tried to find out from Hori what the long debate was about, but English
is evidently much more laconic than Japanese. He summed it all up by
saying that they feared the inn was unworthy of foreigners. Admirable
_bushido_! What inn in the wide world could have been worthy of such
bedraggled wanderers? However, once we were allowed within the walls
and recognized as guests the spirit of hospitality welled solicitously.
Listen, O dogmatists! The joy of the finding is not always less than
the joy of the pursuit. If there are doubters let them seek the
Nakescendo trail and find the second inn of Agematsu, there to learn
that no dinner that they have ever imagined can equal the realization
they will discover inside the lacquer bowls and porcelain dishes which
will be brought to them.
The maid who had been assigned to administer to our comfort accepted
her duty as a trust. She was unbelievably short, but was very sturdy.
Her broad face and the strength of her round, unshaped limbs proclaimed
the hardy bloom of the peasantry. The physical, mental, and emotional
unity which comes as the heritage of such unmixed rustic blood is in
itself a prepossessing charm. Our daughter of Mother Earth was as
maternal as she was diminutive. She might think of a thousand services,
her bare feet might start of an instant across the mats to respond to
any requests, but never did she surrender one iota of her instinctive
belief that we, merely being men, were only luxurious accessories
for the world to possess. She was so primordially feminine that she
inspired a terrifying thought of the possibility of society being
sometime modelled after the queendom of the bees.
She had never seen a foreigner but she had heard much gossip of
our strange customs. Her inquiring mind was intent upon verifying
this gossip as far as possible. She was also very curious about our
possessions. She taught us how to hold our chopsticks and how to drink
our soup. She told us that we drank too silently. A little more noise
from our lips, she said, would show that we were appreciating the
flavour. She did acknowledge in us some aptitude to learn, implying
that if a more advanced state of culture had existed in the feminine
family group of our homes over the seas we might have been mothered
into some respectability. So saying, she arose sturdily to her full
height and bore away the dinner tables. Then she returned to make the
beds, struggling with the mattresses as might an ant dragging oak
leaves.
When the beds were finally laid she brought a fresh brewing of tea and
replenished the charcoal in the _hibachi_. She lighted our after dinner
cigarettes for us by pressing them against the embers. She sat waiting
until we had dropped the last stub into the ashes. Then guardian midget
rolled back the quilts, ordered us to bed, tucked us in carefully,
giving to each impartially a good-night pat. Her day’s work finished,
assuredly her efforts entitled her to a quiet enjoyment of one of the
cigarettes! She sat down on the foot of my bed and deeply drawing in
the smoke, blew it into the air with a sigh of contentment.
“I have been told,” she said, “that foreigners marry for love. Can that
be true?”
We assured her that that custom existed.
“Um-m-m,” she pondered. Our examination was evidently of import. She
took another step in questioning.
“But if you married for love how can you be happy to travel so far away
from your wives?”
She gasped at our claim of non-possession.
We made a second insistence regarding our unsocial state. She did
not put aside her good nature but she berated us roundly for our
unkindness, our lack of taste, in thinking that we could joke in such a
way just because she was a peasant girl in a country inn, but when we
further insisted upon repeating our tale she was really hurt. There is
a time, she said, for joking to come to an end. If it were always thus
our custom to insist upon a joke long after it had been laughed at and
appreciated, then she did not believe that she had excessive pity for
our wives and children in their being left behind while we wandered.
She then dismissed us from her questioning and appealed exclusively
to Hori. She could understand that if we had been forced to marry by
parental social regulation and had been united to wives whom we did
not and could not love, perhaps it would be quite within reason that
we should wish to have vacations in singleness, but to have had the
privilege of marrying for love and then to be wandering alone--oh, it
was un-understandable.
“Well,” said Hori mysteriously, “I think that what they have said is
the truth but it may not be all the truth. In their country certain
desperately wicked criminals are not allowed the privilege of marrying.”
There is a glamour which hangs over the notoriously wicked. The maid’s
glances were now modified by appropriate awe into distinct respect. She
got up, and endeavouring for dignity built a tower out of the scattered
cushions. She climbed upon this shaky height and turned out the light.
Then she hurried away to the backstairs regions with her tale.
In the morning it was raining. When we got up we could hear no sounds
below and when we went to the bath there were no maids to fill the
brass basins. Hori wandered off to the kitchen to find hot water and
we did not see him again until after our maid, very heavy-eyed, had
brought the breakfast tables to our room. He came as the bearer of
two items of information which he had gleaned from the mistress. The
first was that there had been a council sitting on our morals, presided
over by our maid, which had lasted through the hours of the night. The
second item was the truthful reason why we had been turned away from
the first inn and the confirmation of our suspicions that we had gained
admittance where we were only by an extremely narrow margin.
