By Alice M. Bacon
IN THE LAND OF THE GODS. 12mo, $1.50.
JAPANESE GIRLS AND WOMEN. 16mo, $1.25. In Riverside Library for Young
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_Holiday Edition._ With 12 full-page Illustrations in color and 43
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A JAPANESE INTERIOR. 16mo, $1.25. In Riverside School Library. 16mo,
60 cents, _net_.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
IN THE LAND OF THE GODS
IN THE LAND
OF THE GODS
SOME STORIES
OF JAPAN BY
ALICE
MABEL
BACON
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND
COMPANY MDCCCCV
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY
ALICE MABEL BACON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1905_
DEDICATION
TO MY JAPANESE FRIENDS, THROUGH
WHOSE EYES I HAVE SEEN, BY WHOSE
EARS I HAVE HEARD, WITH WHOSE
VOICES I HAVE SPOKEN, THIS VOLUME
IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED
A story book should need no introduction, but inasmuch as this one
deals with customs, beliefs, and modes of thought as yet unfamiliar to
American readers, a few preliminary words of explanation may be an aid
to sympathy and comprehension.
Since the great war has begun to show us something of the intensity of
Japanese national life, nothing, perhaps, has surprised the Occident
more than the spiritual force of the race,--the reverent but certain
attitude in which its members stand toward much that is to us unknown,
or at best intermittently believed. In no respect do the Japanese as
a nation differ more widely from Occidentals than in their actual
practical belief in the close relations existing between the visible
and the invisible, and in the continuity of this life and the next.
The pledge of “loyalty to the Emperor for seven lives” is not a mere
hyperbole. It voices the deepest religious feeling of the Japanese soul.
In the hope that somehow, by this effort to render vivid to American
minds some of the popular beliefs and superstitions of Japan, I may
be able to help my own people to a more sympathetic understanding of
our trans-Pacific neighbors, I have written out these stories. Many
of them are simply folk-tales, set, for our better comprehension of
the conditions, in the every-day atmosphere of Japanese home-life in
country or city. One, “The Blue Flame,” is an incident told me as true,
and as occurring in the very town in which the narrator lived. Two,
“The Favor of Hachiman” and “At the Shrine of Fudō,” while neither
folk-tales nor stories told to me, set forth beliefs that to-day
actuate the lives of some forty million wide-awake, progressive, and
intelligent people.
Three of the stories are devoted to the fox superstition, still found
among the peasants and among the lower classes in the cities, but that
no longer survives among the educated modern Japanese.
For a fuller understanding of the mysteries touched upon in this
volume, the reader is referred to the works of Lafcadio Hearn. His
book, “Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation,” is the most complete and
sympathetic study yet made of the spiritual side of the nation, and the
chapter “Kitsuné,” in volume one of his “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,”
relates in charming form the various phases of the fox belief.
HOLDERNESS, N. H.,
August, 1905.
CONTENTS
I THE FAVOR OF HACHIMAN 1
II AT THE SHRINE OF FUDŌ 39
III THE BLUE FLAME 73
IV THE INDEPENDENCE OF SABURO 85
V KITSUNÉ YASHIKI 105
VI CHOKICHI’S PILGRIMAGE 131
VII THE BUYER OF AMÉ 151
VIII THE PEONY LANTERN 169
IX THE LADY OF THE SCROLL 215
X HOW FUMI REMEMBERED 239
GLOSSARY 267
I
THE FAVOR OF HACHIMAN
Hachiman is the deified spirit of the Emperor Ojin,
son of the warrior Empress Jingo. He is now worshiped
as the God of War in many shrines and temples
throughout Japan.
It was the eve of the annual Feast of the Dead,[1] and O Kimi San had
just finished the construction and decoration of the “Spirit Altar.”
She had set the posts and hung the rice-straw rope, and swung from
it the fringe of vermicelli, green chestnut sprays, white paper, and
dried fruits and vegetables. She had shaped with her own hands, from
cucumbers and egg-fruits, the rude representations of cattle and
horses, and had set them, together with fresh food and wine, before the
quaint little shrine that stood now, completed, in the place of honor
in the house. And all the time as she worked she had been thinking of
Taro, and the tears came to her tired old eyes, and dropped sometimes
upon her work, as she thought of how, only three months before, he had
gone to the war, and then of how soon came back to his old father and
mother the word of his death, fighting the hairy Russians in Manchuria.
And so to-day, as she prepared to do honor to the visiting spirits, it
was of Taro that she thought more than of the ancestral ghosts for whom
she had kept the feast so many years. Taro, her brave, strong Taro,
who should have lived to make his daily and yearly offerings at his
parents’ shrine, was coming to them to-night, a spirit, to receive from
them the comfort and love that was all the happiness earth could offer
him now! As she worked through the hot August morning, her heart was
sore and sad, and there seemed no hope ahead for her and Gunkichi, her
old husband. Lonely they must live on until death came, and lonely must
their spirits be forever, for no descendants would offer to them the
affection and the daily gifts that disembodied spirits crave.
She stood now on the edge of her little piazza, and looked down the
length of the village street. A small white flag, in its centre a
blood-red sun, drooped idly from its slender bamboo staff before the
house. A great gray monkey, chained to a tree across the road, woke
from his noonday doze to blink at her sleepily, then closed his eyes
and humped himself once more into a fluffy ball. The heated air wavered
above the dusty road until the shops and hotels on each side of it
seemed to shimmer and shake like the background of a moving picture.
