'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'
A woman's voice ringing through the night, chanting in a tone of
singular sweetness words of which each syllable comes through my open
window like a wavelet of flute-sound. My Japanese servant, who speaks a
little English, has told me what they mean, those words:
'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'
And always between these long, sweet calls I hear a plaintive whistle,
one long note first, then two short ones in another key. It is the
whistle of the amma, the poor blind woman who earns her living by
shampooing the sick or the weary, and whose whistle warns pedestrians
and drivers of vehicles to take heed for her sake, as she cannot see.
And she sings also that the weary and the sick may call her in.
'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'
The saddest melody, but the sweetest voice. Her cry signifies that for
the sum of 'five hundred mon' she will come and rub your weary body
'above and below,' and make the weariness or the pain go away. Five
hundred mon are the equivalent of five sen (Japanese cents); there are
ten rin to a sen, and ten mon to one rin. The strange sweetness of the
voice is haunting,--makes me even wish to have some pains, that I might
pay five hundred mon to have them driven away.
I lie down to sleep, and I dream. I see Chinese texts--multitudinous,
weird, mysterious--fleeing by me, all in one direction; ideographs white
and dark, upon signboards, upon paper screens, upon backs of sandalled
men. They seem to live, these ideographs, with conscious life; they are
moving their parts, moving with a movement as of insects, monstrously,
like phasmidae. I am rolling always through low, narrow, luminous
streets in a phantom jinricksha, whose wheels make no sound. And always,
always, I see the huge white mushroom-shaped hat of Cha dancing up and
down before me as he runs.