Akira is bowing and smiling at the door. He slips off his sandals,
enters in his white digitated stockings, and, with another smile and
bow, sinks gently into the proffered chair. Akira is an interesting boy.
With his smooth beardless face and clear bronze skin and blue-black
hair trimmed into a shock that shadows his forehead to the eyes, he
has almost the appearance, in his long wide-sleeved robe and snowy
stockings, of a young Japanese girl.
I clap my hands for tea, hotel tea, which he calls 'Chinese tea.' I
offer him a cigar, which he declines; but with my permission, he will
smoke his pipe. Thereupon he draws from his girdle a Japanese pipe-case
and tobacco-pouch combined; pulls out of the pipe-case a little brass
pipe with a bowl scarcely large enough to hold a pea; pulls out of the
pouch some tobacco so finely cut that it looks like hair, stuffs a tiny
pellet of this preparation in the pipe, and begins to smoke. He draws
the smoke into his lungs, and blows it out again through his nostrils.
Three little whiffs, at intervals of about half a minute, and the pipe,
emptied, is replaced in its case.
Meanwhile I have related to Akira the story of my disappointments.
'Oh, you can see him to-day,' responds Akira, 'if you will take a walk
with me to the Temple of Zotokuin. For this is the Busshoe, the festival
of the Birthday of Buddha. But he is very small, only a few inches high.
If you want to see a great Buddha, you must go to Kamakura. There is a
Buddha in that place, sitting upon a lotus; and he is fifty feet high.'
So I go forth under the guidance of Akira. He says he may be able to
show me 'some curious things.'