of the supreme misbeliefs of the world. Before dinner, when we were
sitting on our narrow balcony, we had said good-evening to a circle
of young men who were lounging on cushions in the large room next to
ours. Later they dressed and went out and we forgot them. I awoke to
hear through the thin wall that they had returned. They were holding
a Japanese conversation. Such a conversation can only be described
by telling what it is not. In rhythm it is neither the cæsura of
the French peasant woman retailing gossip, nor is it the eluding
tempo-harmonic tune of the Red Indian drum beat; it is not the Chinese
intoning nor is it a staccato. At first the foreign ear does not
distinguish the beat of the cadences but once captured the appreciation
of the subtle metrical wave is never again lost. We had the opportunity
of full orientation that night. The paper wall was but a second tympan
to our ears.
Their conversation as an entity was a musical composition effected
without counterpoint and played by the instruments in succession.
First there was a swing of phrases from one speaker, and then after a
decorous and proper dramatic pause there was an answering swing from
another. No speaker was interrupted. The right of reply was passed
about as if it were as physically tangible as a loving cup.
There was one distinct suggestion from the monotony of it all above
every other impression, a something absolutely alien to any Occidental
conversation. While they talked and drank tea and drank tea and talked,
I twisted about under my tent puzzled to solve what that impression
was. Suddenly I found words to express to myself the sought-for
revelation. The effect of a long Japanese conversation is that of
_voiceful contemplation_. Separated from them physically only by a
paper wall, we belonged to another world, a world which has ordered
its existence without finding contemplation and its manifestations a
necessary adjunct.
The mosquitoes, which all night had kept up a noisy circling over our
net, flew off at daybreak. Some speaker spoke the concluding word in
the next room and for a few minutes the universe was quiet. Then came
the high shrieking of the ungreased axles of coolie carts being dragged
to the rice fields. I took my quilt and cushions out onto the balcony.
The inn began waking up. Down in the garden two kitchen maids appeared.
They were arousing their energy by dipping their faces into brass
basins of cold well water. I left my balcony and wandered below to find
a basin for myself.
The inn had filled during the night with guests of all descriptions
and ranks. They were coming forth from under their quilts. A _ne-san_
stepped to the wellside and filled a basin for me and then ran off to
find a gift toothbrush. Another maid, lazily binding on her _obi_,
stayed her dressing for a moment to pour cool water from a wooden
dipper over my head and neck. Getting up o’ the morning is a social
cooperation in a Japanese inn.
Breakfast came. After breakfast I sat down on the balcony cushions to
smoke and to breathe the delicious morning air and I promptly went
to sleep. I wished to go on sleeping forever and to let the world
work, or walk, or talk, or do anything it might choose to do, but
O-Owre-san appeared, saying that he had paid the bill. He had stuffed
our presents into his rucksacks and had had the dramatic farewells to
himself. After one has accepted a going-away present, one goes. Tense
good-byes do not brook recapture. The super-wanderer is thus forbidden
ever to retrace his steps. For him alone, his life being always the
anticipation of the next note of the magic flute, does the present
become real by eternally existing as a becoming. He will not pay the
price for contentment, which is to re-live and rethink the past.
When we at length reached Nagoya, where the government bureau records
temperatures scientifically, we learned that the week had been really
one of extraordinary heat. Among other symptoms of the week, deranged
livers and prickly irritation had inspired angry letters in the
readers’ columns of the foreign newspapers, belabouring everything
native, particularly the casual discarding of clothing. A newspaper
editor told us that such attacks of hyper-sensitiveness over nudity
come not to foreigners newly arrived nor to those residents who sanely
take long vacations back to their homelands (where they may have
the rejuvenation of themselves being homogeneous with the masses),
but to the conscientious unfortunates who remain too long at their
posts. Round and about them for the twenty-four hours of the day
and the seven days of the week surges the sea of native life. The
feeling of lonesome strangeness, which can never be entirely lost by
the foreigner, feeds on its own black moods and this poisonous diet
suddenly nourishes a dull hatred. Then come the bitter letters to
the press demanding that the Japanese reform themselves into Utopian
perfection and threatening that unless they so do the foreign guests of
the empire will assemble in convention and design an all-enveloping bag
(with a drawing string to be pulled tight about the neck of the wearer)
as a national costume for their hosts for evermore.
