an odor of
incense about it. Fresh flowers stood on every stone, and here and
there quiet parties of women and children were brushing with reverent
hands fallen petals or stray leaves from the graves.
Listlessly he wandered in, thinking of nothing but the quiet green
coolness of the place, and walking slowly toward the opposite gate,
where he was sure to find a kuruma to take him home. And as he walked
with down-dropped head, he saw before him a new-made grave. It had no
stone, only an upright pole set up to mark the spot,--sign that the
first year had not passed since death,--and hanging above the grave,
waving slightly even in the still sultry heat of the August afternoon,
was the peony lantern which had glowed from his veranda the previous
night.
“Such a small house that perhaps you could not find it, even if you
were to look--but I am still with her to care for her--and she is
happy.”
O Kuni’s words were in his ears as his tears fell fast above the “small
house.”
“At last she escaped, and I with her”--Well he understood now the words
which last night had meant so little to his dull brain.
“Happy escape,” he said to himself. “O Tsuyu San, I too must escape and
be happy!”
Somehow or other he reached his home in Negishi, and Hanzo’s heart
sank when he saw his master’s face. Untouched he sent away the supper
that Koma had prepared for his expected guests, and then dismissed his
servants for the night.
“I must have a long rest,--I am tired,” he said. “Do not wake me before
nine to-morrow morning.”
Hanzo had pasted above the gate the talisman that the good priest had
given him, but it was with an anxious heart that he closed up the
shutters for the night and then lay and listened like a cat, wondering
and dreading what the night might bring forth.
There was a faint clicking of clogs, and then two women’s voices
speaking in low tones outside the gate. Then came a stifled sobbing and
a wail, thin and piercing, shrilled into words:--
“Tēichi, oh, Tēichi, would you send me away?”
Trembling, but with every sense alert, Hanzo heard the master slide the
_amado_ aside, heard him pat-pat in the garden sandals to the gate,
heard the heavy bolt move in its socket and the hinges groan. He dared
not look, but all his brains were centred in his ears.
“O Tsuyu San,” came in a whisper, “have you come for me? I too would
escape and dwell with you in your small house in Aoyama.”
Hanzo opened his eyes, crawled to the ventilating opening in the
_amado_, and looked. Two forms like smoke or mist were drifting beside
his master. A peony lantern, glowing and waving, lighted their faces,
and they were pale as death. The voices died away, the floating vague
figures vanished within the house, and softly, very softly, the
master’s _amado_ slid back into its place.
By nine o’clock the next morning the August sun had flooded all the
little garden with its light, and driven far away the shadows and
horrors of the night. Hanzo, obedient to his master’s order, pushed
aside the _amado_, his fears almost at rest in the warmth and
brightness of the morning. All was quiet within and dark; the light
from the one opened shutter fell across the guest-room into the little
four-mat room in which the master slept. And he was sleeping still. A
peony lantern hung above his head, a smile lingered upon his lips, and
clasped tightly in his hand he held a bit of golden lacquer,[51]--an
incense-box with little spots of mould that tarnished its brightness,
and on its lid the seven flowers of autumn worked by a master hand.
Thus the two tokens of a deathless love were joined in one again, and
Tēichi too had escaped and was happy.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] A hero of the twelfth century, noted not only for his skill in
war, but also for his adventures with the fair sex.
[48] The lotus is always associated with death in the Japanese mind.
[49] See note 1, page 3.
[50] The title used in speaking to or about a young unmarried lady.
[51] It is the custom in Japan to bury with the dead any small
keepsakes specially prized during life. The lacquered incense-box seems
to have been such a keepsake, given to Tsuyu by her mother, treasured
by her in life, and buried with her.
IX
THE LADY OF THE SCROLL
Kintaro Yamazaki was sitting in his little upper room with a letter
spread out on the floor in front of him, thinking. He was thinking
so hard that his brows were wrinkled, his thick black hair stood up
straight on his head, and his eyes, fixed on vacancy, were closed to
two narrow black lines in his handsome, smooth, young face.
The thought did not seem to come to any result, for soon, with a sigh,
he wrenched himself away from it, reached out for the little tea tray
that stood beside him, filled up the pot from the kettle that steamed
over the _hibachi_, and sipped his tea from a small cup with much
gusto. His face lightened with the cheering draught, and he said aloud,
perhaps by way of strengthening his own resolution, “I will ask them
to wait. Surely they might let me finish my studies first!”
A step sounded on the ladder-like stair-way that led to his room.
There was a rustling of garments in the passage, and a meek voice cried
out:--
“Excuse the trouble I am making you.”
Kintaro made no move from his place. He knew it was his landlady’s
daughter coming to see whether he had tea and water and charcoal
enough. He only shouted rather gruffly, for his mind was still on his
letter, “Come!” and plunged again into thought. The sliding paper
screen was pushed gently open, just wide enough to admit the frowzy
head and broad face of O Matsu.
“Excuse the trouble I am making you,” she said again, in a small,
humble voice, and bowed to the matted floor.
“Come in!” he answered, less gruffly, and the girl hitched meekly in
on her knees, pulled in the charcoal basket, the tea caddy, the cold
water pot, and a long, narrow bundle, and bowed once more.
“The postman brought this for you,” she said, as she bowed again,
pushing the bundle toward him with grimy fingers.
