Chapter VIII: Part 8

And over the lake and the temples, over the cherry-trees and the tea-stalls, over the city below and the playing children within, the big bronze bell of Ueno sends forth its great booming note--that note which is outside our music, deeper, more liquid, which comes with its low, booming sway, just when daylight turns to darkness. Cast of bronze and silver, rung by a wooden beam that strikes a boss outside, the note of the great bell comes swaying as though the air were water. And slowly over the city the bell booms, trembling, and he who hears it sits still and thinks; sits lost and dreams of the song of the seven spheres.

* * * * *

When Ueno’s avenues of cherry-trees are pink with flowers, when the stalls beneath the trees are full of flower hairpins, then Tokyo through its gardens and its roadways blushes too, for the whole city is planted thick with cherry-trees. Not only on the river bank, where the long two-mile avenue of Mukojima is a perpetual _fête_, but everywhere, in private gardens and in public streets, the delicate, pale pink blossoms on their brown leafless branches catch the sunshine and the showers, and fall as little rosy clouds from heaven on to the ground beneath. For Tokyo is a city holding the country in its lap. Not an artificial bedded-out country, stiff as a Versailles park, but the real wayward country, though tended with a loving, understanding care.

And Tokyo is a city brimful of flowers. Between the cherry-trees of April and the chrysanthemums of November most of the flowers can be seen within the city in temple courts or nursery gardens or public parks. The lake of the lotus at Ueno is famous through Japan, and in the temple of Kameido grow the age-old wistarias.

Trained on horizontal trellis work, their long pale tassels hang down towards the water, stirring with each breeze. The trailing clusters of the flowers grow four feet long sometimes, and droop towards the surface of the lake in thick swaying pendants of pure colour. Behind these living curtains, in a twilight of pale mauve or soft white light, on the edge of the pond whose shape spells “heart,” sometimes afloat on the pond itself, the tables of the _chaya_ stand, and those who make holiday because the flowers are blooming, all Tokyo, sit and look, drinking wee bowls of pale green tea, or writing poems to the flowers.

On the waters of this lake of the letter “heart” float the pale mauve petals and the petals of pure white, which fall and drift and sink, and fall and drift and sink, until the waters are hidden with flower flakes and the wistaria is over and gone.

Kameido lies on the far bank of the Sumidagawa, in a network of poor streets, for the left bank of the river, like the big island at its mouth, is denser with yards and factories than is the right. The streets are narrower, fuller of children and the noise of hammers and of wheels. Yet in this poor wage-working quarter the festivals of the plum-blossoms, the wistaria, and the peony are held.

In all Japan there is no other flower _fête_ which in the least resembles a horticultural show except that of _Botan_, the tree-peony. For when the peony blooms, the little trees, large as dwarf rose-bushes, are placed on tiers inside a matted tent. There the resemblance ends. These plants are set each in a framework of space, and the colours are grouped and blended with the thought and the instinct of an artist.

The flowers of the peony are as large as the largest chrysanthemum, larger than ours, but their petals are rich, made of satin where ours are of cotton, delicate, fragile, and sheeny. The colouring is soft and subdued, and the faint sweet scent which comes from them is like the dream of a rose. The colours are simple, white warming to cream, paling to snow, and all the tints of pale reds, deep reds, and crimsons.

The matting which covers them is of pale yellow, but somehow the light, as it comes through it, touched perhaps by the flowers, is the light of a dream--as sunlight without heat, as moonlight warmed and living, a light that shimmers, holding colour fast within, yet fast asleep. To-day the light in that peony tent at Kameido remains to me as definite as the flowers, as distinct as the scent, as real and, in truth, more beautiful. It was as though one saw the radiance of an unknown, unmade jewel, light but not yet substance.

* * * * *

All this left bank of the river from Fukagawa to Eko-in is full of workmen and workshops, of small trades and smaller traders, and here in the month of May in the grounds of the temple raised to the memory of the hundred thousand citizens killed in the great fire of 1657, the yearly wrestling contests are held. The _Smō_, tall, broad, powerful men, many six feet high or more, who dress in large checked _kimono_ and wear their hair in the old-fashioned top-knot, are adored by the populace who come in thousands to see them.

The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the sea, and slight despite its purple trapping. The crowd, a Tokyo crowd in _kimono_ and foreign head-gear, cap, bowler, and felt hat, sit from morning until night, day in day out, for the three long weeks of the wrestling matches.

The wrestlers stand, knees bent, body horizontal, their out stretched hands almost touching the ground, and grip. And the bout is long because the grip must be accepted by both of them, and because between each false grip the two retire slowly to their respective sides and wash out their mouths with tea. This may be repeated a dozen, twenty times, but when the real grip comes, then the action can be swift as lightning; the opponent forced beyond the straw rope which lies upon the sanded earth of the ring, before one realises that the wrestle has begun, or pushed down over it with the slow resistless force of flowing water, or the two may sway about interminably before one is beaten.

Bulk is not the one ideal of the wrestler, the young and strong rely on their activity; it is only when a man is getting older that he weights himself with fat, that his bulk and heaviness may prove too great for his opponent easily to push over. The wrestlers all wear waistbands and stiff fringes of blue silk, and the rippling of the muscles beneath their golden brown skin is such a joy as the Greek nation knew at the time of the Olympiads.