And--still like a moving picture--there came directly toward her the
figure of a woman, wavering, almost staggering, under the heat of the
August sun and the weight of a heavy baby tied to her back. The village
lay quiet, asleep or preoccupied with its own discomfort, while the
woman toiled on toward O Kimi San’s little rest-house. It was a tiny,
thatched, open-fronted cottage, just beyond the village, and almost
overhanging the mountain gorge along which the road was built. It was
cool and fresh with the foam of the torrent far below, and in the
shadow of a wooded rocky peak that towered above.
O Kimi San shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked into the
shimmering glare at the small burdened figure. Her kindly old face,
seamed and crisscrossed with the wrinkles of a hard life, grew
sympathetic. The traveler, as she came into the shade of the Tengu
Rock, breathed a deep sigh, and with a hitch of her shoulders tilted
the baby into a more comfortable position. O Kimi, from the little
matted platform that was the floor of her house, called out hospitably
to the newcomer,--
“It is very hot! Come in and rest a little; you must be tired.”
The mother looked up doubtfully and shook her head. “Thank you,” she
said; “it is hot, but I must go on. I must reach Shio no Yu to-night;”
and she struggled forward.
But O Kimi’s kindly soul was not content with such refusal. She slipped
from the platform into her sandals lying ready on the earth below, and
followed the traveler.
“Come in,” she said; “please come, for the baby’s sake if not for your
own. You cannot see how red and hot he is. He will be sick if you carry
him farther in this heat. Wait here with me until it’s cooler. You can
get to Shio no Yu if you start by four o’clock. The moon is full, and
you can walk late.” O Kimi fairly dragged the little woman back with
her to the house, her tired visitor demurring faintly. “Now sit down
here and untie the baby, and I will take him. Then you can rest your
poor tired feet with some of that hot water over there;” and O Kimi
pointed to a steaming, dripping pipe creeping along the perpendicular
upper edge of the road,[2] under which tubs were set to catch the
leakage.
The tired little mother, in a paroxysm of thanks and expostulations,
gave herself up to the kindly solicitude of her hostess. She sat
obediently down on the tiny, polished piazza, and untied the band which
held the heavy baby to her. O Kimi took him in her arms, hugged him for
a moment to her wrinkled breast, then laid him down and watched him
with greedy eyes while his mother was washing her face and arms and
blistered feet in the steaming hot water across the way.
“When he wakes he shall have a bath too,” said the old woman, as the
mother, refreshed, came and took her seat on the soft mats of the
little house; “but now you must have some tea and a fan, and then,
when you are rested, tell me something about yourself, and why you are
traveling all alone this way with your baby.”
O Kimi bustled off to her kitchen, and soon came back with tea and
cake. Then she disappeared again, and after a longer time brought in
a second tray with rice-bowl, pickles, fish, and iced vermicelli, all
as daintily served as the Empress herself could have wished. “It is a
poor meal,” she said, with formal self-depreciation. “My husband caught
the trout in the river this morning, and the vermicelli is but the O
Bon fare. I am sorry that I have nothing better to offer you;” and she
bowed low as she set the tray before her guest.
But though the food was dainty, though O Kimi San offered new helpings
of rice from the brass-bound wooden bucket with insistent hospitality,
the traveler was too tired to eat. She played with her chopsticks and
commented with enthusiastic politeness on the delicacies set before
her, but could hardly choke down the last of the rice in her bowl,--an
act which etiquette and religion both required of her,--and the fish
and vermicelli were left almost untouched. Her face was pale, and
under her eyes were blue rings. Every movement of the visitor showed
that she needed rest more than food. O Kimi’s sympathetic heart went
out to the poor stranger.
“Here,” she said, “lie down beside your baby, and I will hang my large
mosquito-net, and you can sleep awhile before you go on. You are too
tired to move yet.” With gentle insistence she gained her point. The
tired mother lay down on the mat beside her sleeping baby, and the
great green linen mosquito-netting, hung from the four corners of
the room, shut out the hard things of life for a space, leaving the
wanderers to the ministration of the green coolness, the soft air, the
murmur and rush of the torrent far below them.
O Kimi San continued with her household tasks. She carried out her
dishes and trays and rice-bucket to the kitchen, she swept the road in
front of the house, and watered it with a dipper from a wooden pail.
She filled the kettle with fresh spring water, and arranged the bits of
charcoal in the fire so that they should concentrate their heat at the
precise centre of the kettle’s bottom. Then she went back to her guests
who were sleeping under the mosquito-net, just as the baby opened his
eyes and began to whimper. O Kimi went down on her knees and gathered
him to her longing heart. “Botchan,”[3] she whispered, and cuddled
him and talked to him in the soft baby language until his little hand
stole into her bosom, and he began to chatter in reply like a sparrow,
looking up into her eyes and laughing with quaint baby humor. He was
a fat, sturdy, red-cheeked boy of three, who trotted about the matted
floor on chubby brown feet, and laughed and danced when O Kimi brought
him a bowl of rice. She fed him with chopsticks, he sitting on his
heels facing her solemnly with open mouth like a young bird, and
closing mouth and eyes ecstatically when the chopsticks, like the old
bird’s beak, pushed the food between his lips.
