Over the Tenjin-bashi, or Bridge of Tenjin, and through small streets
and narrow of densely populated districts, and past many a tenantless
and mouldering feudal homestead, I make my way to the extreme
south-western end of the city, to watch the sunset from a little sobaya
[9] facing the lake. For to see the sun sink from this sobaya is one of
the delights of Matsue.
There are no such sunsets in Japan as in the tropics: the light is
gentle as a light of dreams; there are no furies of colour; there are no
chromatic violences in nature in this Orient. All in sea or sky is tint
rather than colour, and tint vapour-toned. I think that the exquisite
taste of the race in the matter of colours and of tints, as exemplified
in the dyes of their wonderful textures, is largely attributable to the
sober and delicate beauty of nature's tones in this all-temperate world
where nothing is garish.
Before me the fair vast lake sleeps, softly luminous, far-ringed with
chains of blue volcanic hills shaped like a sierra. On my right, at its
eastern end, the most ancient quarter of the city spreads its roofs of
blue-grey tile; the houses crowd thickly down to the shore, to dip their
wooden feet into the flood. With a glass I can see my own windows and
the far-spreading of the roofs beyond, and above all else the green
citadel with its grim castle, grotesquely peaked. The sun begins to set,
and exquisite astonishments of tinting appear in water and sky.
Dead rich purples cloud broadly behind and above the indigo blackness
of the serrated hills--mist purples, fading upward smokily into faint
vermilions and dim gold, which again melt up through ghostliest greens
into the blue. The deeper waters of the lake, far away, take a tender
violet indescribable, and the silhouette of the pine-shadowed island
seems to float in that sea of soft sweet colour. But the shallower and
nearer is cut from the deeper water by the current as sharply as by
a line drawn, and all the surface on this side of that line is a
shimmering bronze--old rich ruddy gold-bronze.
All the fainter colours change every five minutes,--wondrously change
and shift like tones and shades of fine shot-silks.