A man with a fan, an average-sized Japanese who hardly comes above the elbows of some of the wrestlers acts as starter, as umpire, and as referee, and the sharp s-s-sh of his shutting fan can be heard distinctly in the silence of the amphitheatre. The judges, four old tried wrestlers, sit under purple hangings and decide disputed points, while half the front tier is reserved for the _Smō_ themselves.

But to the non-Japanese it is not the wrestlers but the spectators who are the centre of interest. Here gathered together within the amphitheatre, concentrated on one thought, absorbed, therefore natural, sit samples of all Tokyo. For the _Smō_, like our prize fight of last century, is beloved by the populace and patronised by the aristocracy. Every one takes some sort of interest in it, and results are as widely known as the Derby or a test match. The crowd, a crowd of men and boys,--for the fathers bring their little sons with them,--knows, as well as the umpire himself, the forty-eight falls, the twelve lifts, the twelve throws, the twelve twists, the twelve throws over the back, alone allowed the Japanese wrestler. The excitement at disputed points is intense, the whole amphitheatre arguing with its neighbour. The enthusiasm at a brilliant, a quick, or a well-contested throw is intoxicating. Spectators will rise in their seats and throw down presents, tobacco-pouches, purses, hats, or other property, which the owner redeems next morning in money.

The _Smō_ are the idols of the street boys, and tall, huge, unintelligent, in gaudy _kimono_ and well-oiled top-knots, they stride through the Tokyo streets haughty, and sometimes overbearing.

We think of the Japanese as unalterably small, yet here is a class, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, who are huge, strong, large-framed men, taller than the tall races of the north. They are another and a living contradiction of the imaginary minisculism of the nation. If the Japanese desire to produce big things, in war, in statues, or in men, they take thought, they take care; much thought, infinite care, and somehow it is done.

* * * * *

So Tokyo wrestles, works and plays, and this left bank of the river toils and lives hard. Across the water Tsukiji, secluded in its “foreign” residences, dwells genteel, and gossips. The Ginza shops. The suburbs far within the circle of the streets grow hedged-in gardens and long avenues of trees, where the houses lie unseen. The schools, the training colleges, and the university, a cityful of students study, and boys in cotton _hakama_ and dark-peaked soldiers’ caps walk through the streets--boys who are passing from the indulged childhood of Japan to the iron self-control of manhood.

There is apparent in their ways and manners a touch of self-assertiveness, a touch of almost self-conceit, which at no other time in their own lives, and at no time at all in any other member of the community, will ever be observable. It is but a touch, and would pass unseen in any other land, in any other setting; here it stands out palpable. A little hard these boys look and very earnest. They will strike work if they think a teacher is not competent to teach, so bent are they on learning. They seem to have accepted school as the modern training of the _samurai_, and to study in that spirit.

The scholarship boys at Government Colleges work harder still and on the narrowest of means. They can afford so little for their board that one whole college gave up playing base-ball in its recreation hour because “it made them too hungry.”

And at the University, where the students matriculate at twenty and stay till twenty-four and five, for beside their own learning, beside the ten thousand Chinese symbols and all the philosophy of the East, they must to-day add the learning of the West, the languages of Europe, the laws, the sciences, and the arts of another civilisation and of an alien race, at the University the students live lives of hardest brainwork and rigidest economy. Many spend their evenings in earning the money that buys their day. Some deliver newspapers and sleep in the porches of “foreign” houses. Many die of consumption, brought on by over-work and under-feeding. Across the river the hammers ring, the wheels whir round, the hum of a people’s toil sounds in all ears. Here within the girdle of the streets, between the factories and the palace is a work doing, silent, less perceptible but harder, higher and undertaken for that end.

* * * * *

Between the hard work of hand and brain Ginza and Nihon-bashi shop, and at night the wire-drawn twang of the _samisen_ comes from the lighted restaurants. Restaurants where each diner or each party occupies a separate room, and _geisha_ girls are sent for to entertain the guests, with puns and games, with polite conversations and endless repartee. They sit on the kneeling cushions throughout the meal pouring _saké_--and amuse. Then they dance. Posturing and swaying to an accompaniment of _samisen_ and song they glide over the matting always graceful, always reserved. The quality of their dancing rings passionless, dainty, graceful, not cold but controlled. An air of serenity surrounds them. They are not trained to the duties of womanhood, but to its heaviest burden--pleasing. The licensed playthings of the nation, toys to amuse, they reach up to their limited, low-scaled destiny, through the perpetual sacrifice of self; and the national self-control encases them, so much their very own that few perceive it. With very different fates and from very different motives there is about them, as they dance, something of the charm and of the aloofness of Andersen’s mermaiden; and if their steps too are as steps upon a sword, they, too, will smile untroubled.

* * * * *

So the city strives and pleasures, so the city learns and toils. Full and full of life the streets, quiet and very still the heart. The nine tall hills from Shiba to Ueno make a crescent round the moat, the brown streets lie without, the Mikado dwells within. Born as a camp Yedo made its ruler’s seat its centre, its nobles’ _yashiki_ an enclosing wall; and then beyond, out of sight and sound, the necessary, unimportant commonfolk had leave to work and sell. Tokyo to-day is still as Yedo was. _Yashiki_ are pulled down, their ground is sold, but parliaments and embassies, nobles’ houses and their gardens, still make a circle round the palace, a space of suburb and of peace between the city and its centre.

Over the streets and the roadways, through parks and gardens, the black-winged crows sail past cynical, unbelieving. The web of brown canals beneath their high-arched bridges, the broad uncertain river sometimes slowly, sometimes fiercely, all flow towards the sea. The land-locked ocean, and the pale green rice-fields ripple round the streets. From sixty miles across the plain great Fuji looks towards the capital.