If hot days in the port cities, where there is some mild regulation of
costume, can bring such disturbances of mind to anxiously missioning
folk, we thought that it was as well that they were not walking with
us that day through the villages of the broad plain which slopes from
Mount Keisoku to Ise Bay. It was before we were out of the hills that
our road carried us through a grove. A stone-flagged walk led into
the shadows of the trees and we could see at its end the beginning of
a long flight of stone steps which bespoke some hidden and ancient
shrine beyond. A small stream flowed alongside the path and cut our
road under an arched stone bridge. We heard shouts of laughter from the
pines and the next moment an avalanche of children came tumbling along
as fast as their legs could take them. Some were cupids with bright
coloured _kimonos_ streaming from their shoulders; some did not have
even that restraint. A tall, slender maiden was in pursuit, and the
pursuit was part of some game. They dashed by us through the light and
shadow and were lost again in the pines.
It was the reincarnation of a Greek relief. In that flash of the
moment in which we saw them, the glistening nude body of the pursuing
girl running through the green and brown and grey of the grove was
passionately and superbly the plea of nature against man’s crucifying
purity upon the cross of sophistication.
I regretted to O-Owre-san the having within me so much of that very
sophistication that I had begun immediately to moralize upon such a
sheerly beautiful vision. He, who had been saying nothing, replied
with an end-all to the subject. “Your mild regret,” said he, “that
dispassionate analysis has displaced passionate creativeness is the
penalty you pay for the pleasure of studying your own sadness.”
The Greeks, I believe, had for one of their two axioms by which they
covered the conduct of wise living, “No excess in anything.” I had very
fearlessly compared the young girl to a Greek relief, but when we were
out of the hills and were in the meaner villages of the plains I began
to feel the truth of that Greek dictum that people can mix too much
practice into a theory, especially when it comes to an overwhelming
surrender to naturalness. I lost my enthusiasm for my so shortly before
uttered panegyric of a world naturally and unconsciously nude. I began
to understand a new meaning in the artist’s cry of “Give me Naples and
her rags!” Especially the rags! Upon some occasions art and sensibility
need the rags far more than does morality.
All this argument was with myself as O-Owre-san’s dismissal of my
tentative first offering on the subject had not been encouraging
to further communication. I then proceeded to a further step in my
private debate and queried whether in the selection of clothes, to be
truly practical, man would not be served better by trusting to comfort
rather than to either art or morality; and then I came upon the thought
that comfort has no strength to resist convention when they collide,
and as convention, with the guile of the serpent, always makes much
pretension of riding in the same omnibus with virtue, perhaps after all
the true wisdom of life is to stay close to convention and thus one
will be pretty sure to reach Journey’s End in good shape. I mentioned
my change of heart to O-Owre-san as we were sitting down in the shade
of a _ramune_ shop, where unabashed nudity had gathered in a circle
to regard the foreigners. He did not seem to be moved to interest by
my reformation. I heaped a malediction on his head. Surely if I were
willing to rearrange my opinions seven times daily at some one stage he
might agree.
It was during this rest that I came upon the happiest adventure that
the mouth of man may hope to experience in this imperfect world. I
had been thirsty from that first day in the East when I had begun
breathing in Manchurian dust. In Peking I had tried to cool my throat
by every variety of drink offered through the mingling of Occidental
and Oriental civilizations. In Korea, a certain twenty-four hours
of wandering alone and lost among the baked and arid mountains had
further augmented the parching of my tongue--an increasement which I
had believed to be impossible. Along the Tokaido we were free to drink
as much chemical lemonade as our purse could buy and, despite the
warnings of all red-bound guide books, we drank the water. But never,
since the beginning of my thirst, had I found a liquid worth one word’s
praise as a quencher, neither water nor wine, neither _ramune_ nor tea.
I have irreverently forgotten the name of the village of the discovery.
