Utterly different this whirling joyous Honen-odori from the Bon-odori
which I witnessed last year at Shimo-Ichi, and which seemed to me a very
dance of ghosts. But it is also much more difficult to describe. Each
dancer makes a half-wheel alternately to left and right, with a peculiar
bending of the knees and tossing up of the hands at the same time--as in
the act of lifting a weight above the head; but there are other curious
movements--jerky with the men, undulatory with the women--as impossible
to describe as water in motion. These are decidedly complex, yet so
regular that five hundred pairs of feet and hands mark the measure of
the song as truly as if they were under the control of a single nervous
system.
It is strangely difficult to memorise the melody of a Japanese popular
song, or the movements of a Japanese dance; for the song and the dance
have been evolved through an aesthetic sense of rhythm in sound and in
motion as different from the corresponding Occidental sense as English
is different from Chinese. We have no ancestral sympathies with these
exotic rhythms, no inherited aptitudes for their instant comprehension,
no racial impulses whatever in harmony with them. But when they have
become familiar through study, after a long residence in the Orient, how
nervously fascinant the oscillation of the dance, and the singular swing
of the song!
This dance, I know, began at eight o'clock; and the Ondo-tori, after
having sung without a falter in his voice for an extraordinary time,
has been relieved by a second. But the great round never breaks, never
slackens its whirl; it only enlarges as the night wears on. And the
second Ondo-tori is relieved by a third; yet I would like to watch that
dance for ever.
'What time do you think it is?' my friend asks, looking at his watch.
'Nearly eleven o'clock,' I make answer.
'Eleven o'clock! It is exactly eight minutes to three o'clock. And our
host will have little time for sleep before the rising of the sun.'