And here in Tokyo’s heart, in _Dai Nippon’s_ heart of hearts, not the usurping _shōgun_ or general in his camp, but _Tenshisama_, Son of Heaven, bestower of a western constitution, augustly dwells.

II

EAST AND WEST

EAST

The large red building covered all over with Chinese characters--a white sign on each cardboard square of red--overlooks the canal. It seems too gaudy and unsubstantial a building for sober work, and yet all day long multitudes of dark-blue coolies, like Florentine noblemen run to seed, go in and out. Fantastic key patterns in white are traced upon the skirts of their blue tunics, while on each back is a large red circle covered with the hieroglyph of the building. They may earn some 6_d._ a day for twelve long working hours.

From among the pale straw-coloured bales emerge two workmen. There are patches in their dark-blue hose, and the brown toes stick out through the blue of their divided socks. Even the blue designs on the white towels around their heads have faded away with much washing.

Catching sight of one another they bow low. A step nearer, and the jaunty ends of white towel tied in a knot on the forehead of one man, touch his knee.

The other, whose towel is tied like a night-cap round his head and under his chin, bends lower still.

Another step, and the indrawn whistles of politeness grow loud and shrill.

Another, and the white towels disappear entirely between the blue legs.

Then the night-capped one straightens himself and speaks:

“_Shitsurei de gozaimas ga, chotto hi o kashte kudasai_” (“Although this is great rudeness on my part,” he says, “would you condescend to lend me a match.”)

WEST

Between two rows of slovenly houses a long grey street stretches away, wet and grimy. There is just one break in the grey monotony where the gin palace stands in all its gilt and plate-glass splendour.

Coming up the street are two workmen. The billycock hats on their heads have lost their brim, and show more dirty stain than original black. As they catch sight of one another across the street they pause.

Suddenly one removes the clay pipe from his lips and spits profusely. The other eyes him, his hands in his pockets; then he too takes the short pipe from between his lips, and jerking his head in the direction of the public house, slowly puts out his tongue.

The first billycock replaces his pipe with care, crosses the road, and with a sanguinary word they both disappear within the doors of the gin palace.

III

YONÉ’S BABY

It lay on the matted floor, a little brown thing that cried, and Yoné sat on her heels and looked at it.

Huddled over the brazier in the corner, her skinny hands stretched out to clutch the warmth from the sticks of glowing charcoal, the old grandmother dozed and grumbled.

And Yoné did not move. The _Ijin San_ for whom she worked had told her she ought to take care of her dead daughter’s child and bring it up; but Yoné’s conscience, the conscience of her race, the inherited upbringing of her dead fathers, made her instinctively turn towards the _O Bā San_ in the corner. She could not feed two mouths. Life was hard for Yoné; and the _O Bā San_ had a good appetite though she was so old.

So Yoné sat on her heels and sullenly listened to the quavering wail without moving.

“If the gods wanted the child to live, why had they let its mother die? Why had its father divorced the little wife ‘for temper’ before the baby was born? It was Fate. And after all the baby was very small and ugly, a little, cross sickly thing that cried. No, it had much better die, much better.”

And Yoné got up, and went to get ready the evening rice for the _O Bā San_. As she did so the shadow of the _Ijin San_ herself fell across the floor, and her voice, in very English Japanese, asked after the baby. Yoné was down on her knees in a moment, drawing in her breath through her teeth in long whistles of politeness.

“The baby was not well, as the _Ijin San_ could see. It did nothing but cry; and after all what was the use? It had much better die.”

The _Ijin San_ sat down on the little platform, the _shōji_ pushed back between her and the room, in consternation. After all she had said the day before, all she had urged, Yoné still clung to that awful idea. The _Ijin San_ had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady in the corner had something to do with Yoné’s idea “it was better baby die.” It would be quite easy for “baby to die” too, and that without much active doing on Yoné’s part. So she sat there perplexed, the baby cuddled up in her arms. Moral persuasions she had tried, and appeals to Yoné’s conscience, her love for her dead daughter, her duty--all in vain. And she looked down at the queer little atom in its bright red _kimono_, with the wide flapping sleeves, wondering whether it would look quite so odd dressed like other babies, her own for instance, and she smiled. It was a last chance any way.

“Yoné,” she said, holding up the baby. “How would you like to see him dressed like the _Bot’chan_.”

“Hē,” cried Yoné, turning round, her vanity awake in a moment.

“Well, if you’ll take care of him, I’ll dress him in foreign clothes, and he’ll look just like the _Bot’chan_.”

Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration grew deeper and deeper. Her admiration for the _Ijin San’s Bot’chan_ knew no bounds; and then the pride of having a foreign-dressed baby of her own! Why, not one of her acquaintances, not even the rich _saké_ merchant at the corner, dressed their children “foreign fashion.” It was a height beyond their ambition, a dizzy pinnacle only reached by the _samurai_ and the Court! And Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration and her indrawn whistles of politeness knew no bounds. Even the _O Bā San_ in the corner turned her head round and showed some signs of interest. And the baby stopped its feeble cry and lay back on the _Ijin San’s_ lap--and smiled.

With a sudden swoop Yoné caught it up. “I take care, I take care,” she said, “let the _Ijin San_ bring the clothes.”

And from that day she went about her work with the quaintest little brown morsel in a foreign pelisse and a white bonnet nodding over her shoulder. And neither the _O Bā San_ nor the baby ever went hungry whatever Yoné might do.