As we sat resting in the _ramune_ shop I looked about and saw some
champagne cider bottles of unusually large size. The quantity rather
than the flavour of that particular chemical combination was the
appeal. I asked for two of the bottles, making the request to a maid
who was hoisting a flag over the door. The flag had a single Chinese
character printed on it. It was a sign which I later learned to
distinguish from incredible distances. After flinging out the flag, she
took down two bottles from the shelf but instead of opening them she
smiled with a beaming which came from the secure faith that she was
bearing good news.
“_Kori wa ikago desu?_” she asked.
The concluding three words are among the first to be learned from the
phrase book and mean “Do you wish?” The word _kori_ I remembered from
its having been one of the extras of our first night. It means “ice.”
We said yes, that we would like ice, but in our ignorance we spoke
with no marked ebulliency. She smiled again and sat down, folding her
arms in her _kimono_ sleeves, an equivalent of that expression of
contented virtue shown when our own housewives peacefully wrap their
hands in their aprons.
[Illustration: THE KORI (ICE) FLAG OF THE “ADVENTURER”]
That the flag above the door had some definite meaning for the
villagers began to be most evident. The shop was filling. Mob
expectancy is contagious and we found ourselves waiting tensely with no
clear idea what we were waiting for. The shop was now quite full and
all eyes were turned to the street. We heard shouts from the outside
that were almost _banzais_, and a coolie came running in. His face
was aflame from the happy look of completed service. He was carrying
a dripping block of ice in many wrappings of brown hemp cloth. I do
not know how far he had come with the ice. Perhaps he had been to some
station of the distant railroad. The maid took her hands from her
_kimono_ sleeves and seized the ice. She pulled off the wrappings.
Next she took a saw and cut off an end from the cake. Another maid
re-wrapped the precious remainder in the hemp cloth and buried it in a
pit dug in the floor. A third maid had been standing by with a board
which had a sharp knife edge set into it. The first maid scraped the
end of the ice cake over this inverted plane and shavings of sparkling
snow fell into her hand. She packed this whiteness into two large,
flat, glass dishes. She poured into the snow the effervescing champagne
cider and brought us the “adventure.”
An adventure is an adventure in proportion to the emotion aroused.
For days without end thirst had been sitting astride my tongue. Just
as the Old Man of the Sea fastened his thighs around Sindbad’s neck
and then kicked the poor man’s ribs mercilessly with his heels, so
had my parasite tickled my throat with his toes. To have unthroned
my tormentor at the beginning of his companionship would have been
a sensuous satisfaction. To do so after having known the abysses of
abject slavery was an ecstasy exceeding the dreams of lovers.
I flushed the ice particles around in my mouth until my eyes rolled in
my head. O-Owre-san was alarmed into protests. I had no time to listen.
I ordered another bowl of snow and another bottle. It was costing _sen_
after _sen_ but I knew in my soul that if I had to beg my rice to get
to Yokohama and had to sleep under temple steps, even if the price
for the snow thus beggared me, the uttermost payment could be in no
proportion to the value.
The fertile plain through which the Tokaido now wound was crowded with
the sight of man. A few houses always clustered wherever a rise in the
ground could lift them above the water of the rice fields. The paddy
toilers, digging with their hands around the rice roots, worked in long
lines, men and women, with their bodies bent flat down from their hips
against their legs. If they noticed our passing and looked up, we would
say, “It is hot!” and they would say, “It is hot!” Finally an avenue
of scrub pines brought shade and I declared for a siesta. Our first
attempt gave way before a horde of ants. We tried relaying the top
stones of a heap of boulders and then climbed up on that edifice, going
to sleep quite contentedly. When I yawned into wakefulness I looked
lazily around the landscape wondering where I was. I felt queerly and
strangely alone. It was not that the sound of breathing from under
O-Owre-san’s helmet had ceased. He had not become a deserter, but while
we were sleeping every peasant in the fields had disappeared. There can
be, then, a degree of heat under which a coolie will not labour, and we
had found the day of that heat.
In the next village we discovered our labourers again. They were lying
on the floors of their open-sided houses, the elders motionless except
for the deep rising and falling of their breasts and an arm lifted now
and then in desultory fanning. The children, however, were restless
enough to be startled into gazing at the two strangers who were walking
the gauntlet of the narrow street.