A trace of curiosity lighted Kintaro’s narrow black eyes, but the girl
did not observe it, as he nodded stiffly and left it lying. She knew as
well as he that a large package by mail was an excitement in his life,
and she would have liked to stay and watch him open it; but he made no
move, so she busied herself for a few moments with her work and crept
humbly from the room, to lie in wait outside the door and listen.
Kintaro was an art student in Tokyo, and after three or four years of
hard study and much practice he was beginning to acquire some little
reputation. He had come from his country home in the north with the
idea that he would be a great artist. He had made his way into the
studio of one of the foremost painters of the day; and had cooked,
washed dishes, run errands, swept, mixed colors, cleaned brushes, and
acted as servant apprentice, until his good temper, perseverance, and
real talent had procured for him the interest and careful attention
of his master. Little by little he had learned the secrets of art,
the firm, bold strokes, the wonderful blending of colors that had
made his master famous, and now he was taking a last year in the art
school of the Imperial University before going back to his home. He
was an only son, and his parents missed him sorely. He was given what
seemed to them an ample allowance, but what was, in the extravagant
modern Tokyo, a mere pittance, with which, for this last year, he could
only rent a small room in a poor street, and live in the cheapest
manner. The little daughter of the house, who answered his summons
when he clapped his hands, was a thorn in his flesh. She was always
grimy and disheveled; her dress was usually badly disarranged; she
was curious about him and his belongings; and once when he came home
at an unexpected hour, he found her pawing over his sketches with
dirty fingers. It was the instinct of self-defense that led him to sit
unmoved and without interest in his bundle while she puttered about
her work, and the same instinct that led him to recall her after her
exit from the room and send her out into the street for a package
of cigarettes of an unusual brand. He knew it would take her ten or
fifteen minutes to find them, and that in that time he could satisfy
his curiosity without appeasing hers.
With a sigh of relief he heard her bare feet slipping down the steep,
polished stairs, and then the clatter of her clogs as she hastened out
to make the purchase. He leaned forward and took up the bundle.
“From Noguchi,” he said, as he read the superscription. “What in the
world is he sending me? I didn’t even know he was back from China yet.”
He untied the strings and unwrapped the paper as he spoke, laying
bare a plain wooden box, tied about the middle with a heavy cord of
red silk. Kintaro’s hand trembled with eagerness as he opened the box,
unrolled the yellow cotton in which its contents were wrapped, and
carefully took out a scroll tied with silken bands. Very tenderly he
unrolled it, until at last it lay at full length on the mats.
He held his breath with amazement and delight. “What a beauty!” he
murmured at last.
It was a picture of a woman, the most beautiful that he had ever seen.
The graceful form was dressed in sumptuous trailing garments, the fair,
oval face with its crown of raven hair wore an expression of appealing
sadness. The lines and coloring were only such as a master can command.
The picture was mounted on blue brocade, with carved ivory rollers at
each end. As Kintaro leaned over studying it, he heard the clatter of
clogs in the courtyard below, and hastily rolling up his treasure, he
thrust it into its box, and the box into a cupboard, before the bare
feet had reached the top of the stairs.
Humbly the untidy little maid bowed as she presented the package of
cigarettes with a murmured apology for her delay in procuring them.
Kintaro looked at her with aversion. “Why do they want me to marry?” he
thought within himself. “Women are no good. I don’t want them around.”
He got up, seized his hat, and pounded noisily in his stocking-feet
down the stairs. He must get out into the streets, among the busy
crowds, and forget his thoughts.
For an hour or more he tramped along, so abstracted that he hardly
knew where he was going. Once he walked right over a toddling boy,
who was as absorbed in kite-flying as Kintaro was in meditation, and
had to pick him up and give him a penny to spend on sweets before the
urchin would cease his lusty bawling. Once a jinrikisha man tearing
along at full speed nearly ran into him, pushing him aside with his
outstretched hand just in time to prevent a catastrophe. When he
returned to his lodgings, it was dark, and the streets were full of the
moving luminous globes that light the jinrikisha men at their evening
work.
The little maid met him at the door, bowing low and murmuring “O
kaeri!” by way of greeting. He passed up to his room, where a lamp was
burning, a tea-kettle bubbling over the fire, and his supper awaiting
him on a tray.
O Matsu followed and sat down to watch him as he ate, filling his rice
bowl again and again from the covered box at her side. His aversion
came over him in full force. How could he marry? Women were disgusting
to him. Poor boy! During his years of work in Tokyo he had never spoken
to a woman higher in rank and education than his landlady, and to his
mind poor little Matsu, with her frowzy hair and grimy fingers, was the
type of womanhood.
And now his parents had written him that the question of marriage could
no longer be deferred. He was their only son, and his duty required
that he raise up grandchildren to do them honor. They wished him to
take a wife from his own province and city, and had been thinking of
their neighbor’s daughter, O Fumi, who was just seventeen years old,
and would make a good daughter-in-law, if all that they could learn of
her was true. This they had written to Kintaro in the letter he had
received that morning, and it was this that had so disturbed his mind.
O Fumi San,--he remembered her. She was a little girl when he left
home,--something of a hoyden, with a slim figure and restless ways.
He remembered how fast she could run, with her kimono tucked up to her
knees like a peasant girl’s, and her bare brown legs flashing back and
forth as fast as a jinrikisha man’s. She used to laugh at him too, for
he was always sitting on his heels working away with brush and paper;
and she had nicknamed him “Bozu,” pretending to think that he was
preparing himself for the priesthood. He had been away from home five
years now, and she was seventeen, and his parents wanted him to marry
her. Undoubtedly she had grown into a fat, red-cheeked maiden like O
Matsu there. He shuddered at the thought, and held out his rice-bowl to
be filled with tea, a sign that he had finished his meal.