IV

THE GRAVES OF THE RŌNIN

The white wing of a blossoming plum-tree casts a pale shadow across the pebbled steps of the causeway, and the spring sunshine is warm. Behind, under the great gate of the temple, is a stall with souvenir tea-bowls of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ and the red blankets of a tiny _chaya_. In front, at the end of the causeway, stands a Japanese father with his little son, buying bundles of incense sticks from the Buddhist sexton. Coming up the path are two peasants with bare, brown legs, one wearing the old-fashioned gunhammer top-knot. And the plum-tree, its scent warm and fragrant, lies a white wing above the path.

The Japanese father, _samurai_ from his face, and modern by his clothes, and his son have passed into the graveyard before us. But we all stand together in the little square garden on the side of the hill, with its thickly clustered tombstones, shaped like Moses’ Tables of the Law in the Child’s Bible, set in the flat brown earth.

Below, a sharply falling line of dark green shrubs; above, the overhanging trees of the hillside; and the garden is quiet and still, with a little chill of damp and death that sobers and subdues.

Before each stone tablet on the earthen path are bamboo vases filled with freshly cut branches of evergreens, and the burning incense sticks trail a thin scarf of smoke along the ground.

The two old peasants are busy sticking their thin, brown incense tapers into the little heaps of grey ash--to become grey ashes in their turn. The little son has already lit his before the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké; and the father, gravely feeling in the pocket of his “foreign” coat, takes out a visiting-card, and lays it reverently among the pile of others on the grave.

Then they go away slowly. And I catch the names of Asano Takumi no Kami and Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, and I know that the little son is listening to the story of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_.

For two hundred years now they have come up the pebbled pathway into the graveyard, country peasant and Tokyo gentlemen coming with incense sticks and flowering branches, to keep green the memory of the loyal retainers who died to revenge their lord: coming in _kimono_ and top-knot: still coming in foreign clothes and _shappo_, for the old spirit lives though the outer form is changing. The fierce unswerving loyalty, the utter self-sacrifice, the tenacity and strength of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ still stir the soul of the modern Japanese under their foreign envelope as it stirred the heart of those fierce old _samurai_, with their hands ever on the hilt of their long two-handed swords.

“Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth as the enemy of thy father or thy master,” says the Scripture. And the Forty-Seven died, and more than died, to fulfil the commandment.

In the temple below their wooden effigies stand to this day. Among them are old men and young boys--one with the grey locks of seventy-seven, one with the boyish cheeks of seventeen--but neither the old man nor the young boy faltered, through all the long months of waiting, in the dangerous moment of the struggle or after. They plotted and endured; they fought and slew; they brought the bloody head of Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, washed in the well beyond the plum-tree, here to the grave of their dead lord; they gave themselves up to Justice; they carried out the sentence of death on their own bodies with their own hands--all with the same quiet self-control which only the sense of a supreme, absorbing duty can produce.

And the Forty-Seven were buried here, in the quiet cold graveyard, beside the body of their lord. And when they had been laid to rest there came a fierce two-sworded _samurai_ to the little garden, and, kneeling down in front of the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké, he took his dirk from his belt and stabbed himself above the grave. For he had insulted Oishi Kuranosuké, in the long months of the waiting, thinking he had forgotten his lord.

So they buried him among the Forty-Seven, and before his tomb are flowering branches and burning incense tapers.

* * * * *

The two old peasants are gone, but the sound of coming steps is on the pebbled pathway.

It is the feet of the nation. They come to keep their age long watch above the graves of the Loyal _Rōnin_.

V

THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL

Enshrined in their white wooden boxes the dolls look down; and the gently drifting crowd stare their fill.

It is the eve of the Dolls’ Festival, and for a hundred yards along the wide _Odōri_, the street is wreathed across and across with swaying lines of paper lanterns.

On each matted floor, raised knee-high from the ground, a shopman sits on his heels, his hands eternally stretched out over the charcoal fire of the _hibachi_.

The background of dolls on three sides of him seem as interested in their sale as he. The crowd drifts, talks, points, looks, but he sits still, absorbed in his occupation. Occasionally he will turn a languid head over one shoulder in the direction of an inquiring voice, and tranquilly name a price four times bigger than he expects to get; but unless the customer pursues the bargain with vigour he does not stir. Even then, all the talking is done without moving more than a head. And when the culminating point arrives at which the would-be buyer shakes the dust off his feet and makes vigorously for the next shop, he murmurs an impassive “_Yoroshī_” (“All right”), and warms another finger, while a boy in the background, who for ever dusts the stock-in-trade, does up the parcel and takes the money.

I wonder--would anything stir this _blasé_ image of indifference?

Perhaps if a fool or a foreigner, interchangeable terms in the East, paid the price he asked he might----. No, “_Yoroshī, yoroshī_,” he murmurs, and does not interrupt the warming of his hands by a finger’s-breadth.

For ten long days now the dolls, all in the quaint robes of old, have looked down on the gently drifting crowd, emperor and empress, lords and ladies, and court musicians. The red silk trousers and the flowing hair, the cut-glass chandelier-like head-dress and the wide, wide sleeved _kimono_; the court lady leading her lap-dog; the musicians with their instruments; and along the lower shelves, the long procession of lacquered bowls, and tables and furniture, the old, old shapes of Old Japan, the realities buried for ever in museums, and only these, their midget substitutes, enjoying a brief life once a year.

