wondering what lay beyond the farthest distance she could see along the
road, was not imagining a little shop, where between domestic cares she
could take time to wait upon customers.
It is for the imagination of dreaming O-Momo-san that the priests
light the incense at the sacred altar; it is for practical O-Kimi-san
that they read the traditional advice from the theology of moral
maxims. The Marys and the Marthas! The cherry blossoms are a bloom of
mysterious beauty for the daughter of the barber; they are a symbol of
gay festival time for the practical maid of the inn. Will it be the
end for the daughter of the barber of Kasada to marry her father’s
apprentice and to live on in the little shop, dreaming until dreams
slumber and are forgotten, knowing only this of the old Tokaido that it
leads away in a straight line until it is lost in the brilliant blur of
the sun on the waters of the rice fields? Or will her imagining heart
know adventure in the world beyond the vision of her doorstep? Perhaps
the _sen_ will come so slowly to the barber’s drawer that the wistful
daughter will be sold to a _geisha_ master, and in filial piety,
fulfilling the contract, she may go even to Tokyo where she will be
taught to sing and to dance and to laugh gaily. She may find that life
is kind. Again, she may be sold to another life--under the juggernaut
of poverty--and in the Nightless City knowledge will come to dwell in
the empty place where wistfulness was.
We walked away from Kasada along the unchanging road; one blade of
rice was like another, one step was like another, finally one thought
became like another. Nagoya was many miles ahead. O-Owre-san, the
tramper, is of the faith which holds that to give in to a stretch
of road just because it is dull is to surrender for no reason at
all. That is good doctrine. I have something of it, but my hold upon
the faith is admixed with a Catholicism which does not preclude the
restful and inward harmony of maintaining speaking acquaintance with
several conflicting beliefs. On the other hand O-Owre-san will, simply
and unostentatiously, subordinate his preferences, but the surrender
is so generous that that virtue is usually a protection in itself
against applied selfishness. To escape any disagreeable feeling of
shame I thought it might be that O-Owre-san could be induced to
make the suggestion himself that we take some more rapid means of
transportation. We were in the land of _jiu-jitsu_. The fundamental
idea of this system is that you politely assist your opponent to throw
himself. I began by alluding to the thrills and possibilities of the
antique shops of Nagoya. If we should continue walking we could not
reach there until late at night, and if we should find Kenjiro Hori
waiting for us and prepared to be off early the next morning, when
would there be time for exploring? I then ventured casually that the
railroad would take us to Nagoya in a couple of hours. Imagination
began to work as my ally. O-Owre-san at last queried directly whether
I would be willing to give up walking in the country for exploration
in the city. I yielded. Thus, when the arrogant Tokaido of steel
crossed our road, as the map had told me it soon would, two foreigners
with rucksacks found places amid teapots and babies, bundles and ever
fanning elders, and soon they saw the tall smokestacks of modern Nagoya.
Our kit of clean linen and clean suits had been forwarded from Kyoto in
care of the foreign hotel. Perhaps we each had had the idea when the
bag was packed that we would be exceedingly content to catch up with it
again, not alone for the contents but in anticipation that the finding
would mean that we would be again surrounded by the comfort of Western
standards exotically flourishing. Alas for the stability of our tenet!
We were aware that our capitulation to the simplicity of the native
inns sprang partly from the glamour of the new, but the conquest had
come from realization and not mere anticipation. Dilettantes we were,
truly, and as such we acknowledged ourselves, but we should be credited
that we escaped the eczema of reformers. We had no obsession to
hasten back to our own land to argue the multitudes out of the custom
of wearing shoes in the house or sitting on chairs instead of floors.
Nevertheless when we walked into the door of the hotel and up the
stairs every tread of our heavy, dusty boots struck at our sensibility
of a better fitness and order.
We walked along the upstairs hall and passed a room with wide open
double doors. There was Kenjiro Hori waiting for us; that is, a
semblance of O-Hori-san was there, his material body. When a Japanese
sleeps his absorption by his dream hours is so complete that one is
tempted to believe that his so-called waking hours (no matter how
manifested in energy) may be only a hazy interim between periods of
a much more important psychic existence. We walked into the room and
sat down and talked things over and waited for the opening of Hori’s
eyelids, but they moved not. O-Owre-san at last departed to seek
treasure trove in the antique shops and I decided for the laziness of a
bath.