We had seen an ice flag over a shop at the very entrance to the town
but O-Owre-san suggested that there would surely be another shop
farther along. I accepted his reasoning but there was not another
_kori_ flag to be found anywhere. We had reached the last house. The
sign over the shop we had passed was at least a mile back along that
burning white cañon. O-Owre-san stopped in at the last house to beg
some well water. I looked at the water and thought of the ice.
“If there ever was any ice back there,” said he, “it’s melted by this
time.”
I was venomous. I left my luggage and started back.
The children, maybe, had been telling their parents of the sight that
they had missed, a sight which might never come again. The grinding of
my heels this time brought a somewhat larger audience to their elbows.
They appeared appreciative of my second appearance. I staggered on and
on, mopping my head with a blue and white gift towel. I felt in my
limbs the exact strength that would carry me to that _kori_ shop, but
to have had to go a foot beyond might well have meant an experience in
hallucinations which I had no wish to know.
An old man, who grinned toothlessly, dug down into a sawdust pit and
exhumed a fair-sized cake of ice. He moved about his work grotesquely
as if he were an animated conceit of carved ivory quickened into life
for a moment by the hyper-heat. He at last gave me a bowl of snow
with sprinkled sugared water over it. I munched the ice for a full
half-hour. As I slowly grew cooler the crowd about me slowly grew
larger. They stood silently staring, always staring.
The change for the silver piece which I put down was a heap of coppers.
It must have weighed half a pound or more. I might not have been so
generous if the wealth had been more portable. As it was, I invited
in two or three boys from the circle of the crowd. A carpenter’s
apprentice had been sitting on the bench beside me. He had paid for
one bowl of snow which he had held close to his lips, tossing the sugar
powdered ambrosia into his mouth with dexterous flips of a tiny tin
spoon. He looked at the ice supply about to disappear into the pit and
I invited him to a further participation. He glanced at me intensely
for a second as if he wished to solve by that one glance every reason
for my existence. Then he turned his attention to his second bowl,
which I paid for. His hair was clipped close to his skull. The fresh,
youthfully transparent skin of his face was stretched like a sheet of
rubber, the tension holding down his nose and allowing his eyes to
stare with an openness impossible to optics otherwise socketed.
Just how the round, cannonball head of the Japanese boy evolutes into
the featured physiognomy of the Japanese man is puzzling. It must be
a sort of bursting. The schoolboy’s eyes betray the passing moods of
his emotions, but there is always something beyond the mood of the
moment in his gazing, an intangible yearning for infinity. It must at
times be terrifying for an Anglo-Saxon teacher or missionary to face
those eyes. Such a victim may find respite by swearing in the court of
all that is practical and material that the mere physical strangeness
of the deep staring has bewitched him. He is wise if, by clinging to
analysis of the objective world, he can restrain all passion to disturb
such mysteries--otherwise he may be led into a voyage such as that of
Urashima to the enchanted island. And then, if ever he seeks to return
to his Western identity, he may find that the world which he once knew
has died and that he stands neither wedded to the daughter of the
Dragon King nor possessing the substance of his former self.
I was thus dreamily communing, studying the face of the carpenter’s
apprentice. It was he who recalled me from such heat born, mental
wanderings by finishing his ice, picking up his _kimono_ and throwing
it over his shoulder, and walking off with the air of, “Well, you ice
dreamer, I have been with you for a moment, but now I have work to do
in the world.” I followed after him and walked out again into the fiery
street.
I can swear that the ice had cooled me back to the normal. I felt
myself a part of the obvious world. I had banished the disease known as
the imagination. I was doing the most practical thing for the moment,
going back to my rucksack. But I can also swear that the real world was
most unfairly unreal. Great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers,
who had passed so far along on their journey through life that probably
they had given up hope of ever again seeing anything new and worldly
strange to interest them, had been carried to the fronts of the houses
to behold the outlander. It was as if I had not come to see Japan
but Japan had been waiting long and patiently to see me, a parading
manikin in a linen suit and yellow boots and a pith helmet. The naked,
old, old women, their ribs slowly moving under their dried skin as if
breathing and staring were their last hold upon the temporal world,
knelt, supported by their children, on the mats. Walking slowly by I
felt that I was the sacrificial pageant of the ceremony for their final
surrender. There was not a sound from their lips. I began to have a
sense of remarkable completeness, that I was a single figure with no
possible replica. It was not until I saw O-Owre-san’s blue shirt that
I was able to snap the thread which was leading me not out of but into
the tortuous labyrinth of such speculative folly.