They are so neat and pretty, of such exquisite workmanship and finish, that I stay to look and look. Behind me the crowd closes in thicker and thicker, looking too--but at me; so thickly that they obstruct the rails of Tokyo’s main tramway, and cause it much embarrassment.

To-morrow is the Dolls’ Festival, and all the world is buying; I, too, would like to buy. So I sit still on the edge of the matted floor and watch. I shall learn what I ought to give and how to conduct the intricate matter of a purchase. But though they were here before me, and though they stay long after me, and though I wait with what I consider quite Oriental patience, they do not buy, not one of them, they only talk. So I am compelled to conduct my own purchase without the aid of native example, and to the certain advantage of the impassive shopman.

Does any one ever buy anything in Tokyo?

In all my many wanderings I have never seen them, patiently as I have stalked them. They are always just going--just going--just going----

Perhaps that is why the impassive shopmen are so impassive.

VI

WITH DEATH BESIDE HER

“_Go-han wa skoshi mo arimasen_” (“Not another grain of rice, not a grain”). And O Matsu sat back on her heels, the lid of the wooden rice saucepan clutched in her hand.

“_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the grey head, with its cropped hair gathered into a slide behind, bent despairingly over the saucepan.

The _O hachi_ was quite empty, O Matsu had eaten the last grain yesterday; she knew that quite well, but the trembling old fingers went on feeling round and round the bare sides of the saucepan, for she was very hungry. All through the long months of the rice famine O Matsu had managed somehow. To-day the empty _O hachi_ lay on the ground while O Matsu sat staring slowly into it. Then Death stared back at her, and she knew it.

With a trembling little movement she got on to her feet and moved across the matted floor into the _zashki_. The sun was shining on the rice-paper panes of the _shōji_, and she pushed them back and stood out on the little platform of polished wood, trying to warm herself; but the piercing winter wind made her blackened teeth chatter, and she came in again. In the _hibachi_ the grey ashes were dead and cold, the last stick of charcoal had boiled the water for her tea last night. There was neither fire nor food. O Matsu stood still watching, while Death and his Shadow grew, as a ghost in the twilight.

Slowly the familiar walls, the matted floor, the half-opened _shōji_ insisted that the house was yet unswept, the first duty of a housewife still undone; and with a painful effort O Matsu went and fetched the bamboo broom that swept the matting, and the damp cloth to polish the platform. The broom felt heavy to the weak old hands, and the task of polishing the platform almost beyond her strength; so she worked on slowly, stopping often, for hunger made her faint, but always going on again. At last, _zashki_ and platform finished, she crept back into the kitchen, longing to rest. The empty _O hachi_ lay on the floor. She made a great effort, and, picking it up, carried it outside to scrub, for cleanliness is a supreme duty in Japan.

When she came back she put the freshly scrubbed _O hachi_ in its place. Then she sat down. There was nothing more to do. The house was as clean as a house could be. O Matsu was inexpressibly weary, and the desire for food was almost beyond control. Instinctively she wandered back to the empty _O hachi_ and took off the lid. The copper bands, dim and splashed with the washing, caught her eye. It seemed to her the hardest thing of all her life to go and fetch her little cloth and sit down to polish them, but she did it. And Death and his Shadow sat down at her side.

Somehow as she rubbed, two tears gathered in the dim old eyes, and rolled down the withered cheeks. O Matsu dropped the cloth, and holding the long sleeve of her _kimono_ before her face, sat still and wept.

There is nothing in all the world so lonely as a Japanese woman without husband or children. She has no claim on her own family, and little on her husband’s; and in a land where the children, once grown up, provide for their parents, what can a childless widowed old woman do?

* * * * *

The sun moved round the house, and O Matsu still sat in her kitchen rubbing softly at the copper bands of the saucepan. And death, in infinite pity, laid his hand upon her head, and his Shadow vanished.

“_O meshi wa skoshi mo arimasen_,” she said. And the shaven old eyebrows puckered themselves together. “_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the bent little figure went on rubbing.

When the policeman came in the grey dawn of the morning, surprised that the _amado_ were not drawn, he found O Matsu, the polished copper bands of the _O hachi_ glittering in her lap--quite dead.

VII

KYOTO’S SOIRÉE

Midnight and yet as hot as mid-day. Over our heads the velvet darkness lay as a visible lid above the streets, warm and still. Not a breath of air was stirring from one end of Kyoto to the other; the city seemed a vast dark house with all its windows shut. Only the rapid running of the _kurumaya_ produced the slightest breeze, and that was but the fanning of a heated ballroom; and when it stopped the hot still air settled down hotter, stiller, than before.

We had reached the bank of the river, the bridge and Theatre Street lay beyond; and, as suddenly as one opens a door in a dark passage, we were there, inside, in the press and the noise, the lights and the crowd of Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_.

Restaurants and hairpin stalls, _geisha_ booths and theatres, the interesting show of the two-headed fish, or the tragic story of the _Forty-seven Rōnin_, embroideries, and _bīru_, jugglers and phonographs, cheap stalls for the sale of shaved ice and sugar syrup, elegant restaurants with fish dinners; dancing-booths at two _sen_ a head, where white-painted _geisha_ girls continually sang four notes and assumed four postures, and sang the same four notes and repeated the same four postures to a tightly packed audience sitting on its heels, silent but appreciative; and all, restaurants, booths, theatres, stalls, blazed with lights and posters, deafened with the banging of big drums and the invitations of the proprietors, reeked with the smell of burning tallow, the fragrance of boiling tea, the scent of crushed geranium, the odour of an eastern summer’s night and of the press of clean-washed, hot humanity.