I asked for a hot bath. The bath boy’s uniform was starched and new,
and he was starched and new in his position as drawer of water. He
was very proud of such responsibility and was very earnest and very
smiling. In some other occupation he had picked up a little English.
He promised to hurry. Minutes went by. Above the sound of the running
of the water I could hear a mysterious pounding and scraping. This
combination of noises continued with no regard for passing time. Now
and again I pounded on the door in Occidental impatience. “Very quick!
Very quick!” would come his answer. When the bolt did snap back I could
see from his perspiring face that he must have been hurrying after
some fashion of his own. He bowed and pointed to the tub. I put in one
foot--and out it came. The water might have come from a glacier.
“I asked for a hot bath--_o yu, furo_,” I shouted.
There was no retreat of the smiles. They even grew.
“Japanese man, he take hot bath. Foreign man, he take cold bath.”
I now understood the scraping and pounding. The hot days had attacked
the water tanks of the hotel until the faucets marked “Cold” were
running warm. The bath boy had been laboriously stirring around a cake
of ice in the tub. Blandly came the repetition, “Foreign man, he take
cold bath.”
For the sake of sweet courtesy and kindly appreciation I should have
sat down in that water, but I did not. I pulled out the stopper and
drew a hot tub. When the boy realized this sacrilege against the custom
of the foreign man, he veritably trembled from the violence of the
restraint which he had to put upon himself, but his idea of courtesy
was so far superior to mine that he retreated. I bolted the door
against him.
O-Owre-san returned from his field with enraptured accounts. There
is some sort of affinity between him and a bit of treasure. He is
the hazel wand and the antique is the hidden water, but as a human
divining rod he does not merely bend to magnetism, he leaps. My first
initiation to that knowledge had been so sufficiently striking that no
new evidences ever surprised me. That initiation had come when we were
riding one Sunday morning on the top of a tram in the cathedral city of
Bath. We were in the midst of a discussion. Half way through a sentence
he suddenly lifted himself over the rail and disappeared down the side
of the car. When I could finally alight more conventionally I ran back
to find him with his nose against a dull and uninviting window. From
the top of the tram he had seen within the shadows a chair. There was
no arousing the antique shop on Sunday and thus he left a note of
inquiry under the door and eventually that particular treasure, wrapped
in burlap, made its long journey to America.
He began discussing the treasures of Nagoya when in walked Hori.
“I don’t see how you got by my door,” said he.
“Weren’t you asleep?” I asked.
“Oh, just dozing,” he explained.
V THE ANCIENT NAKESCENDO
We had an hour to kill before dinner and we were irritably moody
against the foreign windows which gave us no breeze. “It’s housely
hot,” said O-Owre-san, and he sighed pathetically for the cool mats
of an inn floor where there would be a pot of freshly brewed tea at
his elbow and a green garden to look out upon. I was studying a map of
Japan, tracing out its rivers and mountains.
I have an inordinate passion for maps. Surely Stevenson had some such
passion. I venture that he first thought of the pirate’s chart of
“Treasure Island” and after that first imagination the story simply
wrote itself. Particularly does passion find satisfaction in one of
the old Elizabethan maps, printed in full, rich colours, the margins
portraying the waves of the sea with dolphins diving, and with barques
straining under bellied sails. Some are headed for the Spanish Main,
and others are striking out for the regions marked “Unknown.” Those old
Elizabethan maps could have been drawn only in the days of hurly-burly
England when the deep-chested seamen under Raleigh and Drake sang
savage sea songs in the taverns and the tingling life in a man’s veins
was worth its weight in adventure. No wonder that to-day, with our
pale, lithographed maps telling us the exact number of nautical miles
to the farthest coral island we have become analytic and scientific.
As Okakura said, “We are modern, which means that we are old.”
Nevertheless, a pale, errorless, unemotional map is better than no map
at all.
