It is so narrow, the Street of the Aged Men, that by stretching out
one's arms one can touch the figured sign-draperies before its tiny
shops on both sides at once. And these little ark-shaped houses really
seem toy-houses; that in which Akira lives is even smaller than the
rest, having no shop in it, and no miniature second story. It is all
closed up. Akira slides back the wooden amado which forms the door, and
then the paper-paned screens behind it; and the tiny structure, thus
opened, with its light unpainted woodwork and painted paper partitions,
looks something like a great bird-cage. But the rush matting of the
elevated floor is fresh, sweet-smelling, spotless; and as we take off
our footgear to mount upon it I see that all within is neat, curious,
and pretty.
'The woman has gone out,' says Akira, setting the smoking-box (hibachi)
in the middle of the floor, and spreading beside it a little mat for me
to squat upon.
'But what is this, Akira?' I ask, pointing to a thin board suspended by
a ribbon on the wall--a board so cut from the middle of a branch as
to leave the bark along its edges. There are two columns of mysterious
signs exquisitely painted upon it.
'Oh, that is a calendar,' answers Akira. 'On the right side are the
names of the months having thirty-one days; on the left, the names of
those having less. Now here is a household shrine.'
Occupying the alcove, which is an indispensable part of the structure of
Japanese guest-rooms, is a native cabinet painted with figures of flying
birds; and on this cabinet stands the butsuma. It is a small lacquered
and gilded shrine, with little doors modelled after those of a temple
gate--a shrine very quaint, very much dilapidated (one door has lost its
hinges), but still a dainty thing despite its crackled lacquer and faded
gilding. Akira opens it with a sort of compassionate smile; and I look
inside for the image. There is none; only a wooden tablet with a band of
white paper attached to it, bearing Japanese characters--the name of a
dead baby girl--and a vase of expiring flowers, a tiny print of Kwannon,
the Goddess of Mercy, and a cup filled with ashes of incense.
'Tomorrow,' Akira says, 'she will decorate this, and make the offerings
of food to the little one.'
Hanging from the ceiling, on the opposite side of the room, and in front
of the shrine, is a wonderful, charming, funny, white-and-rosy mask--the
face of a laughing, chubby girl with two mysterious spots upon her
forehead, the face of Otafuku. [2] It twirls round and round in the soft
air-current coming through the open shoji; and every time those funny
black eyes, half shut with laughter, look at me, I cannot help smiling.
And hanging still higher, I see little Shinto emblems of paper (gohei),
a miniature mitre-shaped cap in likeness of those worn in the sacred
dances, a pasteboard emblem of the magic gem (Nio-i hojiu) which the
gods bear in their hands, a small Japanese doll, and a little
wind-wheel which will spin around with the least puff of air, and other
indescribable toys, mostly symbolic, such as are sold on festal days in
the courts of the temples--the playthings of the dead child.
'Komban!' exclaims a very gentle voice behind us. The mother is
standing there, smiling as if pleased at the stranger's interest in her
butsuma--a middle-aged woman of the poorest class, not comely, but with
a most kindly face. We return her evening greeting; and while I sit down
upon the little mat laid before the hibachi, Akira whispers something to
her, with the result that a small kettle is at once set to boil over a
very small charcoal furnace. We are probably going to have some tea.
As Akira takes his seat before me, on the other side of the hibachi, I
ask him:
'What was the name I saw on the tablet?'
'The name which you saw,' he answers, 'was not the real name. The real
name is written upon the other side. After death another name is given
by the priest. A dead boy is called Ryochi Doji; a dead girl, Mioyo
Donyo.'
While we are speaking, the woman approaches the little shrine, opens it,
arranges the objects in it, lights the tiny lamp, and with joined hands
and bowed head begins to pray. Totally unembarrassed by our presence
and our chatter she seems, as one accustomed to do what is right and
beautiful heedless of human opinion; praying with that brave, true
frankness which belongs to the poor only of this world--those simple
souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from
heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do not
know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that
soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips,
which among this kind people is a token of humblest desire to please.
As I watch the tender little rite, I become aware of something dimly
astir in the mystery of my own life--vaguely, indefinably familiar,
like a memory ancestral, like the revival of a sensation forgotten two
thousand years. Blended in some strange way it seems to be with my faint
knowledge of an elder world, whose household gods were also the beloved
dead; and there is a weird sweetness in this place, like a shadowing of
Lares.
Then, her brief prayer over, she turns to her miniature furnace again.
She talks and laughs with Akira; she prepares the tea, pours it out
in tiny cups and serves it to us, kneeling in that graceful
attitude--picturesque, traditional--which for six hundred years has been
the attitude of the Japanese woman serving tea. Verily, no small part of
the life of the woman of Japan is spent thus in serving little cups of
tea. Even as a ghost, she appears in popular prints offering to somebody
spectral tea-cups of spectral tea. Of all Japanese ghost-pictures, I
know of none more pathetic than that in which the phantom of a woman
kneeling humbly offers to her haunted and remorseful murderer a little
cup of tea!
'Now let us go to the Bon-ichi,' says Akira, rising; 'she must go there
herself soon, and it is already getting dark. Sayonara!'
It is indeed almost dark as we leave the little house: stars are
pointing in the strip of sky above the street; but it is a beautiful
night for a walk, with a tepid breeze blowing at intervals, and sending
long flutterings through the miles of shop draperies. The market is in
the narrow street at the verge of the city, just below the hill where
the great Buddhist temple of Zoto-Kuin stands--in the Motomachi, only
ten squares away.