“O Matsu San, how old are you?” he said, anxious to know the worst
about his proposed bride.
O Matsu, in an ecstasy of smiles and bows at this unexpected interest
in herself, answered as well as she could in the midst of her
prostrations that she was seventeen. Kintaro’s soul shrank within him.
It was just as he thought! They were like that at seventeen, he said to
himself, and the picture of roguish, bright-eyed O Fumi San vanished
from his heart, and O Matsu, his pet aversion, obsessed him once more.
The real O Matsu, humbly gathering up the supper things, vanished
backward through the screen door, leaving Kintaro lost in gloomy
meditations. Suddenly the thought of Noguchi’s present came to him,
and he shook off his forebodings, to open the cupboard, unroll the
_kakemono_,[52] and hang it in the _tokonoma_,[53] the place of honor
in the room.
How radiantly lovely it looked as it hung there! Kintaro gazed at it
as one enchanted, until to his imagination the face and figure seemed
those of a living woman. Surely those mournful eyes were looking at
him! That mouth which had been so sad was almost smiling! He moved
uneasily to the other side of the room, and looked again. The eyes were
still following him. He turned his back and sat with his face to the
wall. At last he could bear it no longer, and looked around to see
the eyes still fixed upon him, and the lips curving into a smile about
which there could be no mistake.
His spirit melted within him. His whole soul went out to the fair being
in the picture. Long after he had gone to bed he lay with wide open
eyes, staring at the _tokonoma_, and at the graceful figure that seemed
to move back and forth, to draw near and recede, in the dim light of
the night lantern.
From that time life put on a new aspect for Kintaro. In the daytime
his _kakemono_ lay rolled up and hidden in the cupboard, and he worked
at his art as best he could. But work as he might, only one image was
before his eyes, only one thought possessed his mind. He had written
to his parents that he was coming home in six months, and asked them
to let the matter of O Fumi San wait until his return; and with his
mind thus free for a time from the vexing question, he let his thoughts
centre about the lady of the scroll. Every night, as soon as O Matsu’s
ministrations were over, he hung the _kakemono_ on the wall, and lived
in its companionship until morning. He grew pale and thin. His fellow
students joked him on his appearance, and asked him which of the
fashionable geishas of the day was making havoc with his heart, but he
bristled up so fiercely at the jesting, and put his hand to his side
with so meaning a motion, that the mirth died away in their throats,
and he was left alone with his art and his dreams.
One evening, when O Matsu had carried away his supper tray, and he had
hung up the _kakemono_ in its accustomed place, Kintaro sat down at his
desk to write. His soul was so full that it must find expression, and
his thoughts poured out upon the paper in a poem to the object of his
worship. It was not very good poetry, perhaps, but it came from the
depths of an honest young heart, and it relieved his mind. He wrote it
out in his best hand on a poem card and hung it beside the picture,
just as he had often hung poems on the branches of his favorite
plum-tree at Kameido.
The moon was shining so brightly that night that Kintaro put out his
lamp and sat in the moonlight on the piazza of his little room. The
scent of the plum-blossoms was in the air, and in the street below
sounded the beating of drums, the clatter of many clogs, and the sweet,
high voices of excited children, for there was a great temple festival
in progress, and the whole city was out making holiday. Then suddenly
there stood before him in the moonlight the beautiful lady of the
scroll.
Kintaro did not dare to move. He thought it must be a dream. But the
vision, if vision it were, sank gracefully to the floor, bowed low
three times, and began to speak. The voice was low and sweet, and the
language was pure and elegant.
“You have done me many and great favors,” said his beautiful visitor,
“and I have been very happy since I came here. If what you say in your
poem is true, and if you really wish me to stay with you, I will be
yours forever.”
Kintaro was choking with joy and fear. He gasped, he nearly fainted. He
seized the hand of the picture lady, and it was so warm and soft and
human that his courage returned and he was himself again. Far into the
night they talked, and in answer to his eager questions she told him
all about herself.
“I lived many years ago,” she said, “in China. I was a gentleman’s
daughter, and my name was Shorei.” A tear fell from her eyes upon
Kintaro’s hand. “One year there was a famine, and riots among the
peasantry, and my father’s house was burned. We ran away and hid, for
we were all afraid of the peasants. We went up into the mountains, and
I was taken by a robber. He sold me”--she shuddered--“sold me”--her
voice dropped to a whisper--“to a tea-house.”
She was weeping now, and so was Kintaro. “They said I was beautiful,
they gave me fine clothes, and they petted me and made much of me. It
was there that the painter painted my picture. They tried to make me
like the life, but I could not bear it. I died.”
Kintaro started violently and dropped her hand. She looked at him with
her sweet, sorrowful eyes.
“I was glad when I was dead,” she said, “for spirits cannot suffer as I
suffered. Then I came to your country, and when I saw how you loved my
picture, I thought perhaps you would love me.”
She looked at him reproachfully, and he stretched forth his hand to
her, but she vanished from his sight.
In the street the lanterns twinkled and the clogs clattered and the
children shouted and sang, but Kintaro sat alone, staring at the spot
where his scroll lady had been, until the city sank to sleep and the
moon went down.