The particular map of Japan which I was studying had had a few
mysteries added in the printing which were not to be blamed upon the
geographer. The different colours had been laid on by the printer with
marked independence of registration. It was difficult to trace even
the old Tokaido, but imagination from practical experience told me
that when it followed the coast it led through miles and miles of rice
fields. Farther up on the map, in the mountain ranges above Nagoya, I
saw a blurred word and turning the sheet on end I read “Nakescendo.”
The word brought a remembrance. I began trying to piece together what
that memory was. At last I assembled a forgotten picture of a Japanese
whom I had once met on a train. In the beginning I had thought him
a modern of the moderns until he told me of his sacred pilgrimages.
It was my surprise, I suppose, in his tale of his tramping, staff in
hand, with the peasants that had made me so distinctly remember his
earnestness as he mouthed the full word “Nakescendo.” I rolled over on
the bed with my finger on the map and asked Hori if he had ever heard
of the Nakescendo.
Hori looked up in surprise as if I had rudely mentioned some holy name.
“All day,” said he, “I have been thinking of the Nakescendo.” Then he
told us how the Nakescendo road enters the mountains through the valley
of the beautiful Kiso river and, following the ranges first to the
north and then to the east, takes its way to Tokyo. In the era before
railroads it was a great arterial thoroughfare and in those feudal days
the _daimyos_ of the north and their retainers journeyed the Nakescendo
route with as much pomp as did their southern rivals along the Tokaido.
Nevertheless the Nakescendo now exists in history as the less famous
thoroughfare of the two. Hori suggested that the dimming of its fame
may have come because its ancient followers had cherished its beauty
with such intensity that they did not allow their artists to paint it
nor their poets to sing of it to the world, in the belief, perhaps,
that all objective praise could be but supererogation.
I had most of this imagining from Hori’s understatements rather than
from anything definite that he said. He is of the _samurai_ and his
ancestors learned the art of conversation in a court circle devoted to
the graces. The incompleted phrase of the East so subtly makes one an
accessory in the creation of the idea involved that we, of the West,
who live in a world of overstatement, find ourselves disarmed to deny.
One cannot discount words that have never been uttered.
I added to Hori’s words some definite phrases from my own imagination.
These were to influence O-Owre-san if possible. I knew that it had been
his long held dream to walk the Tokaido from end to end, but I had not
realized until I saw his dismay at my suggestion of a change how ardent
his dream had been. I had recklessly prophesied the mountains of the
Nakescendo to be the abode of spring among other praises. It could not
be denied that whatever the Tokaido was or was not, the rice fields
that had to be crossed would not be springlike.
We slept over such argument as we had had. The next day burst in the
glory of a burning sun, which was rather an argument on the side of
the mountain faction. The breakfast butter melted before our eyes.
O-Owre-san finished his marmalade and pushed back his chair, and
then casually capitulated. “Well,” he said, “if we are going to the
mountains, what are we waiting for?” What indeed? I ran upstairs to our
room and pulled off my hotel-civilization clothes and stuffed them into
the bag and labelled it for Yokohama. There was to be no more formal
emerging into the _seiyo-jin’s_ world for us until we should reach that
port of compulsion. O-Owre-san was less exuberant in his packing but he
cheerfully whistled some air--which was indeed forgiving--and as usual
was ready before I was.
Hori’s travelling kit had evidently bothered him not at all. A
half-dozen collars, two or three books, one or two supplementary
garments, and a straw hat were tied up in a blue and orange
handkerchief and this _furoshiki_ was tied to the handlebars of a
bicycle. Until we met the bicycle we had talked of the problems and
plans of the three of us, but from the instant of production there
was no gainsaying that there were four of us. Further, the really
colourful and unique personality among the four partners of the
vagabondage was that diabolical, mechanical contraption.