Along the street, inside the stalls and out, the crowd was dense, cheerful, polite and contented. There was no pushing, no ill-humour, no fights, no drunkenness, nor one policeman. The people of Kyoto were enjoying themselves like well-bred guests in a ballroom, with the courtesy of self-control, and the self-abandoned pleasure of a child. The road with its shifting crowd, and the two long lines of brightly lighted buildings, covered with paper lanterns and cotton banners on bamboo poles, looked more like a “set” in a theatre than real houses in an out-of-doors street. Not a candle-flame quivered, not a banner stirred, and the long perspective of the arched bridge was still as a painted background.

Down in the river, in the actual bed of the stream, were more lights, whole crowded restaurants afloat. Sitting on the tops of tables, whose four legs driven down into the sand brought them within six inches of the water, supper parties innumerable ate and talked; while the children, slipping off their _gheta_, paddled their feet in the stream. Even the little waitresses, as they ran from customer to customer, would leave the long polished gangways that led from tea-house to table, and take the shorter way through the water. Every one was eating, and every one was happy--shaved ice with sugar syrup, at two _sen_ a glass, or dishes of brown eels and rice at two _yen_, gratuitous tea or _bīru_ in thirty-_sen_ bottles. And with the summer night above, the water all around, the hundreds and hundreds of little tables floated on the water bright with _kimono_ and lanterns. The broad shallow backwater either side the bridge was full of them, and the gentle rushing of the actual river beyond the circle of bright light lent a sense of freshness to the shadows that they did not in themselves possess.

Up on the bridge the crowd grew thicker, Theatre Street more full; the hairpin stalls were surrounded with women and little girls, buying long hairpins carved at the end, or ornamented with silk lanterns or flowers, or ingenious designs of tortoises made of shells, with legs that quivered realistically. And the velvet blackness lying above the streets and beyond the river was warm to feel.

Suddenly, as when one throws a stone into the water, the crowd surged forwards, then rippled slowly back; half a dozen white-uniformed policemen, with the distinctive, distinguished face of the _samurai_, were coming over the bridge, driving the people before them, back and back. The confused noise of indistinct shouting filled the air. Suddenly on to the bridge came running in a sort of jog-trot a crowd of bareheaded men, their short white tunics hardly reaching to the thigh and their brown legs naked beneath, all tugging and straining at a huge unwieldy car, which moved in jerks on its wheels of solid wood. On each side ran bands of men brandishing flaming torches in their hands, while priests in gorgeous apparel came behind. And priests and people, torch-bearers and car-pullers, were chanting as they ran, a fierce, wild cry, which went on and on. The car-pullers swayed from side to side, tossing their hands above their heads, the torch-bearers rocked, sending great flaming fragments among the crowd, and we all stood pressed together, shrinking back from the burning torches, and the feet of the car-pullers, singed here, trampled there, in one sweating mass of hot humanity.

In the middle of the bridge the car stood still. The men in white tunics moved restlessly on their feet, straining at the cords; the torch-bearers chanted louder, tossing their torches in the air; the priests hurried to the front, and stood gesticulating while the wild, monotonous cry, gathering fierceness and frenzy from its very monotony, thundered and roared. Then with a sudden swirl the car turned round, and torch-bearers, car-pullers and priests were rushing back again to the same fierce wild cry, the same frenzied swaying of the bodies, and the same mad tossing of the arms. The sacred procession had come, was gone.

Slowly the crowd rippled back, on over the bridge, back down the street, the policemen disappeared, the drums of the _geisha_ booths and the invitations of the stall-owners rang out again. Down on the surface of the river the floating tables grew fuller and fuller.

Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_ was at its height.

VIII

NŌ

A room whose sloping floor is cut into chess-board squares; each square flat and matted, so that the back is twelve inches high and level with the front of the square above; a bare still wooden room long and crowded. Each matted square thick with kneeling men and women, the long-headed aquiline faces of the nobles and the _samurai_. At the end a platform with an opening vaguely leading from it. No scenery, no footlights, no curtain. It is the theatre for the performance of the _Nō_. Those sacred old world plays written many hundred years ago, acted by _samurai_ for _samurai_, the religious mysteries and moralities of Japan.

In the West the theatre long ago shook off, escaped, forgot the Church. Here the elder child, the mother rather, still lives by the side of her offspring, and lives unchanged. The _Nō_ to-day is as the _Nō_ of five hundred years ago, the _Nō_ which grew out of the sacred dances of an immemorable antiquity. Like the drama of the Greeks it has its choruses, its chants, its unities, its one or two actors masked, richly dressed, impressive, who move with a religious solemnity, and speak as voices, not as men. Its plays, too, are drawn from sacred legend, from the mythology of Shintō deities, from the mysteries of the Buddhist faith, and from the fairy tales of the race. Over it all there is a glamour as of a stolen glimpse into the buried past. To-day its language is archaic, but preserved by constant repetition, handed down from father to son in the families of nobles who, since _Nō_ first began, have played in _Nō_, it remains the language and the speech of those dead Japanese, who towards the fourteenth century organised the _Nō_.

The chant is strange and piercing, its very notes and phrases are outside of all that we consider music, as unfamiliar as the speech of insects, or the song of the remotest fathers of mankind. It echoes like a voice from out the long dead worlds, piercing yet remote, and the _tink_ of pipes dies out. There falls a stillness in the room.