All the next day his thoughts were on his picture lady. He could hardly
wait for the coming of night, and he hurried poor little O Matsu about
her final work until she retired with her broad red face drawn into a
woeful pucker and tears in her beady black eyes.
When he hung up the scroll he noticed that the lips were smiling, and
that the eyes seemed a shade less sad. They were looking to-night,
not at him, but beyond him at the little desk at which he studied
and wrote. On the desk lay a card on which was written in an elegant
feminine hand a poem. Eagerly he read it, and the tears sprang to his
eyes. It was only a couplet,--
“God’s will it is that here I stay
To love and live with you alway.”
Over and over again he read it, and he held out his hands to the
picture. “Is it true?” he asked. “Will you live with me always?”
The soft eyes looked full into his, the beautiful lips smiled. It was
enough. His joy was so great that he could not speak, but he sat in a
transport until the lamp burned out, and he lay down on his quilt to
dream of Shorei.
For six months Kintaro kept up his intercourse with the spirit of
Shorei and lived in an ecstasy. One night, late in August, when the
crickets were chirping and the whole population of Tokyo was walking
the streets for a breath of fresh air before closing the shutters for
the night, Kintaro sat, in the restful quiet born of a hot bath and a
thin kimono, on the piazza of his little room. Suddenly Shorei came to
him, and her face was sad. She sank to the ground weeping, and bowed
her head to the floor.
“The end has come,” she said. “I have been so happy with you here that
I had hoped it could be always so. But I must go. You will never see
Shorei again.”
In vain Kintaro asked why she must leave him. She only said, “To-morrow
you shall know;” and then, as she vanished from his sight, he heard
her whisper, “We will meet soon again.”
All night he wept, and in the morning, when he laid the _kakemono_ in
its cupboard, he felt as if he were burying a dead friend.
Just as he closed the cupboard and was turning away to look about
his empty room, Matsu thrust her head through the door. Between her
finger-tips she held a letter. She laid it down in front of him, and
backed out to bring his breakfast.
Kintaro unrolled the long, thin sheet of paper, and as he read his
face clouded. “‘In Tokyo,’” he read; “‘meet her to-day--at the Koyo
Kwan.’[54] Impossible! I can’t!” and he thought of Shorei and all she
had been to him. Then suddenly those last words came to him, “To-morrow
you shall know. We will meet again soon.” It was all so strange;
perhaps this would explain it.
Very carefully Kintaro dressed himself that afternoon, and very spruce
and handsome he looked in his flowing silk garments when he stepped
out of his jinrikisha at the Maple Club Inn, to meet an old friend
of his father’s who, accompanied by his wife, was visiting in Tokyo.
This friend it was who had undertaken, for the sake of both parties
concerned, to bring about a meeting between him and O Fumi San.
There was a feast set in a great upper room, and when Kintaro entered
and took his seat in the lowest place, as became his age and rank, he
was greeted with smiles and bows from many old friends and neighbors
assembled to do honor to the occasion.
The first greetings ended,--no light matter in such a company,--he
had time to look about him and see what there was to be seen. On the
opposite side of the room, just facing him, dressed in the dainty full
dress of the modest Japanese maiden, was a vision from which he could
not move his startled eyes. The quaint old-fashioned dress was gone,
so was the expression of unutterable sadness, but the face was the face
of his lady of the scroll.
“Shorei!” he murmured, scarcely knowing what he said. The beautiful
face lighted up. Into the bright eyes flashed just a glance of
recognition. “I am Fumi,” said the vision, and they bowed their faces
to the floor.
FOOTNOTES:
[52] A scroll to hang on the wall.
[53] The alcove in which pictures are hung in a Japanese room.
[54] The Maple Club Inn.
X
HOW FUMI REMEMBERED
“Even the knot of the rope tying our boats together
Knotted was long ago by some love in a former birth.”
Japanese Folk-Song, translated by Hearn.
TOKYO, February 10.
I am Fumi, of the family of Takeda of Sendai. When I came to be
sixteen, my mother said to me, “Fumi, you are too headstrong. You like
to run and play out of doors like a boy. Your manners are not quiet and
ladylike, but rough and noisy. Even your little sister Michi can sew
and draw and play the _koto_[55] and perform the tea ceremony better
than you. Soon you will have to be married, and what family will want
to receive a spoiled child like you as a daughter-in-law?” My mother
shook her head and sighed, and I was very sorry, so sorry that I hid my
face and cried.
“Oh, mother!” I said, “what shall I do? It is so hard to be good and
quiet. When I sit still a long time sewing, my legs tingle, and I have
to run; and when I try to learn the tea ceremony, the old master is so
stiff and solemn that he makes me laugh. I am a bad girl, and I cannot
be like other girls. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” and I cried
until my sleeves were all wet, and it was my best dress, too.
My mother was very good to me. She patted me gently and said softly,
“Poor little girl! Poor little girl! Let us think about it, and I will
talk with your father.”