When the tired mother waked at last, O Kimi and the boy were great
friends. She had brought a tub of hot water from the pipe across
the road, and was taking off his scanty clothing in preparation
for the promised bath. He wore only a little cotton kimono, with a
diamond-shaped apron of many-colored _to chirimen_, or woolen crape,
beneath. Undressing was a small affair, and soon Botchan was sitting in
the wooden tub, splashing and chattering like a young duck.
“Such a boy!” said O Kimi San to the mother, who was sitting up now,
watching the operations of her hostess. “He is so like my son. It makes
me happy to have him near me.”
“And your son--where is he?” asked the visitor.
O Kimi San looked straight ahead of her and spoke very softly: “My son
has had the great honor to give himself to the Emperor. Alas! we must
light the O Bon lanterns for him to-night”-- Her voice broke, and she
hid her face behind her sleeve.
The visitor bowed low. “It is sad, and my heart is grieved for you,”
she said. “To my husband, too, has come such honor. He went down in
the Sakura Maru at Port Arthur, and even his body was not found. His
spirit, they say, is in the Shokonsha,[4] but”--
The elder woman bowed in her turn in the presence of a grief so like
her own, and there was silence for a space. At last she said softly,
“How is my heart grieved with your sorrow;” then, her eye resting
on Botchan, who was squatting now beside his mother, looking with
wondering eyes at his elders, she added comfortingly, “But your boy
will grow up to care for you, and to preserve his father’s memory.”
The visitor bowed again. “True, he will care for me when he is grown,
but how shall I care for him until he is grown? I am going now to my
husband’s brother in Shio no Yu, but he is poor, and has many boys of
his own, and I do not know whether he will receive me.” The woman’s
voice trembled, and she stopped for a moment, then went on in the
curious, even tone which in a Japanese woman betrays deep emotion.
“When my husband went, he said to me, ‘Suzu, I shall probably die for
my country. You must not mourn, you must be glad, and must teach the
boy to be glad that his father had so great honor.’ And when I said,
‘Oh, Yofu, how can I be glad? How can I live? I must kill myself if
you are killed,’ he answered, ‘To kill yourself would not be brave or
wise, if by so doing you should leave our boy to starve. If I die, you
must live and make a brave man of him.’ So I have lived, but it is hard
for me. And Botchan is a brave boy,--so brave and so strong. All this
morning as we came up from Nishi Nasuno, he walked by my side, his
little hand in mine. Sometimes he would stumble and almost fall, and I
would say, ‘Botchan is tired, let mamma carry him,’ but it was always,
‘Botchan is very strong. Mamma is tired.’ At noon we stopped to eat our
lunch, and when I looked at his feet, they were all blistered. I washed
them in cold water as we sat beside the road, but when we started out
again he could not walk. That is why I carried him. Yes, Botchan is a
soldier’s son, and he will be a brave man.”
Suzu hugged the stolid, chubby baby sitting so solemnly beside her,
until he giggled and shouted with delight. “And now, if indeed it must
be, we will go, for I must reach Shio no Yu to-night,” and Suzu bowed
her farewell to O Kimi with many expressions of gratitude for her
kindness, while Botchan gravely imitated her prostrations.
“Can’t you stay here with me to-night?” protested O Kimi. “There is a
storm coming. You should not try to brave a storm with that baby.” But
Suzu was set on her plan, and with a final hug of Botchan as she tied
him to his mother’s back, O Kimi set them forth upon the road.
“Cross the river about a mile above here where you see a little bridge,
then follow the road to the left, and Shio no Yu is about four miles
away.”
Suzu bowed and smiled, and O Kimi went back to her little house,
lonelier than ever for the baby’s visit.
There was a muttering of thunder from the hills above, a darkness and
stifling stillness in the air. O Kimi looked out uneasily. “It is time
Gunkichi was back,” she said. “He has been gone all day. If he gets
caught across the river, and the storm comes, how will he get home?”
But as she was bringing her vague fears to a point by speech, there was
a light pat-pat of sandals along the road, and Gunkichi, wrinkled and
smiling, with a great bundle of sprawling, straggling roots upon his
back, hailed his old wife with a cheerful greeting.
“It’s very hot,” he said, as he dipped his towel into the hot water and
washed the streaming perspiration from his face and arms and bare brown
legs and feet, “but we are going to have a great storm, and then it
will be cool.” He laughed and chattered, partly to himself, partly to
his wife, and partly to the great gray monkey perched on the tree above
him. “Heh! Mr. Monkey,” he said, “you are so lazy this hot weather that
you don’t care for anything. Heh! Mr. Monkey, wake up!” He poked at the
humpy fur ball until it turned its red face, grown redder with rage,
toward him and chattered viciously. “Now you are awake at last, and I
will give you something. Here, mother, will you hand me a cracker for
Mr. Monkey?”
O Kimi laughed, and brought him a toasted rice cracker. “Gunkichi,”
she said, “I believe you try to be a boy just to comfort me;” and she
looked at him affectionately, but with tears in her eyes.
Gunkichi said nothing. He was apparently absorbed in watching the
monkey, who was meditatively crunching the cracker. When he turned
again he cleared his throat a little before he went on to tell O Kimi
of his day’s successes.