It is the afternoon of the last day of the Iidamachi _Nō_. As in the theatres of Greece the plays, each of which lasts about two hours, are given one after another throughout the whole day, while between them comes the _Kiogen_ (mad words), or _folies dramatiques_, farce-like, Greek-like comedies, shorter even than the _Nō_. Many of the spectators have been here since the morning, and on the matting of the shallow square boxes are lacquered trays of food, on all teapots and tobacco-stands; others come to see a special play or so and go away again; but to one and all it is not an amusement, it is a study, a homage paid to the past, a rite.

As the first notes of the strange piercing chant wail down the room, the pipes and cigarettes go out, the tiny tea-bowls are set down, and a silence falls.

The actors, in their rich brocaded robes of a make and texture of a long dead past, come slowly through the passage-way on to the platform. Their masks are made of lacquer, and they speak in a slow nasal deep voice that seems to come from the very back of their throats. They speak with every muscle strained and taut. It sounds almost as outside of speech as the chant is outside of music, and they move in strange long strides. Such movements are not merely for artistic effect, nor to mark agitation, or to reproduce nature; they are often used to mark the passing of a period of time.

For all its stiffness and its rigour, its archaic make-believes, its unnatural realities, there is an intensity and a thrill in it as of a living thing that matters. The strange music of the tambourine-like instruments, the thin wailing of the bamboo flute, the beating of the one small drum, shaped like an hour-glass with three supporting pillars, breaks in again and again upon the intoned speech of the actors with its repeated irregular cadences in notes outside of speech. And the long-robed figures, masked and rigid, stalk slowly across the stage; and the chant of the chorus, as in the plays of Greece, explains, comments, describes the action.

It is the story of the fisherman who found an angel’s robe of feathers on a tree, and would not give it back though the angel begged and begged. Without it she cannot reach her home in the blue of the heavens above, and for a heavenly spirit to stay for long on earth means death. Already the chorus is chanting her dirge when the fisherman, seeing her beauty fading and her life ebbing fast, relents. He will give back the robe if she will dance for him. She promises, but implores first her robe that the dance may be more perfect. The fisherman fears she will deceive him and fly back to heaven at once. But the spirit turns upon him.

“Fie on thee, fisherman,” she cries, “deception was born of man; the high heavens know not of it.”

And, touched, he gives back the robe. She dances, while the chorus sings the beauties of the landscape, of Japan. How

“Heaven has its joys, but there is beauty here,

Here

Where the moon in bright unclouded glory
Shines on Kigomi’s lea.
And where on Fujiyama’s summit hoary
The snows look on the sea.”

Even the angel would stay awhile in a land so beautiful.

“Blow, blow ye winds that the white cloud-belt driven
Around my path may bar my homeward way,
Not yet would I return to Heaven.”

And still the angel dances, and the vision of Heaven descends upon earth. She sings,

“And from the cloudy spheres,
Chiming in unison the angels’ lutes,
Tabrets and cymbals, and sweet silv’ry flutes
Ring through the heav’n that glows with purple hues.”

Then the voices fall away. And to the strange, tuneless music, whose notes are not our notes, the spirit dances on, round and round in gliding circles, with the slow, smooth movements of the sacred _Kagura_.

“Fragrant and fair--too fair for mortal eyes.”

The chorus sings again. And gliding round and round in circles ever smoother, ever slower, the spirit passes from the platform and up the vague passage-way that leads to the green-room beyond.

The fisherman starts. The play is ended. In long, stiff strides, so slow, so slow, that an appreciable space of time seems set around the movement of each muscle, the actor goes across the stage, up the vague passage-way, into the room beyond.

It is five minutes before the last slow solemn stride takes him beyond our sight. Then hour-glass drum, the flute, the two tambourine-like instruments that wail, shake out their last weird tuneless tune. The chant of the chorus ends on a note that to us is a middle--and stops.

My ears still wait the end of the phrase when the hush of intense silence dissolves. There is a rustle in each square shallow box, a lighting of tiny bronze pipes and cigarettes, a filling of tea-cups, a tapping of chopsticks.

The _Nō_ is over.

NOTE.--In quoting from this _Nō_, “The Robe of Feathers,” I have
followed Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s translation in “The Classical Poetry
of the Japanese.”

IX

A JAPANESE BANK-HOLIDAY

The bulletins grew longer, and all the world waited and watched.

The Japanese papers were full of minute descriptions and hopeful prognostications. The cherry-trees were doing well; they were expected to bloom next week.

Then came a cold wind and rain; “for flowers,” as the proverb says, “bring showers.” And the bulletins became paragraphs.

But the sky grew blue again, and even the foreign papers broke through their Western disdain, and announced that “Marquis Itō had gone to Kyoto to see the cherry-trees.” Imagine the _Times_ gravely recording amongst its official intelligence that “Mr. Balfour had gone to Devonshire (not a third of the journey) to see the apple-blossoms”! But the Japanese are, of course, uncivilised!

On Easter Monday the trees were out, and all the world with them. The two long miles of river-bank at Mukojima were crowded. The river itself was thick with _sampan_. And still all Tokyo pours itself out over the bridges, across the canals, out under the long double line of cherry-trees.

The chrysanthemum may well be the Imperial crest; the cherry-tree is the national emblem, and its flowering a national _fête_--a Japanese Bank Holiday, with Mukojima for its Hampstead Heath.