Once upon a time two foreigners had passed through Agematsu and had
been received as guests in one of the inns. That advent had been so
many years before that a new generation of mistresses and maids had
succeeded the victims of the marvellous invasion, but the legend of
that night of terror had been handed down undimmed. “And what do you
think was their unspeakable atrocity?” Hori asked dramatically. “_They
made snowballs from the rice of the rice box at dinner and threw them
at each other and at the maids!_”
From time to time, through the mountains, we heard again the legend
of those two remarkable _seiyo-jins_. We grew to have an admiration
for knaves so lusty in their revels that they could leave behind such
a never fading flower of memory. They must have gone forth to their
travels minutely familiar with the code of Japanese etiquette, so
thoroughly were they skilled in fracturing it. A riot might have been
forgiven, and forgotten, but not the throwing of rice on the floor.
The one constant forbidding under which a child is brought up finally
leaves no process of thought in the brain that anyone could ever
intentionally offend against the cleanness of the matting. It is less a
_gaucherie_ to set fire to a friend’s house and burn it to the ground
than to spill a bowl of soup.
We waited for the rain to clear away, but as it did not we borrowed
huge paper umbrellas and wandered off down the valley. We were in the
midst of a silk spinning district and in almost every doorway sat some
woman of the household busily capturing the silken threads from the
cocoons. We asked permission to rest in the door of a carpenter’s shop
which overhung the rocky Kiso and was shaded by the tops of great pines
which grew from the sides of the valley bed. The carpenter brought us
tea and stopped for a moment to point the view through the trees which
had been the companion of his life.
Sometimes poverty seems to be an absolute and unarguable condition;
at other times one’s ideas as to the what and when of poverty are so
shifting as merely to be interrogations. There was the poverty in that
valley of the struggle for some slight margin above dire want; the silk
workers were speeding their machines for their pittance; the carpenter
was busy through every hour of daylight. Economics and efficiency are
everyday words but what is their ultimate meaning not in dollars but in
life? What are the real wishes of the leaders in Tokyo, the statesmen
who are planning policies and at the same time must strive to please
the great banking houses of the world?--do they look forward to the
time when factories will fill the land and the spinners will not be
sitting in their own doorways but the children of to-day’s workers will
be standing in long rows before machines? “We are taught,” explained
a Japanese, “to pay our heavy taxes cheerfully so that the empire may
expand and develop. Wealth will be thus created and then taxes can be
reduced.”
Hori had remembrance of a traveller’s tale which he had heard long
before of an ancient tea-house along the Kiso famous both for its
noodle soup and its view of the spot locally believed to have been
the awakening place of Urashima when he returned from the Island of
the Dragon King. Considering that the story explicitly states that
Urashima awoke on the seashore, the faith of the inland believers
is really more marvellously imaginative than the story itself. The
trudging coolies whom we stopped had never heard of the tea-house.
Therefore we knocked at the first gate we came to in the bamboo wall
along the road to find that our footsteps had magically led us to the
famed spot itself. We left our muddy boots at the door and a maid
showed us the way to the balcony of the room of honour from which we
could see the tumbling river. The view is called “The Awakening.” An
islet emerges from the foam of the waters and its rocks have been made
to serve as a miniature temple garden. There is another view farther
down the bank, from which the dwarfed pines and stone lanterns of the
island may be seen to better advantage. Cicerones lie in wait there
for the sightseer. In delightful contrast to the urgings generally
experienced from the tribe, these guides were quite shy in the presence
of foreigners.
The daughter of the house, in a _kimono_ of silk and brocade, herself
brought the tray of tea and _sake_ and a pyramid dish of noodles.
The porcelain was old and of tempting beauty. The tea was fragrant.
Hori insisted that we should extemporize poetry to express our
appreciation of the beauty of the Kiso, but O-Owre-san and I were
rather self-conscious in our rhymes. We had been nurtured in a land of
specialization where poetry is entrusted to professionals. The sun came
out. We paid our reckoning, folded up our paper umbrellas, and walked
back to our inn for a long night’s sleep.
VI THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOTTLE INN
In the morning Hori discovered that his military survey map somehow
had been mistaken for a sheet of wrapping paper the day before. The
torn-off section had served to carry rice cakes in my pocket. The
tearing had strangely traversed mountains, valleys, and rivers along
almost the line we purposed following. As Hori was still unemancipated
from the idea that not to know where one is is to be lost, he was
rather in a maze for the next few days, as we continually wandered off
the edge of the map into unknown regions. He must have marvelled at
times over the kindness of the Providence which had guided our steps
from Kyoto to Nagoya.