Such a day as it had been! He had climbed the Tengu Rock and worshiped
at the little shrine of Hachiman, the war-god, on its top, and seen the
great black snake who lies always coiled up within the shrine except
when the god sends him forth with his messages. Then he had set out in
search of roots suitable for his use. For Gunkichi was an artist in
roots. His little shop beside O Kimi’s kitchen was filled with strange
productions of his fancy. By smoothing here and hollowing there, by
cunningly reinforcing and adding in another place, by a spot of red or
black or white paint judiciously applied, Gunkichi would evolve from
the most hopeless-looking roots and snags griffins, _tengus_, devils,
monsters of all sorts, which found a ready sale among the summer
visitors at the hot baths in the village. As he opened his bundle and
drew out his new-found treasures one by one, he discoursed eloquently
on the wonderful things that they would become in his hands.
“Look, mother, this will make a grand dragon!” He pulled a long twisted
root with many branches from the heap in front of him. “Here is his
head now, with horns and wide-open mouth. I will paint his mouth red,
and give him two great white eyes. Then when I have soaked his long
body in the hot water, and coiled it about, these branches will make
his legs, and this long slender one his tail. Perhaps some of the Tokyo
people will buy it. I wish the Emperor could see it! I’d give it to him
if I could.”
He stopped, abashed by the temerity into which his enthusiasm had led
him, and added humbly, “But of course it would not be worthy,” and
bowed low at the name that he had invoked.
“Father, you have given to the Emperor the only thing you had to give.”
There was a pride, carefully veiled, in O Kimi’s voice. Gunkichi, who
had by this time slipped out of his sandals and seated himself on the
mats, turned his head aside and vigorously rubbed his face with his
blue-and-white towel.
Just then the storm broke. With vivid lightning, a crash of thunder,
and the roaring as of a waterspout, it rushed down the mountain gorge.
O Kimi San drew the outer rain-doors of the house, sliding them along
their grooves on a full run. The monkey, a moment before a motionless
ball of gray fur on the top of his perch, scuttled down, with much
angry chattering and rattling of his chain, into his little house. They
were none too soon, for the rain, like a solid column of water, was
rushing and swirling about them, the river foaming and roaring beneath,
almost before O Kimi and Gunkichi could fasten the house securely.
Then O Kimi stirred about the kitchen preparing supper, while Gunkichi
smoked thoughtfully in the shuttered twilight of the little guest-room.
As O Kimi brought in the tray and the rice-bucket, she suddenly
bethought herself of her visitor. “Ma!” she exclaimed. “Poor Suzu! I
wonder where she is now!”
“What Suzu?” asked Gunkichi.
Then Kimi told him all the story of her afternoon, and of how Suzu had
left the house only just before he came home.
“If she got across the bridge before the storm came, she will be safe,”
said Gunkichi; “but if she tries to cross it in the storm, she may be
carried away with it.”
There was nothing to be done. Supper cleared away, the old couple sat
and talked. Once or twice O Kimi tried to light the O Bon lanterns, but
with a swirl and a rush the wind blowing through the funnel-like gorge
extinguished them each time. She was perturbed, and a look of fear
came into her eyes, a wail into her voice. “It will be dark for him,
and he will think we have forgotten him! Gunkichi, what shall we do?”
Gunkichi answered her gently, “Our Taro knows we would not forget him.
He knows that we would light the lanterns for him if we could, but the
wind-gods will not let us. You have set the food and trimmed the light
before the spirit altar. He has been away so short a time, he cannot
lose his way home, even if there is no light outside.”
“If I could only open the _amado_ a crack so that he could come
through,” O Kimi moaned, and pushed the shutter aside a little. But
the howling wind filled the house, and shook the flimsy structure as
a terrier shakes a rat. Both tugged together to close the door again,
and then sat down in the darkness, for the wind had put out their
light. Only the tiny lamp before the spirit altar continued to burn. It
flickered in the searching wind, and threw strange creeping shadows on
the walls.
And then there came a cry, a wail of terror from the stream below.
Gunkichi started up. “What’s that? Some one is in trouble in the
river!” He threw open the _amado_, and the wind and rain nearly took
his breath away. He felt the road with his bare foot. It was a running
torrent, but he stepped in, and out from the shelter of the roof. The
wind took him and pinned him fast against a rock, while the pouring
rain nearly drowned him. He could see the river by the pale light of
the full moon behind the clouds. It was boiling white among the great
black rocks far below, and he knew that to reach its level in the wind
and rain would be useless. Spent and water-soaked, he crawled back at
last to the house.
All night the wind blew, the thunder roared, and the rain fell in
torrents; but when morning came the clouds cleared away, the wind
blew fair, the sun shone, and every rock and leaf and twig seemed
new-created after the storm.
Gunkichi started out early, to go up the river and see what had
happened in the night. “If I can get across, I will go to Shio no Yu
and see if Suzu reached there safely,” he said, as he tied on his
sandals.
O Kimi set about her household tasks. She was thinking a great deal
about her own Taro, and then, again, of Suzu and her little Botchan.
Her heart ached to hold the chubby baby form close to her breast, to
put food between the soft baby lips, to hear the cooing baby voice; and
somehow Taro and Botchan seemed to mingle in her mind until she felt
that yesterday she had held her own boy in her arms, and then had sent
him away into the storm with an unknown woman.