In making that machine, the manufacturer, without possibility
of dispute, had achieved the supremacy of turning out the most
consistently jerry-built affair since the beginning of time. He
merits first immortality both in any memorialization by the shades of
jerry-builders who have gone before and in the future from the tribe
as it expands and multiplies upon the earth. The loose, and often
parting, chain hung from sprocket wheels that marvellously revolved at
nearly right angles to each other. When Hori mounted into the saddle
the wheels fearsomely bent under his weight until their circumferences
advanced along the road in ellipses strange and unknown to the plotting
of calculus. The rims scraped the mudguards in continuous rattle as
if there were not enough other grinding sounds of despair coming
from every gear and bearing. In some way those abnormalities worked
together, acting in compensation. Any one of the single errors without
such correspondingly outrageous offset would have been prohibitive to
locomotion.
The indomitable spirit of the machine to keep going should perhaps be
praised, but its general character was steeped in malevolency against
all human kind. It hated Hori no less violently than it did us or
strangers. It hated and was hated and continued to leave a trail of
hatred in its path until a certain memorable day when we came to a
mountain climb. While we were discussing what best could be done for
its transport the proud spirit overheard that it would have to submit
to being tied upon a coolie’s back. It rebelled into heroic suicide at
that prospect. It committed _hara-kiri_. The entire mechanism collapsed
suddenly into an almost unrecognizable wreck.
“When the flower fades,” says Okakura Kakuzo, “the master tenderly
consigns it to the river or carefully buries it in the ground.
Monuments are even sometimes erected to their memory.” Hori gave a
piece of money to the coolie for a reverent burial of the demon wheel.
Our breakfast had really been luncheon and after our energy of
packing and getting started we so indulged our time in the shops on
the way out of the city that we finally decided that if we were to
get into the mountains before night we should have to take the train
over the paddy fields. The bicycle, the rucksacks, and the blue and
orange handkerchief, together with the owners, were crowded into an
accommodation train. The small engine puffed with the temperament of
a nervous pomeranian, throwing a volcanic spume into the air which
condensed into a fine diamond ash to come back to earth and to stream
into the windows and then to drift, eddy, and scurry about the seats
and floor.
An accommodation train has the verve of life which the conventions of a
through express stifle; but whether it be a New England local with bird
cages, or the Italian _misti_ with priests and snuff boxes, nursing
madonnas, garlic sandwiches, and chianti bottles, or the stifling
wooden boxes of Northern India crowded with Afridi and Babus, no train
in all the world is as domestic as the Japanese _kisha_. Friends and
the friends of friends come to rejoice in the dramatic formalities of
farewell. If perchance any individual on the platform is neither the
friend nor the friend of a friend of some departing one he takes an
altruistic pleasure in smiling upon the opportunities of others.
We bought our pots of tea with tiny earthenware cups attached and put
them on the floor as did everyone else; and we also bought our _bento_
boxes, of rice, raw fish, pickles, seaweed, and bamboo shoots, from
the criers of “_Bento! Bento!! Bento!!!_” The train started. No one was
bored; the children were not restless; and we of our carriage stayed
awake or went to sleep in every posture possible to the flexibility of
human limbs matched against the rigidity of wooden seats. The babies
came along and became acquainted and we sent them back to their parents
carrying gifts of cigarettes.
Curled up on the seat across from ours, with her head resting on her
luggage, was a girl about twenty years of age. She was a Eurasian and
was beautiful rather than pretty. Now and again her graceful arm raised
her fan but otherwise she did not move. Her dark eyes returned no
curious glances. Her mood of mind and soul seemed as frozen and hard
as the blue ice of a mountain glacier. It was a passionate negativity,
her defence against the instinct of society, which eternally wages war
upon the hybrid. It is instinctive, this struggle of the race mass
mind against the disintegration of its integrity. She had learned the
meaning of glances. The Eurasian must expiate a guiltless guilt. She
did not ask for quarter in the battle; far back of that cold, defensive
gaze was the strength of two proud races. Character makes fate, said
the Greeks. Inevitability may make tragedy. We were to pick up the
threads of old tales of love and tragedy along the valley of the Kiso,
but in the life of that strange, fearless, beautiful Eurasian girl was
the web and woof of a yet uncompleted story. When we at last passed our
bundles out of the window at Agematsu she had not stirred.