The two long miles of raised bank is a sea of heads, a second black river set between pale pink banks; and it washes slowly, undisturbedly onwards. Nobody pushes, nobody shouts, nobody calls rude remarks. And the blue-tuniced coolies, like Florentine noblemen out at elbows, with the work-a-day blue towel round their heads replaced by a pink one, the very shade of the cherry-blossoms above, say polite “_Go men nasai_” (“I beg your honourable pardon”) if in looking upwards they stumble against each other.

The _kurumaya_ has drawn his wife and children to Mukojima, and they wander slowly under the trees, the little ones in their gay-coloured _kimono_, covered with the largest of large flowers. Even the little tonsured babies blink up at the pink wonder overhead from the warm pouch on their mother’s backs. And the old grandmothers, with their cropped grey heads and shaven eyebrows, tell how the cherry-trees were much finer when they were young. The little girls, with their hair oiled into lengths of black ribbons and tied in loops on the top of their heads; the young wife, with the wonderful whorls of the married woman’s coiffure; the bare-legged, blue-knickerbockered _’ricksha_ man; the schoolboys, with their striped cotton _hakama_; the fathers, in their grey _kimono_--all the working world, all the people are here.

Below the level of the bank, raised high here, for the Sumidagawa, like all the rivers of Japan, is fierce in its floods, and set thick together, are the _chaya_. These range from the humblest little roofed shed, with its broad, low tables, like a series of large trays on dwarf legs, covered with coarse red blankets, to the superb tea-houses with their snow-white matted rooms, their painted _shōji_. And they are all full. The _kurumaya_ drinks his bowl of pale green tea, sitting on his heels on the red blanket. The little wife tries the immensely popular drink of _ramuné_ (lemonade) out of a doll’s tumbler. The coolie, with his festive pink towel, pours warm _saké_ from slim china vases into tiny china bowls, and the smile on his broad, bullet-headed face grows broader. For the _saké_ drinker, unlike Western drunkards, only becomes politer and politer, until the Japanese smile of courtesy broadens into a large, fixed, unending, amiable grin, and the _saké_ drunkard goes politely, though stumblingly, home to sleep. But of even _saké_ drunkenness there is little, for the most part _o cha_ (honourable tea) and _o kashi_ (honourable cakes) content these uncivilised Bank Holiday-makers, who have come out to see--just the pink cherry-blossoms against the blue sky. And will go home again--content.

On the river the red towels are perhaps more numerous, for all the fishermen, all the dock labourers, the whole riverside population of Tokyo have come in their _sampan_ to Mukojima. And they float past now, little and big, crowded with blue tunics or grey _kimono_. Some with an awning of paper lanterns, and all gay with flags and banners. And full as the river is with boats, and jammed together as they are under the bank, nobody shouts, nobody quarrels, nobody swears. A garden party at Windsor Castle might be better dressed, it could hardly be better behaved. Nor in the whole length of those two miles of crowded bank, with the line of _sampan_ on one side and the line of public-houses on the other--_sampan_, avenue, inns, all full to overflowing--are there three policemen. More, the trees, with their exquisite cloud of pink flowers, are within easy reach of a man’s arm, and nobody breaks them. The municipality of Tokyo has not even considered it necessary to affix a notice regarding the penalty for damaging trees. I should doubt if it had even thought to invent one.

And yet the blossoms are beautiful enough to make a man’s heart long to possess them.

“A little pink cloud of the sunset has caught in the bare branches of the cherry-tree.” And not all Western imagery can surpass the simile, for the pink is the pink of a cloud at sunset, and soft as the softest mist. When the wind stirs the trees, the blue sky seems scattering pink snowflakes to the ground.

“What is the soul of Japan?” asked the poet. “It is the mountain cherry-tree in the morning sun.”

But a soul so simple, the civilised nations, of course, disdain!

X

THE PALACE OF THE SON OF HEAVEN

Kyoto is a city of immense distances where the brown earth streets, set in between their rows of low brown houses, run on interminably. Even under the weltering summer sky the streets are full; for Kyoto, the once-time capital, is still the second city of the Empire, and the art centre of Japan. My _kurumaya_ scatters men and children as he runs; and the sounds of busy bargaining, the inevitable _takai_ (too much), following the _ikura des ka_ (how much?) pursue me as I ride.

At each corner two more streets stretch out, as straight as interminable, as full of life. And still my _kurumaya_ runs.

I am going to see the Emperor’s Palace. Through many hundred years, through most that is history in Japan, the Son of Heaven dwelt in the heart of this city, and these long interminable streets so full of life stretched all around him. The _Tenshisama_ lived in the midst of his people, and neither saw nor heard.

We have left the streets at last; on either hand stand railed-in squares of growing trees; the road is wide and smooth, the busy thousands in the streets drop out of sight and sound. My _kurumaya_ runs more swiftly.

Here is neither shop nor house, nor passer-by, the restless hum of life itself has ceased. It is quieter than a forest, for in these artificial squares of railed-in trees nothing stirs. Men’s gardens are always three parts dead.

The broad road widens still; white as fuller’s earth and hard, it stretches like an avenue between high walls of smooth white brick, laid flat and thin as Roman tiles, on thick layers of pale white mortar. Two carefully paved-in streams of fresh grey water run between wall and road. And streams and road and walls go on and on. It is the Palace of the Heir Apparent.

The walls are twelve feet high, the stream is three feet wide; and still my _kurumaya_ runs. The pale white walls stretch down the road like parallels in Euclid. It is the Palace of the Princes of the Blood.