She was sitting at her sewing, looking from time to time out into the
road, her eyes dim and misty, and with an occasional tear dropping upon
the blue cotton of Gunkichi’s new blouse. Did she see aright, or was
that mist before her eyes deceiving her? There was a great black snake
gliding down the road! She rubbed her eyes and looked. Never had she
seen such a snake. He was eight feet long or more, and of ample girth,
and his black, scaly body glistened in the sunshine. He came on to the
little rest-house, and paused before it, lifted his head, and waved it
back and forth, raising it higher and higher until his gleaming eyes
looked over the edge of the piazza right at O Kimi San.
“It is the messenger of Hachiman,” whispered O Kimi, and prostrated
herself in reverence, face down upon the mats. She raised her head, the
snake was still looking at her. Again she bowed, and when she looked
up there was still that shining waving head with the glittering eyes
fixed full upon her. Once more O Kimi bowed low, and in her heart was a
prayer to Hachiman that he would call his dread messenger back to his
shrine. When she lifted her head, no snake was there, but there was a
slight rustle on the side of the Tengu Rock, and O Kimi knew that her
petition had been answered.
“Did he send a message to me?” she thought. And then, in spite of her
grief and perturbation, she laughed at the audacity of her question.
“Of course he had no message for me. I am too low a person to have a
message from a god.” She went back to her sewing, her hand shaking a
little and her eyes dimmer than ever. Presently she looked up, brushing
her hand across her eyes as she did so. Would wonders never cease? What
was coming along the road now?
He looked very small, and very fat, and very bullet-headed, as he
walked nonchalantly along against a background of towering cliffs,
waving trees, and blue, white-flecked sky. He was dressed in a small
diamond of bright-colored cloth tied over his fat stomach, and he
carried in one hand a stick, while the other was crumpled tightly
about a struggling, gauzy insect. When he saw the rest-house standing
by the road he crowed merrily, and hastened his steps. O Kimi could
hardly believe her eyes. It was Suzu’s Botchan coming back to her! All
the love and longing of her bereaved soul went out to the brave baby
marching serenely toward her.
“O kaeri!”[5] she called out, afraid that he might go by her and out
of her life again. The baby stopped at the familiar voice, stood
motionless a moment regarding her, then bowed solemnly and nearly
double.
“Tadaima,”[6] he responded gravely, then toddled toward her holding
out his doubled fist, in which was firmly clenched a dragon-fly. “My
horse,” he explained cheerfully. “If I had a long thread, I would
harness him.” He caracoled ponderously on his small chubby feet. “I am
a soldier just come home from the war!”
“Mamma’s soldier boy!” said O Kimi in a rapture. “Come in, and we will
tie up the horse and give the soldier some rice.”
She seized him in her arms and hugged him, then carried him across the
way to the hot water pipe, where she washed the mud from his little
bare feet before setting him down on her clean mats.
He pointed with delight to the rude semblances of animals before the
spirit altar. “Taro’s horses!” he shouted, and clapped his chubby hands.
O Kimi looked at him with a curious awe. How could he know that those
things were set out for her Taro’s spirit? He was such a baby, he could
not have listened to their talk of yesterday. She questioned him:
“Where did you come from, Botchan? Where is mamma?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “You are mamma,” he said. “Taro come home
from war.”
She spoke very gently, half afraid at his strangeness. “But, Botchan,
don’t you remember mamma, who brought you here yesterday? Where is
she?”
His baby face quivered, and he looked woebegone at her obtuseness.
“Taro can’t remember yesterday,” he whimpered; “Taro come home to
mamma.”
O Kimi hugged him close. “Never mind, Botchan,” she said; “sit here a
minute and grandma will get you some breakfast.”
“Not grandma, mamma,” insisted Botchan, his round mouth puckering.
“Kimi! Kimi!” sounded Gunkichi’s voice up the road. O Kimi slipped into
her sandals, and ran to him as he came toward her on a trot. He was
breathless with excitement. “O Suzu San’s body is on the rocks, way
down below the bridge! She must have tried to cross after the storm
broke!”
“Poor thing! Poor thing!” wailed O Kimi. “I should never have let her
go! And now Botchan”--
“Botchan must have been drowned too,” interrupted Gunkichi, anxious to
tell all he knew. “His dress was still tied fast to his mother’s back;
so he fell and went down with her, that is certain. Then he was washed
down by the current. Poor baby! They will find his body farther down
the stream.”
“Father,” said O Kimi in an awe-stricken voice, “the baby is in our
house. I was getting him some rice when you called me.”
“Impossible, Kimi. If he went down with his mother, he must surely have
been drowned. Why, she was held fast, head downward against a rock, and
both must have been drowned as they fell.”
“Gunkichi,”--O Kimi’s voice was low and solemn,--“there is something
very strange that I must tell you before we go back and look at the
baby. Sit down here and cool yourself, and listen.”
They sat down at the edge of the road, out of sight of the little
house, while O Kimi told her story. She told of Hachiman’s messenger,
and of how he stopped and looked at her, and how she bowed three
times and asked Hachiman to take him away. “I think, Gunkichi, that he
really brought a message, and that Hachiman was pleased with your visit
yesterday to his shrine. For then the baby came, and what do you think
he had in his hand? A dragon-fly! and he said it was his horse!”
Gunkichi sat up, excited. “I have heard that dragon-flies are horses’
spirits!” he said.
“That is one of the strange things,” answered O Kimi; “and then he
told me he was a soldier just come home from the war. I thought he was
playing, and played with him, but when I brought him into the house, he
went right to the spirit altar, and when he saw the animals he clapped
his hands and said, ‘Taro’s horses!’ Then I began to wonder. How did he
know about Taro? How did he know those things were set out for him? So
then I questioned him about his mother, and he said I was his mother.