The valley of the Kiso earnestly seeks to attest the theory that the
inhabitants of localities with a similar climate and topography tend
to have similar ideas, especially in working out ways of doing the
same thing. The wide sweeping view with the snow-topped mountains on
the horizon might have been Switzerland, and for a more decisive
deceiving of the eye into thinking so the cottages of the peasants had
the overhanging roof of the Swiss chalet with the same pitch and the
same arrangement of rows of boulders on them. It is a province, also,
of trousered women.
We came upon a wistful-eyed, pink-cheeked, timid fairy of the
mountains. She was carrying on her back a huge, barrel-shaped basket
and she bent forward as she slowly walked along, her eyes fixed on a
handful of wild flowers in her fingers. Even our modest knowledge of
the folklore of the land told us that she must be a princess who had
been captured by ugly trolls. They had set her to impossible labour
as their revenge against her beauty. A young man whose niche in the
world was beyond our determining--although we thought he might be a
student on a vacation walking trip--had caught up with us a half-hour
before and had been measuring his step with ours. When he discovered
that I wished to take a picture of the princess he assisted with such
effective blandishment of speech that she halted for an instant. When I
asked that I might also photograph him, he laughed and vaulted up among
the rocks and disappeared.
[Illustration: WE CAME UPON A WISTFUL-EYED, TIMID FAIRY OF THE
MOUNTAINS]
A little farther along we met the six sisters of the princess. They
were carrying burdens equally as large and heavy as had she, but
they were not so pretty nor so wistful, albeit they were just as timid.
We never could find any key to the mystery why our appearance along
the highway would sometimes be as startling as if we were ghostly
apparitions, and at other times it would merely bring about a casual
interest and staring, if it brought any interest at all. Upon this
occasion it was a panic. The six maidens beheld us, they shrieked in
unison, and they jumped from the road, trying to hide behind rocks and
trees. Their lithe limbs might have carried them like fawns, if their
shoulders had been freed from the huge baskets, but, as it was, their
flight was more like that of some new and enormous variety of the
beetle tribe, evoluted so far as to wear cotton clothes and to have
pretty human heads turbaned under blue and white handkerchiefs. As a
son of Daguerre, I should have tarried for an instant to photograph
their amazing struggle, but an upsetting obsession of chivalry hurried
us on. By the time we turned to look back they had scrambled to the
road, all six princesses accounted for. They, too, turned to look at
us and from the safety of distance began to laugh. The comedy might
thus have ended if it had not been that at that instant Hori rounded
the bend of the road with his thumb pressed vigorously against the
strident bicycle bell. The beetles (or, better to say, the wingless
butterflies) again took flight. We awaited their second reappearance.
This time they did not venture laughter until they reached the curve
and made sure of no further dismay.
Hori dismounted and pushed the bicycle along and we entered into
one of our unending discussions. A subject sometimes in debate
was O-Owre-san’s and my intense interest--our curiosity--in the
conversations that Hori had with passersby along the road or in the
shops. Sometimes, when we had made some simple inquiry in a shop, Hori
would ask a long question; the shopkeeper would answer; Hori would
enter a counter dissertation; the shopkeeper would make his reply to
that; Hori would reply; the shopkeeper would reply; Hori would reply;
and then it might be that the shopkeeper would have the conclusion.
Hori might then turn to us with: “He says ‘no.’”
In the port city shops where English is spoken, if there is but one
clerk he will answer your questions immediately. If there are two,
every question is thoroughly discussed in Japanese before answering,
and if there be three, four, or five clerks, the debate goes on to
extraordinary length. Again and again we asked Hori for a complete
translation but it must have been that he believed within himself that
he had asked the question in the simplest terms, for we seldom got a
verbatim translation.
We were in the midst of some such discussion when we looked up to see
an old man standing before us, leaning on a long staff. His white beard
fell benignly and his steady eyes carried a message of goodwill. He
returned our greetings by a dignified inclination of his head. We were
at the peak of the road and, as often may be found at such points,
there was a small rest tea-house for travellers. We asked the old man
if he would sit down with us and share a pot of tea.
The iron pot, filled with mountain spring water, steamed hospitably on
the _hibachi_ and the fragrance of the tea was a friendly invitation
to relax. Our guest stood his long staff in the corner, sat down on
a cushion, and drew his feet from his dusty sandals. After the true
manner of happily met travellers he was easily persuaded to tell us the
tale of his wanderings. The translation is somewhat rhetorical but, as
Hori explained, the tale was told in the language of etiquette.