By and by I was tired and my face was hot, and I heard a little noise
of scratching and yelping in the garden, for I was sitting close to
the veranda. I looked out from behind my sleeves with one eye and saw
Shiro digging. Shiro is my dog. He is all white except his ears, and
they are yellow. He can’t dig very well because one of his fore legs
was hurt when he was a puppy, but he thinks he can, and he was digging
and yelping. He expected me to help him, and kept yelping louder and
louder, so I called to him that I was coming, and ran out through
the house to the door where my clogs were, and hurried as fast as I
could to the garden. It was only when I was coming back to the house,
all dirty myself, and carrying dirty little Shiro in my arms, that
I thought again of what my mother had said. Then I suddenly dropped
Shiro, and the tears came to my eyes, and I hung my head for fear some
one had seen me. As I passed the parlor which opened out into the
garden, I heard my mother talking with a visitor. I looked, and it was
Mrs. Yamazaki, our neighbor. They were probably talking of her son
Kintaro, who has been studying such a long time in Tokyo. She is very
proud of him, and thinks he is the most remarkable person in the world.
I hoped that she had not seen me playing with Shiro or coming back all
dirty. I am afraid my mother is not so proud of me.
The next day my mother spoke to me again. She told me that I was going
to Tokyo to school. My father, through our prince, had gained admission
for me to the school for noble girls, and he hoped that I would do my
best to use the great advantages that the school would give me. She
told me that the girls there were all quiet and ladylike, that no one
was ever noisy or headstrong, and that I must try and learn to be like
other girls. It was very wrong of me, I know, but I cried again. I did
not want to leave my home, and my parents and brothers and sisters, and
poor little Shiro.
My mother patted me and comforted me. “It will not be for long,” she
said, “only a few months, and you will be very happy after you have
made friends among the girls.”
And that is why I am in Tokyo. My mother was right. I am happy and I
have many friends. I live with seven or eight other girls in one big
house with Mrs. Takahashi, one of our teachers. We walk to school
together every day, and we play together on our holidays.
I think that here in Tokyo it is not thought so wicked for a girl to
want to run and play. At our school the teachers play with us and teach
us many games, and sometimes we have a whole day with nothing but games
and gymnastics, and the Empress comes and watches us as we play, and
all the parents of all the children come, and we have a very good time.
I have seen the Empress smile when we were at our play, so I am sure
that it is not wrong.
I have been here ever since last September, and now it is February.
I would like to see my home and Shiro, but I am happy, and because I
am happy I am going to write every day, or sometimes, anyway, about
the things I do, so that when I am at home I can read it all over and
remember the dear school life. To-morrow we are invited to go out
to Shinagawa, to visit the country house of the Princess Gojo. Her
daughter is our friend, and we are to spend the afternoon. It will be
beautiful, I know.
February 13.
I have been thinking, it seems to me for years, but it is really only
two days, and I cannot think my way out of the strange thing that has
happened to me. Perhaps if I write it all down, I shall be able to
understand it better.
On February 11, which is the anniversary of Jimmu Tenno, we--that is,
all the girls in our house--were invited by Princess Gojo to visit her
country house at Shinagawa. We went by train to Shimbashi, and had only
a little walk from Shinagawa station to the house. The situation of the
place is beautiful, looking out across the bay, and there is a great
garden with hills and valleys and lakes and forest trees and green
lawns. Here and there an early plum-tree had begun to show its pink and
white on its old gray, gnarled trunk. We played tennis, and ran races
on the lawn. We climbed all the hills, getting a different view from
each. We sat down in the little summer-houses and cooled off after our
exercise, for it was a warm, sunny day like spring. At last we were
called to the house, and we sat about a great parlor and they brought
us tea and cake and _o sushi_.[56]
The princess was very kind and very beautiful. She is tall and slender,
and her voice is sweet and her manner very gracious even to me, who am
not a nobleman’s daughter, only a poor samurai girl. She spoke to me
kindly, and said that she knew me because I was the fastest runner in
our school. She told me that the Empress had asked my name at the last
day of field sports, because I ran so fast. I felt very much ashamed,
and my face grew very hot, and I wondered what my mother would think of
me.
When we had finished our tea, the princess asked us if we would like
to walk about the house. We were very glad, for as we sat we could
see that there were many beautiful rooms, and I had never seen such a
great house before. Some of the rooms were foreign and with carpets and
furniture, but most of them were Japanese, with floors of many mats
and beautiful, shining wood-work, and with flowers and bronzes and
paintings and ancient swords and lacquers set out in the _tokonoma_.
The princess led and we followed. Uta, my dearest friend, and I went
hand in hand, very quietly, looking at all the beautiful things that
had been taken out of the storehouses for us to see. Suddenly, as we
stood before a _kakemono_ that hung in one of the rooms, a strange
feeling came over me. It was a picture of a young girl, very beautiful
and sad, dressed in strange flowing garments. Somewhere I had seen that
picture before. I looked at it so long that the princess noticed me.
“Do you like it, O Fumi San?” she said. “If it were the original, I
believe it would be the finest picture in all Japan, but it is only a
copy, by a Japanese artist, of a celebrated Chinese picture that is
now lost.” Though I heard all she said and answered her, my mind was
still at work at the picture. I had seen it before. I knew I had seen
it before, but where? And then, slowly, bit by bit, a scene came before
my mind. A strange garden--a young artist with a mild, smooth face and
dressed in strange garments painting a picture of--_myself_! But I was
not Fumi, of the family of Takeda. What was I? Then something seemed to
snap in my head and I fell. The next thing I knew, Uta and the other
girls were bending over me as I lay on the floor, and I heard the
princess say, “Poor little thing! She has run too hard.”
