Chapter II

As a matter of fact, while it is picturesque at a distance of space or time, actual living in the flimsy toy houses of Japan is far from convenient to one “raised” in Western fashion. It is glorious to be able to nudge one’s neighbor during a performance of “Madame Butterfly” and hoarsely to boast, “I once lived like that”—I am, of course, speaking of the stage-setting, not of the story—but it is equally inglorious to forget for a moment the frailty of paper walls and thrust a hand through one of those sliding _shoji_. To be able—and expected—to run about indoors on bare or stockinged feet, leaving all the dust or mud of the street—and, from Tokyo down, one or both are rarely lacking in Japan—at the threshold has an Elysian sound, a suggestion of speckless Golden Stairs and noiselessly flitting angels. It is an unusual Westerner, however, who does not feel his dignity swiftly evaporating when deprived of his customary footwear. Nor is it merely his shoes which are _de trop_ in a Japanese house; for ideal convenience he should leave his legs, too, at the door. The awkward school-boy’s difficulty in disposing of his hands and arms is mild indeed beside that of the Occidental guest faced with the problem of what to do with his superfluous lower limbs on the cushion-scattered matting of a Japanese room. In flowing kimono it is bad enough; in trousers, which custom decrees shall retain the suggestion of a crease, it is disheartening. It is all very well, of course, to be able to tuck beds in a closet during the day, to have a room uncluttered by furniture, but the total lack of drawers, shelves, or hooks leaves Japan the original land for hanging things on the floor.

More troublesome still to us of an ungregarious race is the utter absence of seclusion in Japanese dwellings. Since that initiation in Tokyo we have inhabited a score of them, mainly inns and public hostelries; and of the petty annoyances of life, of which Japan has her share, even as other lands, perhaps the most exasperating, certainly the most wearying, is the impossibility of sometimes being alone. No wonder so many Japanese turn Shinto or Buddhist recluses and retire to temple or monastery—though even for them there is little genuine seclusion. The romantic paper walls have very slight capacity for deflecting sound. Let the man four rooms removed from you in a native inn turn over in his sleep, and you spring awake ready to do battle with an intruder. Let a pair of fellow-guests engage in one of those interminable conversations which seem to be the most frequent toward midnight and beyond, and a megaphone could scarcely increase the din.

The Japanese are not a noisy race. Verbal strife is rare, domestic quarrels all but unknown, or at least inaudible to the outer world; the streets, usually innocent of paving, give back dust rather than uproar; the gentle-voiced temple bells of all Japan could not equal the din of a single belfry-hung copper kettle of South America. Yet, if all else fails, at least the omnipresent servant can be relied upon to shorten one’s springless slumber. Besides the paper-covered _shoji_ forming the walls of the room itself, there are the heavier sliding walls of the house itself, usually of solid boards, occasionally of glass. No human power can induce house or inn servant to close these before one has fallen asleep; all the studied cruelties of the Orient could not coax her to leave one of them ajar during the night, nor to refrain from opening with a mighty slamming and stowing them away in their daytime box on the house corners at the first peep of dawn. From that moment on, if not, indeed, during the brief night itself, one’s most private chamber is never wholly one’s own. Soft-footed servant-girls patter in and out on every possible provocation, often with none at all, shoving aside the semi-transparent _shoji_ not only without a “by your leave” but without a suggestion of warning, magnificently oblivious to even a complete state of nudity on the part of the possibly somewhat modest inmate. Would one bathe? A maid will make every effort to assist at the disrobing; a “bath-boy,” if not a domestic of the just then still less welcome gender, must needs force his way in to lend a helping hand during the ablutions, while the common tub is all too likely to contain already a denizen or two, smiling a welcome to the hesitating new-comer. Fortunately the temperature of a Japanese bath, as unendurable to the Occidental as the quilt of arctic thickness with which he is expected to cover himself on the most breathless summer night, furnishes an inoffensive excuse for preferring a spigot and one of the wooden half-buckets scattered about the flooded floor.

Though the equipment of Japanese hostelries of the native type does not include dining-rooms, let not the humanity-weary guest fancy that his meals at least may be taken in delicious solitude. From the moment when he claps his hands thrice to announce the arrival of appetite, a serving-maid, if not two or three of them, will be always with him, now touching face to mat as she places before him on the floor a more or less edible dish, the rest of the time sitting on her heels within arm’s length, with the inscrutable face of a bronze Buddha, yet watching with eyes that catch every faintest suggestion of a _faux pas_ his inexperienced wielding of the untractable chop-sticks, that she may report his barbarianisms later to a cachinnatory kitchen. Constantly, on every side, one has the sense of being but a thin paper sheet removed from other beings, those ubiquitous human beings with which all Japan teems, so that in street or train, on country road or mountain trail, almost nowhere can the traveler escape for a brief moment, when the Occidental mood is upon him, from the fellow-mortals with which the island empire is so overcrowded. And through it all lurks the burden of his superfluous legs, the necessity of squatting when he would sit, and the subconscious worry as to where shoes should be worn and where removed, intensified rather than lightened in those scattered establishments for the wanderer ranked as “semi-foreign.” We shall never regret, I am sure, our stay in Japan; but we were often thankful that it was to be only a brief stepping-stone to China, where tables and chairs, and beds and hooks, and less ephemeral footwear would again be found among the stage properties of life.