He couldn’t remember yesterday, only that he was a soldier just come
back from the war. He nearly cried when I called myself grandma. ‘Not
grandma, mamma,’ he insisted. Gunkichi, what does it all mean? You say
that the child was surely drowned, but he is here, or rather, his body
is here, but his spirit is changed. Hachiman has sent us back our Taro.
He gave his body in the war, and now Hachiman has let him enter a new
body so that he could comfort us.”
Gunkichi was doubtful. He had heard that such things used to happen,
but every instance that he had ever heard of was at least a hundred
years old. Things were different in those days. This was Meiji, the
Era of Enlightenment, and though strange things were still happening
daily, they were not of just this kind. There were two persons who
must be consulted before they could be quite sure what to do. One was
the policeman at the far end of the village, the other was the parish
priest.
He explained this to O Kimi, in whose mind no shadow of doubt now
existed, and while she hastened home to feed and fondle her baby,
he walked along to the police station. There, after bowing low and
offering many polite excuses for troubling his excellency, he told
the whole story to the dignified little man in his white, new-style
uniform. The policeman listened with interest, making notes the while
in his little book. Then he sallied forth, taking with him Gunkichi and
a number of the villagers, to study the situation. Poor Suzu’s body
was first recovered, and the opinion of the villagers, indorsed by the
policeman, was that the baby must have fallen with his mother, and been
washed out of his lashings and his kimono in the boiling current. How
he could have lived through it, no one could understand.
“And may we keep the baby, your honor?” said Gunkichi appealingly.
“If, when I have investigated, I find that the brother at Shio no Yu
does not want him, I think you can keep him,” was the guarded reply.
With many bows of deep respect, and effusive thanks for the hope held
forth, Gunkichi parted from the officer, and took his way toward the
village temple. It was a great, old, shabby sanctuary, with wide-eaved
curving roof of blackened thatch, and two stone statues of Jizo, buried
almost to the eyes in pebbles, sitting in mild serenity outside the
gate. Gunkichi stooped and threw a stone to each as he passed in,
murmuring a prayer to the gentle guardian of the children’s ghosts,
and thinking the while of the poor baby’s spirit, wandering beside the
river of death. He stood beside the veranda of the priest’s house that
adjoined the temple, and lifted up his voice in the polite “Excuse me
for troubling you,” that announces the presence of a guest. The old
priest came himself to greet him and bid him come in. Gunkichi bowed
and bowed, but remained humbly without, and told once more his story.
It was spiritual enlightenment that he wanted. Might he and O Kimi
believe that their Taro’s spirit, coming that first night of the Feast
of the Dead to visit his parents, had found the baby’s body lying where
the river had tossed it, and entered in, through the favor of Hachiman?
He gave all the quaint bits of evidence, the coming of the messenger,
the dragon-fly in the baby’s hand (“You know our Taro and his horse
were found shot down together,” explained Gunkichi with some pride),
the child’s use of the name Taro, his reiteration of the fact that he
was a soldier, his insistence that O Kimi was his mother.
The priest listened with reverent interest. “My son,” he said, “it is
plain that you and O Kimi San have been blessed by a miracle. The gods
have seen your kindness to the poor traveler, your worship of the great
Hachiman, your patience under your loss. And they have vouchsafed to
you this wonderful thing. Without doubt the spirit of your own Taro has
come back to you clothed in the body of poor Suzu’s baby. Give thanks
to Hachiman, whose messenger brought you your son again.”
Gunkichi fell on hands and knees upon the pebbled walk, and laid his
forehead to the ground. “Reverend priest,” he said, “since the gods
have indeed condescended to grant so great a gift to our unworthiness,
we would show our gratitude by some offering. What humble thing may we
do?”
And the priest made answer, “Upon the river bank, close to the spot
where Suzu’s body was found, build ye a shrine to the memory of her
and of her child. And at the full moon carry thither, you and Kimi and
Taro, offerings of food and wine to their spirits. And each year, when
the O Bon feast comes round, hang there a lantern and erect a spirit
altar, so that when they return they may not be lonely, but may join in
the good cheer of the festival. And teach Taro, and bid him teach his
children and his children’s children, that the shrine is holy, and that
they must continue throughout their generations the monthly and the
yearly offerings. For by the death of Suzu and her baby your family is
continued, and your spirits shall be loved and tended. Therefore, so
long as your generations continue must they love and tend the spirits
of Suzu and her son.”
Gunkichi lifted his forehead from the earth. “Surely,” he said, “we and
our children and our children’s children will pay honor to the spirits
of the mother and her child.” Then with grateful words of farewell he
went back, subdued and thoughtful, to his home.
Up and down the road in the bright sunshine galloped little Taro,
driving his great dragon-fly attached by a thread to a long bamboo
stick. “O uma!” (horse!), he shouted gleefully when he saw Gunkichi.
“O Totchan! O uma!” (Papa, horse!) O Kimi had hunted out from her
iron-bound chest of drawers a tiny blue-and-white kimono, in which she
had enveloped his chubby body, and she sat, the picture of cheer and
happiness, watching his play, and working, when she could take her
greedy eyes away from him, upon another small garment ready cut upon
her lap. When she saw Gunkichi she called out, “Father, his excellency
has been here again, and he says we may keep the baby. The man at Shio
no Yu doesn’t want him. His honor said for you to come and register at
the police station. Please go quickly.”