The princess was very kind and sent me home in her carriage with O Uta
San to take care of me, and all the way home, as I lay back on the
cushions, my mind went over and over the question, “Who was I when
I was not Fumi?” Every turn of the wheels, every beat of the horses’
hoofs, every shout of the running grooms, seemed to repeat the question
to me.
It was dark when we reached home, and I was hurried off to bed by
good Mrs. Takahashi as soon as she heard that I was tired out. There
I lay and stared at the ceiling while the girls chattered about me,
and then, when all was quiet at last, and dark, except for the glimmer
of the night light, I still lay with my eyes wide open, asking the
same question. I heard the slow tolling of the bell in the Sho-kon-sha
Temple as the hours went by. And at last the answer came.
Whether I was sleeping or waking I do not know, but suddenly I was far
away from the familiar little room, standing in a balcony, looking out
into a green garden, and was surprised to see that the loose robes in
which I was dressed were quite different from what I was used to. A
young man stood in the garden below me, looking at me with wistful
eyes. “Shorei,” he said, “I will paint your picture, and it will be so
beautiful that when I take it to the Emperor and give it to him, he
will make me a great lord, and I can marry you.”
My heart was sore, and there was a terrible fear behind me, a fear of
something that I could not understand. I looked into his kind eyes, and
they made my heart a little restful. “Come soon,” was all I had time to
say, for just then a terrible, coarse, fat woman came to me and said,
“Make haste, they are waiting for you. You must dance to-night before a
great company,” and she dragged me roughly into the house, so roughly
that everything went away, and I was once more in my own bed on the
matted floor and Uta was sleeping at my side.
Since then it has been coming to me little by little,--the memory of
another childhood, far away in some strange land,--the memory of wars
and burning houses, and of long hidings in rough mountain caves, and
at last of a great fight in which all my friends were killed, and I, a
prisoner among robbers, was led to a town and sold. And then the memory
of a shameful life,--my cheeks burn at the thought of it,--of dancing
before great companies of men, of their drunken smiles, their coarse
jokes, their rough caresses. And I remember so clearly how the fat
woman who kept the house used to tell me that I was beautiful, and how
she tried to treat me kindly because my beauty was making her rich. But
sometimes, when I was too sad or weak to be amusing, she would treat
me roughly. She would sneer at me, and tell me that I need not think,
because I was a gentleman’s daughter, that I was too fine for her work.
She had other work in store for me that I would not like as well, if I
grew too proud to dance for her guests. The memory of that fear that
she kept always in my soul is with me still. How I hated the life! How
I longed for escape! I remember that one day I found a sharp sword
lying where one of the guests had laid it aside, and I took it and
would have killed myself, but the old woman saw it and snatched it from
me. After that she watched me carefully, and I could do nothing that
she did not see.
As if through the mists of a thousand years I can see him now as he
looked the first day he came. He was young, and with a good, kind face,
and he did not laugh and shout and try to handle me after the dance.
He only looked at me with his kind eyes, though I could see them flash
sometimes when the other men grew insulting. And when the weary feast
was done, and I lay resting, and wishing I could die before suffering
such shame again, I heard his voice talking in low tones to my mistress.
“That dancing-girl of yours is very beautiful,” he said; “I wish to
have her for my wife.”
The woman laughed, a great, coarse laugh. “Surely you are a brave
fellow!” she said. “Do you know what the girl is worth to me? She
brings a stream of gold nightly into this house, and you, young cock,
want to take her away for your wife! She shall be no man’s wife until I
am paid three thousand pieces of gold,” and she laughed again.
“I am not rich,” he answered, “but within a month you shall have your
three thousand pieces of gold;” and I heard his footsteps as he left
the room.
Every day for a few days, I saw him in the garden, and he painted at
his picture. Then, when it was finished, he came no more. The month
went by and he did not come, and I began to fear. And then, one day, I
heard his voice in the garden. I remember how sad it sounded, so sad
that at first I did not know it.
“Shorei,” he called softly, and I went to my balcony and looked down,
and saw him standing, dressed in white and with a dagger in his hand.
“I have sent the picture to the Emperor, and I have been waiting now
for days and no word has come to me. And to-day I have heard that he by
whom I sent it, and whom I thought my friend, has taken the credit of
it to himself, and is raised to high honor. I am going away. The next
life can be no worse than this,” and he unsheathed the dagger.
“Oh, take me with you where you go,” I cried. “I cannot live here!”
I heard the thumping step of my mistress coming to take me down to
the dancing-room. I could not go, and I threw myself down from the
balcony. That is all I can remember. Where was I when I was Shorei?
And who was he who wanted to buy me in marriage? These questions are
running through my head all day. I cannot talk, nor do my school work,
nor play. Uta says to me, “What is the matter? Have you had bad news
from home? Are you ill? Why don’t you come out and play with us?” But I
cannot go. I must sit in my room and think.
February 15.
Where was I? Who was he? Sometimes it seems as if I was on the very
edge of knowing, and then it all goes again. Last night, as I lay
in bed, my soul was moving, sailing on and on through space, and I
thought, “Now I shall see him. Now I shall know.” And then suddenly I
felt myself falling, falling, down, down, and I opened my eyes. It was
dark, for the night light had burned out. I could not see Uta, but I
heard her move and sigh in her sleep.
February 16.
Last night, I seemed to be dancing all night before those men, and
they shouted and applauded. And one said, “There is not such another
dancer in all the realm of China.” And they shouted all together, “None
such in China nor in all the world!” Surely I might have known before,
for the princess said that her picture was a copy of one by a Chinese
artist.