“I was just going back to look for you,” said he, “I thought you must
have had a sunstroke.”
It seemed just then an unnecessary and a too complicated endeavour to
explain the minute difference between standing with one’s toes on the
edge of the calamity which he had feared for me and the actuality of
toppling over the precipice. Thus I merely replied that I was feeling
all right.
Some tribes of men have in their dogma that the beard must never be
trimmed. I am able to imagine that O-Owre-san would carry a sympathetic
understanding always with him, no matter among what races he might
go adventuring, except into the society of the disbelievers in beard
trimming. He demands an extreme exactitude in the trimming of his
own beard which proclaims the existence of a certain precise flair
of idealism. This flair may be seen manifested in him also in such
croppings out as his appreciation for flawless cloisonné. The fact
that he had discovered a barber shop and had not made immediate use
of his find was overwhelming proof that he had been really solicitous
about me. Now that I had returned he made no further delay but sat down
in the chair. I stretched out on the matting to wait. The barber’s
daughter brought cushions and placed them under my head and then knelt
at my shoulder to send scurrying breaths of cool air from her fan
across my face.
When I awoke O-Owre-san was paying the barber’s charge. It amounted,
if I remember, to three _sen_, or perhaps three and one-half _sen_.
Whatever it was the now properly trimmed _kebukei_ foreigner left four
_sen_ and one-half from his honourable purse, and there was another
copper or two as thanks to O-Momo-san for the gentle medicine of her
fan.
The barber’s clippers, which he had used with such art, had perhaps
cost four _yen_. If so, they would--as may be determined by simple
division--require at least one hundred similar payments before the
return to the barber of their initial cost; and there were the razors,
and the chair, and the shining cups and bottles, all representing
capital outlay; and there must have been rent to pay. There are three
demi-gods of the East and only under their reign lies the answer. Great
is rice, that it satisfies the hunger. Great is cotton, that it clothes
the limbs. Great is art, that it can build the home from the simple
bamboo. The barber jingled the four _sen_ and a half between his palms,
and the jingle was the music that sings of the buying of the rice, the
cotton, and the bamboo. There is mystery and magic in economics; and
there is, in the submission of man to recognize money as a medium of
exchange and in his cooperating to maintain that recognition by law
and force, the greatest story in the world.
The barber ceased jingling the coins and dropped them into a drawer.
His daughter remained kneeling, her wistful, gentle head bowed low in
good-byes. She had been silent but I imagined that I knew two of her
thoughts--no, I should say, two of her moods. One was quite obvious.
She had been amused (it was an adventure in its way) to fan to sleep a
foreign guest. But the other mood, born of dreaming, was asking where
the road led, which those strange visitors were striking out upon,
stretching away into the distance as does the march into the beyond of
life.
We were talking idly one day with a maid in a certain inn. Her name was
O-Kimi-san, and she was pretty in the flush of youth, and “very pretty
anyhow,” as O-Owre-san critically observed. Her feet were quick as
sunshine when she ran for our dinner trays, or to bring tea instantly
to our room upon our coming in from the street, or to fetch glowing
charcoal to our elbow if we should wish to smoke, and her fingers were
cunning in all the other little luxuries of service. She was saving
money, she said, for the wedding which might be, but as she had
neither father nor mother to arrange a marriage she added quite simply
that she was only hoping to be married. She desired to wed a merchant,
with a shop of his own, having a little room upstairs over the bazaar
so that the good wife might be able to run down and attend to customers
between domestic duties. She declared an antique shop would be the
best, for one can buy nowadays from the wholesalers such wonderful,
not-to-be-detected imitations. But her eyes grew sad. It was not within
reason to hope that a merchant with such a shop would ever love a
dowerless girl, and it was taking so long to save the capital herself.
Why, one of the maids of the inn had been there sixteen years! If she
had only three hundred _yen_ the heaven upon earth might be hers.