Gunkichi pattered eagerly away; Taro played on in the sunny road; O
Kimi San sat and crooned a nursery song as she worked on the little
garment; and in the shrine of Hachiman, on the top of the Tengu Rock, a
great black snake, coiled in the damp coolness, awaited another message
from the god.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The annual Feast of the Dead, or _O Bon Matsuri_, is celebrated at
the August full moon. At this time, for three days, the spirits of the
dead are believed to revisit their old homes, and special measures are
taken for their reception and entertainment.
[2] The pipe led the water from hot springs to the baths in the village.
[3] Literally, “Little Mr. Priest,” the universal title of the small
boy, probably on account of his shaven head.
[4] Literally, “Spirit-Invoking Temple” at Tokyo, whither the spirits
of soldiers who die in battle return, and where they live and receive
the honor and offerings of their grateful compatriots.
[5] “Honorable return,” the greeting to a returning guest or member of
the household.
[6] “Just now,” the conventional reply to the greeting.
II
AT THE SHRINE OF FUDŌ
It had come at last. Torao had been wondering all day how he should
tell his mother. The reserve regiment of which he was a member had been
ordered to the front, and he must go day after to-morrow. As he whirled
homeward through the Tokyo streets, his fast-trotting kurumaya
rushing headlong into the crowds with loud shouts of “He! He!” he
looked straight in front of him with knitted brows and unseeing eyes,
hoping one moment that she had not yet returned from her visit to her
sister, the next, that she would be waiting for him, and that he could
see her at once and have it over.
He had passed through the thronged avenues of Uyeno Park, now in its
full glory of cherry blossoms, and was winding along the narrow lanes
of the Negishi quarter, and he had not yet decided whether it would
be best to tell her to-night, or to let her have one more night of
rest and happiness without knowing what the future had in store for
her. He did not think of himself at all. All his life he had hoped, and
for months he had expected, that he would have his chance to serve the
Emperor, and if so it should be ordained, to die in that service. Now
that the time had come and he was called, if he had thought of himself
at all, it would have been with the exaltation that comes from the
near fulfillment of a high destiny. Nor did Fuyu, his young wife, add
greatly to the burden of his mind. She loved him, to be sure, with a
supreme devotion that would give him her very soul, if need be; a love
to which he responded with the condescending though sincere affection
that Japanese husbands are apt to bestow on their wives. But when he
thought of her, it was with a calmness that could reason out her future
and derive a comfort that was almost satisfaction from the forward
look. If he should fall, and their child, whom he might never see,
should live, Fuyu would find a hope and pleasure in its existence that
would go far toward cheering her life. If, through some mischance,
their baby should not live, Fuyu would then be free to return to her
father’s house. She was young, she could begin life anew, and might in
the future become again a happy wife and the mother of children.
But his mother,--his brows knitted more closely,--she was old; she had
reached the age of rest and freedom from care, after a long life of
labor and sorrow. His mind ran back to those days, long ago, when in
her early widowhood, ruined in estate by the same war that had taken
her husband from her, she had been father and mother, comrade and
friend, to his babyhood. How long the days seemed when she was away at
the government school in which she earned, by eight hours of absence
from her home and her baby, the pittance that kept them both alive!
Kind old Bāya, the nurse and general servant, would while away the
time for the little fellow as best she could, by songs and stories, by
taking him out for long walks to see the temples and the shops and the
flowers,--walks so long that sometimes his feet would falter and fail,
and she would have to pick him up and carry him on her back, holding
his dirty little clogs in her hand so that they should not soil her
dress.
Bāya was kind and amusing, and a very comfortable person for a small
boy to depend upon, but she was not his mother, and so he was lonely
all those days, and only at night did he feel that he was really
satisfied. For when she came home from her long hours of work, what a
wonderful coziness the little house took on suddenly! He would watch
for her every night in the front room, and when he heard her clogs stop
at the lattice, he would bounce quickly out and fling it open wide,
and shout “O kaeri!” and seize her bundle of books and pull her into
the house. And they had such good times together. She was never too sad
or too tired or too busy to listen with the most absorbed interest to
the story of his day, to laugh at the funny paper toys he brought home
to her for _o mi age_,[7] to explain to him all the strange things that
he had seen, and to cuddle him and make much of him until at last, when
Bāya had spread the beds upon the floor and he had crept into his, the
dim light of the _andon_[8] would shine upon his mother’s face close
beside him, the last and loveliest object upon which his sleepy eyes
rested.
Torao shut his eyes now to call up again that face of his
childhood,--smooth, oval, with velvet eyes and firm, beautiful lips
that flashed from their wonted seriousness into the most brilliant of
smiles in response to his baby wit or awkward boyish affection. The
abundant hair grew to a little point on the low, broad forehead, and
was combed smoothly back and cut short at the nape of the neck, the
cropped ends held in place by a clasp.
“Poor mother,” said Torao, thinking of the many years that she had
worn this sign of her widowhood, nor knew that he had spoken until the
kurumaya in the shafts turned his head over his shoulder as he ran, to
inquire, “Did the master speak?”