February 17.
I have seen him again. This was the way. I was so tired that I asked
Mrs. Takahashi to excuse me and let me go to bed early. She looked
at me very kindly and said, “Yes, you may go. I am afraid you are
very tired.” By the time I had made my bed and crept into it, I was
shivering, for the night was cold and damp; and I could not sleep, but
lay curled up with my head covered. And then, all at once, I saw him.
It was not the old balcony, or the garden that I remembered, it was a
poor little Japanese room, and he sat on the floor and looked at the
_tokonoma_ where I stood. I tried to go to him, but I could not. I
could only smile a little, and follow him with my eyes as he moved from
one part of the room to another. He did not know me nor speak to me. He
only looked at me, and sometimes it seemed as if he was afraid of me.
Why was I there? Why was he there? Why could we not talk as we used to
do long ago?
February 18.
I have seen him now three nights, in the same little room. He looks at
me but does not speak, and I cannot. Sometimes I smile, but often I am
so sad that I can only look at him.
February 24.
Every night I go to him. He does not remember me, but perhaps he will
some day.
March 10.
Last night, all at once, everything changed. When I first saw him, he
was writing. He sat at his little table. Sometimes he looked at me,
and then he would sigh and write. At last he came to where I stood. I
smiled, for I thought he was going to speak to me. But he did not. He
lifted the poem card on which he had been writing and hung it beside
me, so close that I could read it. These are the words:
“If from the painted scroll thy lips smile kindly upon me,
What wouldst thou do for me, wert thou here in the body to-night?
To me from what other life comes thy sweet spirit winging?
Stay with me ever, beloved; without thee my soul is alone.”
A painted scroll! That was all I was to him! A beautiful picture to
hang in the _tokonoma_! He did not remember me as I did him. That other
life, when I was Shorei and he a young painter, was all gone from his
memory. He looked at me so sadly when he hung up the poem that I tried
to speak, but I could not. Then he put out the light, and went out to
his little balcony and sat watching the moonlight and listening to the
noises of the street. “Oh, if I could only speak to him!” I thought,
“I would tell him who I was, and perhaps he would remember.” And then,
suddenly, I felt that I could move and speak. I was floating toward
him. I was sitting beside him. I was telling all my story. He held my
hand as if to keep me, and I was glad, for I felt that I must soon slip
away, it was only his strong desire that was holding me to him. And
then, I think it was when I spoke of my death, he drew himself away. I
could not stay, and I found myself once more in my own little room with
Uta asleep quietly by my side.
March 11.
All yesterday I thought about how I should meet him last night. Would
he desire me again? Might I speak to him? or would he send me away as
he did before? If he should, how could I bear it? I must speak to him
and tell him my heart. And then, I thought, as he had written a poem to
me, I would write one to him. Our teacher at school tells me sometimes
that I can write prettily. If I could only tell him so that he could
read it! I wrote it over and over again and again before I copied it on
the card. It was not pretty when it was finished. It only said that I
would stay with him always.
I held it in my hand that night when I went to bed, and I wished, oh,
how I wished that I might give it to him! I shut my eyes and held it
tight, and soon I saw his little upstairs room. The table was covered
with papers, and lying on top of all was my little card. How glad I
was! He looked at me, but I looked at the desk and smiled. He did not
speak. I could not. But after a while he too looked over at the desk
and saw the card. When he had read it, he turned to me and his eyes
were bright with joy. “Is it true?” he said. “Will you live with me
always?” I could not speak, my heart was so full, but he must have
known, for he sat and looked and looked at me, until at last I slipped
away and left him still looking at my image in the _tokonoma_. This
morning the card was not in my hand, nor could I find it in the bed or
in the room. I did not dream last night. I really went and gave him my
poem!
August 20.
It is a long time since I have written in my diary. Although school has
been closed since July, I have been here all summer, for my father and
mother have been away up in Hokkaido, and they thought it best for me
to stay with Mrs. Takahashi, and learn as much as possible during the
summer. I have lessons every day, and it is very dull here in Tokyo,
for most of my friends are away, but I am glad I did not have to go,
for perhaps if I were elsewhere I could not go, as I do now, every
night to see Kintaro and talk with him. It is strange that this young
artist, the same who painted my picture when I was Shorei, should be
Kintaro Yamazaki of Sendai now. He does not remember when he lived in
China, nor does he know that I am Fumi Takeda. He knows me only as
Shorei, and though I have told him of the young artist in China, he
does not like to hear of him, for he thinks of him always as another
man. When I speak of him sometimes Kintaro is sad, sometimes he is
cross, but he is never interested.
I have heard our old priest at home say that to most men, when the
gates of the new birth open, the gates of the old life close, but to
a few the gates of the old life are left ajar, and a wind from the
spirit world may open them wide some day, so that the two lives are all
one memory. That is the way it is with Kintaro and me. His gates are
closed, but mine blew wide open that day at Princess Gojo’s, and now I
have remembered all of that old life in China.
August 21.
Such news has come to me to-day! How strange that I never knew it! My
mother has written me to say that long ago it was decided between my
parents and his parents that Kintaro was to marry me when I grew up.
