THE first of the noises of a Matsue day comes to the sleeper like the
throbbing of a slow, enormous pulse exactly under his ear. It is a
great, soft, dull buffet of sound--like a heartbeat in its regularity,
in its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as
to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous
pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice--a sort of colossal wooden
mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on
a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the
naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back
by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its
fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is
the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land.
Then the boom of the great bell of Tokoji the Zenshu temple, shakes over
the town; then come melancholy echoes of drumming from the tiny little
temple of Jizo in the street Zaimokucho, near my house, signalling the
Buddhist hour of morning prayer. And finally the cries of the earliest
itinerant venders begin--'Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!'--the sellers of daikon
and other strange vegetables. 'Moyaya-moya!'--the plaintive call of the
women who sell little thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of
charcoal fires.