With an impatient phrase he answered the man, but the vision of his
early boyhood had faded from his mind, and in its place was the little,
worn, tired mother of to-day. The smooth, oval face was lined and
hollow-cheeked, the soft, deep eyes were dim, the abundant black hair
was thin and iron-gray, the sweet mouth, with its soft curves, had
taken on an expression of resignation and patient endurance,--signs of
the prolonged toil and continual self-sacrifice by means of which she
had managed to educate her son, until at last, in a good position in
the Bank of Japan, he was giving back to her in her old age something
of the care and service with which she had surrounded his boyhood.
Since his marriage, less than a year ago, the mother had become Go
Inkyo Sama, “the honorable retired one,” and free from the cares which
had been her lot for thirty years, she lived in her own portion of her
son’s house, honored and beloved by her son and her daughter-in-law.
Instead of the long days at school, she could devote her time to
visiting her friends or receiving them in her own rooms. There was now
abundant leisure for days at the theatre, for attendance at the temple
festivals, for excursions to the parks and gardens to see the flowers
as they came into bloom in the orderly procession of the seasons.
Torao, even as he groaned inwardly over the sorrow that must come to
darken these sunny days of old age, could not but smile as he thought
how difficult it had been for his mother to acquire the rest habit. It
was hard for her, who had waited upon herself and her son for thirty
years, to sit still and let Fuyu do the little things that were now her
care. From early morning, when the _amado_ were to be opened and the
house made ready for the day, till bedtime, when the _futons_[9] must
be spread on the floor and the night lights lighted behind their white
paper shades, O Fuyu needed to be brisk indeed, if she would attend to
her work before Go Inkyo Sama could attempt it. And as for the visits
and festivities which Torao had hoped that his mother would enjoy in
the freedom of her new position, she had so long been forced to leave
her home each day, whether she would or no, that to her there seemed
no pleasure comparable to sitting down with O Fuyu when the morning
work was done, and sewing, chatting, reading, writing, and smoking tiny
pipefuls of tobacco from time to time, through the pleasant, restful
days. And now the prospect of a grandchild had made her so solicitous
for O Fuyu’s health that she had taken almost the entire work of
the house upon herself, so that Torao had been driven to add to the
family a little girl to wait upon his mother; and O Kō San, a child of
fourteen, neat, smiling, slender, and most anxious to learn the polite
ways of the gentry, had been imported from their native province to
save Go Inkyo Sama from her own zeal.
The high, breathless “O kaeri!” of the kurumaya, as he dashed in at
the gate, roused Torao from his reverie. Panting and dripping, hat in
hand and blue wing-sleeves rolled to the shoulder, the kurumaya bent
double beside the little carriage as his master stepped to the ground.
There was a pattering of feet within the house, and as Torao sat to let
the man unlace his shoes,--for he wore his business dress with all its
foreign accompaniments,--O Kō San slid open the _shoji_ and prostrated
herself face downward in the vestibule, murmuring her “O kaeri!”
“Has my mother returned?” he asked.
O Kō San lifted her head and bowed again. “Go Inkyo Sama returned not
half an hour ago, and is now awaiting the master in her room. She
brought many gifts home from her sister’s.”
“Torao,”--it was O Fuyu now who was bowing and smiling with the
pleasure of his return and of the gifts that Go Inkyo Sama had
brought,--“Torao, forgive me that I was not at the door to meet you,
but mother has just returned and I was with her.”
She looked up at him after her low bow, and caught from his face some
premonition of the coming sorrow. “Oh, Torao! What is it? What has
happened? Why do you look so strange?”
His voice was gentle as he answered her, “Come, we will go to mother’s
room, and there we can talk it all over.” There was no question now of
when or how he should tell the news. Certainty was better than the
fear that came into O Fuyu’s eyes when she saw his face.
Go Inkyo Sama was sitting in her room, surrounded by the presents that
her sister had heaped upon her after the all-day visit she had been
trying so long to make. The great box of cake, the bolt of soft gray
silk, the wooden case containing a rare curio, each wrapped neatly
about with a sheet of white paper, tied with red-and-white strings,
and adorned with a _noshi_,[10] relieved the spotless simplicity of
the matted room, giving it almost a furnished aspect. The old lady sat
by the _hibachi_,[11] for the day was cool with the damp chilliness of
the springtime, and with tiny pipe in hand was taking her comfort in a
leisurely smoking bout while she awaited her son’s return.
“O kaeri,” she said, as he and Fuyu entered, and it was only after his
face was lifted from the bow with which he responded “Tadaima,” that
she could see the cloud upon it.
“Mother,” he said, and he paused a moment.
“Yes, my son.” The look of patient endurance that the years had taught
her was behind the caressing smile that always came to her lips when
she spoke to him.
“Mother,” he began again; then with a plunge, “I have been ordered to
the front. I must go the day after to-morrow.”
Even Torao’s years of closest intimacy with his mother had not prepared
him for the change that swept across the gentle, refined old face.
It was as if a light had been suddenly lighted from within; as if
the faith and patience of a lifetime had been at last crowned by
fulfillment. She bowed in reverence, her face between her hands upon
the matted floor.
“How great is the honor vouchsafed to us by our lord the Emperor!” she
murmured softly,--“to us, who have waited all these years to make
atonement!”
Torao listened in amazement. O Fuyu at the threshold bowed in grief
and awe, while little O Kō San in the passage beyond snuffled audibly
as she crouched with her nose flattened against the polished floor. Go
Inkyo Sama lifted her head at last. Her eyes were bright and tearless,
her withered cheeks slightly reddened with the excitement.