And now, she writes, Mr. and Mrs. Suzuki of Sendai are to be in town
for a few days, and they will invite us to a party at the Koyo Kwan,
so that we may see each other. What shall I do? Will he know me? If
he does not know me, I can never marry him, for I shall know that he
cannot care for me while he loves Shorei. I cannot tell him, for if he
does not know me as Fumi, I do not want him to marry her because she is
Shorei. Oh, if we could only go on as we have always done!
August 24.
My mother writes that Mr. Suzuki is going to invite us for to-morrow.
What shall I do?
August 25.
I must meet him this afternoon. I told him last night that he would
never see Shorei again. It made me very sad, for to myself I feel
almost as real as Shorei as I do as Fumi. He wept and held me, but I
slipped away from him.
August 26.
I could not look at him when he came into the room, I was so ashamed. I
sat at the end of the room. He did not see me at first, for he was busy
bowing to all the guests. It was only when he took his place opposite
me that he looked at me. I saw that he knew me. His face grew suddenly
bright, and he said very softly, “Shorei!” and I answered as well as I
could, for I was nearly choking with joy, “I am Fumi.” That was enough.
Now he is my own in this new life, and nothing, not even death, can
part us again, I believe.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] A stringed instrument which takes the place in a Japanese girl’s
education that the piano does with us.
[56] A dish made of cold rice mixed with a variety of ingredients, and
as usual for Japanese entertainments as sandwiches are in America.
GLOSSARY
_Amado_, lit. “rain doors,” the sliding wooden shutters that close the
house in stormy weather or at night.
_Amazaké_, a sweet, thick, slightly fermented rice soup.
_Amé_, a sweetmeat made from wheat gluten.
_Ameya_, a seller of _amé_.
_Amma_, a masseur.
_Andon_, a paper lantern used as a night-light.
_Bāya_, a term used in addressing an old woman servant, like “Aunty” or
“Mammy” in the South.
_Bon Matsuri_, or _O Bon_, the annual Feast of the Dead.
_Botchan_, “Little Mr. Priest,” the universal title of the small boy,
probably on account of his shaven head.
_Bōzu_, Buddhist priest.
_Dori_, street.
_Fudō_, the Buddhist God of Wisdom.
_Furoshiki_, a square of cloth used for wrapping bundles.
_Furugiya_, old clothes dealer.
_Futon_, the heavy quilts used in making a Japanese bed.
_Go chiso_, “honorable entertainment,” applied to especially nice food.
_Go Inkyo Sama_, a title given to an old person who has retired from
active participation in the affairs of life.
_Hachiman_, the Shintō God of War.
_Hai_, “Yes,” or “I am listening.”
_Heimin_, the common people as distinguished from the military or
samurai class.
_Hibachi_, a fire-box or brazier.
_Inari_, the God of Rice, whose messengers are foxes.
_Jiiya_, a title for an old man servant, used much as “Uncle” is used
in the South.
_Jizō_, a Buddhist saint, helper especially of the souls of little
children.
_Kakemono_, a scroll to hang on the wall.
_Kitsuné_, a fox.
_Kotatsu_, a fire-box in the floor over which is set a rack, and the
whole covered by a heavy comfortable.
_Koto_, a stringed instrument.
_Koyo Kwan_, the Maple Club Inn.
_Kuruma_, a jinrikisha.
_Kurumaya_, a jinrikisha man.
_Kwannon_, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy.
_Miya mairi_, the presentation of a baby in the temple.
_Mochi_, rice dumpling, a festival dish.
_Montzuki_, the ceremonial dress, made all of one plain color, faced
and lined with white, and with the monogram or family crest of the
wearer on sleeves and back.
_Niō_, “Two Kings,” Indra and Brahma, who keep guard at the outer gates
of Buddhist temples to scare away demons.
_Noshi_, a bit of bright-colored paper folded about a piece of sea-weed
and slipped under the string of a present.
_Ōban_, a large, oval gold coin, worth about eighty dollars, now out of
use.
_Obi_, sash.
_O Bon_, see _Bon Matsuri_.
_O Jo Sama_, the title used in speaking to or about a young unmarried
lady.
_O kaeri_, “Honorable return,” the greeting to a returning guest or
member of the family.
_O Mi age_, a present brought back to one who stays at home.
_O Sushi_, a dish made of cold rice mixed with a variety of ingredients.
_O Tottsu San_, Father.
_Rin_, a coin worth about a half mill.
_Saké_, rice wine.
_Samurai_, the military class.
_Sayo de gozaimasu_, “It is honorably so.”
_Sayo nara_, “Good-by,” lit. “If it must be.”
_Shoji_, the light sliding sashes covered with paper which close in a
Japanese house.
_Soroban_, the abacus or counting-frame used by merchants throughout
the East.
_Tabi_, a mitten-shaped sock worn in the house, and with clogs or
sandals out of doors.
_Tadaima_, “Just now!” the response to _O kaeri_.
_Tempō sen_, a large, oval copper coin worth about eight mills, now out
of use.
_Tengu_, a wood goblin.
_To chirimen_, lit. “foreign crape,” a thin woolen material used for
the cheaper undergarments, sashes, etc.
_Tokonoma_, the alcove in which pictures are hung in a Japanese room.
_Torii_, an erection in the form of a gateway that marks the entrance
to a temple or sacred place.
_Uma_, horse.
_Yashiki_, a palace or fine house.
_Yen_, the Japanese monetary unit, worth about fifty cents.
_Yoshitsuné_, a hero of the twelfth century.
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Transcriber’s Notes
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Variations in spelling have been retained as printed.
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter.
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