We had been carried out of the plains and night was coming down. Hori
voiced an inquiry about our landing spot. It was indeed high time to
be located some place for dinner and the night. Our indifference to
particularization about our landing had begun to harass him. In Kobe
and Nagoya when our surpassing indefiniteness had come out he had
nodded and said, “yes,” evidently putting his faith in the belief that
there would surely be an eventual limit to such casualness. I was slow
to realize his worry but when I did some primitive idea of justice told
me that his breaking into the inefficiency of our methods ought to be
more gentle and gradual. I whispered this intuition to O-Owre-san and
thus, when the train halted at the next platform, out went our luggage
and we were left standing to watch the fiery cloud of cinders disappear
into the blue-grey mist.
It had grown cold. The rain was curiously like snow, drifting through
the air, seemingly without weight. There was the beginning of a path
up a slippery clay hill, the upper reaches of which were lost in fog
and darkness. Even the short distances of vision, which until then
had endured, succumbed before we had scrambled up the hill. We made a
careful reconnaissance with hands and feet and found that the mountain
path at the top branched in several directions. The town might lie in
any direction. For more meditative cogitation Hori carefully lowered
the bicycle to its side but unfortunately there was no ground beneath
and off it slid. We heard it painfully scraping down the rocks. In
Alpine fashion we had to go after it. We crawled back again to stand in
a circle on the road, drenched and mud covered.
Dinner, bed, and bath might be within a hundred yards but to take the
wrong path might mean to wander until sunrise. At least so we thought.
Such a variety of adventure is much more interesting in retrospect
than prospect. However, it was worse to stand still. We started on an
exploration, craftily putting the bicycle next to the precipice. On
peaceful days the gears often meshed in moderate quietness but at any
time when its companions failed in omnipotent judgment they would
grind out a wailing reiteration of: “I told you so. I told you so.” We
were shuffling along to the measure of that lamentation when suddenly
there was a sparkle of light ahead. It was from a lantern. The bearer
was a peasant bundled up in a rush grass cape. He lifted the light into
our faces and then gave a single sharp cry of fear. Next he shut his
eyes tightly and was speechless.
A well-balanced consideration for the rights of one’s brothers is
intended for normal times. Now that a guide had offered himself to
us out of the darkness we purposed to keep him, although for a few
minutes he seemed a rather useless discovery. Hori managed at length
to pry the man’s eyes open with wet fingers and, then with fair words
sought to persuade him that if we were not ghosts we obviously needed
his help, but that if we were, then any sense left in him should tell
him that it would be far better to listen to our request to guide us
to an inn and to leave us there than to risk our trailing him to his
own home. He grasped Hori’s point. We followed after our guide and, as
we had suspected, the distance to the village was only a few steps. At
the threshold of the inn our guide bolted. If he had been cherishing a
grudge he should have waited to see our reception. It was not pleasing
to us.
Hori advanced into the courtyard to engage in Homeric debate. The fog
sweeping in struggled with the lights of the lanterns and candles. The
picture was a theatrical composition. There were the three rain-soaked,
laden intruders facing the maid-servants. The maids’ _kimono_ sleeves
were pinned back to their shoulders and their skirts were gathered up
through their girdles. Their faces and limbs gleamed in the coppery
light. The door to the steaming kitchen opened on to the courtyard and
within its shadows the pots and kettles hanging on the walls caught the
glowing flame of the charcoal. I suppose there was not a more honest
inn in all the land but the wild, picaresque picture suggested an
imagining by Don Quixote painted by Rembrandt or Hogarth or Goya. It
was a point of immediate reality, however, which concerned us, and that
point was that we were so far in the inn but no farther, and no farther
did we get.
They gave a reason. They said that the inn was full. It seemed so
ridiculous to have had such trouble in finding an inn and then to lose
it that O-Owre-san and I began laughing. We laughed inordinately, but
our barbarous merriment brought our listeners no nearer to changing
their conviction that the inn was full. There was another inn farther
down the street, they said, and we borrowed a lantern and a coolie
from them and started. The coolie ran ahead and when we arrived at the
second inn the mistress and all her maid-servants were at the door.
From the length of Hori’s argument I became suspicious that we again
were not considered desirable, but after a time he turned and said:
“It’s all right.”