“I was born,” said he, “in the forty-first year of the rule of the
Shogun Ienari. I was young and am now old. My eighty and seven summers
have seen the downfall of the once mighty before the rising to full
glory of the Meiji, and now, from the Palace of Yedo, shine upon us the
divine rays of the Way of Heaven. Great is the Mercy of Enlightenment.
The Eternal Glory is the Way.
“As a child I knew these mountains which you see. The provinces of our
land were then fortified by many castles and these roads were traversed
by armed men. The castles have been razed to the ground but the temples
of the gods still stand. The two-sworded warriors have gone but I, a
humble pilgrim, walk the roads they once knew. The white clouds rest in
the blue sky above Fuji-san as when I looked upon them as a child. The
clouds will rest above Fuji when these eyes shall see them not.
“In the fourteenth year of my youth I took the vow that my life should
be lived in honouring the holy images of Buddha, each and all as my
steps might find them, from the shrines erected by the peasants to the
bronze statues of the great temples. I took the very staff which you
see and the clothes that were upon my back and bade my family good-bye.
Through the kindness in the hearts of men, the lowly and the mighty,
the gods have provided me with food and rest. I have travelled without
illness and my spirit has known the joy of the Way.”
[Illustration: “IN THE FOURTEENTH YEAR OF MY YOUTH I TOOK THE VOW THAT
MY LIFE SHOULD BE LIVED IN HONORING THE HOLY IMAGES OF BUDDHA”]
In those years that his bowl had not gone empty of rice, never, it may
be believed, did anyone give to him as a beggar asking. Japan is of the
East, possessing the intuition that the spiritual is a mystic interflow.
His eyes were young; they were not clouded in contemplation of the
abstract. They sparkled from a delight in life. It had not been
demanded of him that his vicarious pilgrimage should be one of tragic
sacrifice. He had given and he had received. While his theoretical
faith might be that life is an illusion and only the Way is eternal,
nevertheless he was born to love his fellowmen and he could not escape
from the practical faith that was in him that this temporal life must
be of some use and of some meaning. I remembered in strange comparison
a sturdy British unemployed whom I had once come upon. He was lying
under a hedge in Monmouthshire. He borrowed a pipeful of tobacco and
then turned over onto his back to gaze into the blue sky. After a time
he said: “Activity is a fever. Therefore it is a disease. Laziness is
a promise. Rest and forgetfulness are divine.” He did not make the
effort to add a good-bye when I left him.
A path of our pilgrim led over the road which we had just travelled. We
parted, bowing many times. Hori unfolded his ravaged map and found a
village named Narii a few miles farther along. The railroad down in the
valley according to the map went somewhere near Narii. Hori’s nerves
had been rasped by the temperamental vagaries of the bicycle on the
steep slopes and he decided to await a train, promising to meet us.
After a time our path dropped down to the bed of the river. Across a
bridge the road forked, one branch continuing along the valley and the
other winding off into the hills. The hill trail, particularly as it
led into the unknown regions off Hori’s map, tempted, and we shouted
down an inquiry to some children playing in the water. They were
successfully attempting to get as wet as possible while remaining as
dirty as possible. There is a mystery which overhangs grimy Japanese
children. When the little noses present a constant temptation to the
_seiyo-jin_ handkerchief that in itself is a caste sign that you
will find the faces of their fathers and mothers unhappy, dull, and
lustreless. When the children are brightly scoured and polished there
is a general appearance of happiness and contentment in the community.
It is not the simple equation that poverty equals dirt; one village is
scrubbed and the next one is not--otherwise neither seems richer nor
poorer except in happy looks.
When we called to the children in the Kiso they splashed out of the
water like wild animals and scattered in all directions, but as two
naked infants too small to run had been left on the shore, first the
girls and then the boys began to edge back. They remained to stare.
We pointed up the mountain path and asked if it led to Narii. Their
gestures evinced a fierce encouragement to essay the ridges as if they
had the contempt of the untamed for anything as conventional as a broad
valley road. As a matter of fact they were undoubtedly saying that the
valley road did not lead to Narii. We discovered this later when we
could look down from the heights. Hori’s railroad tunnelled the hills.
According to local belief our path carried us over the “backbone”
of the empire, and this crossing spot is considered sacred ground.
Accordingly we should have paid special homage to the local deity
whose shrine we passed, but as we were foreigners and in ignorance,
the god perhaps forgave us. Furthermore, we unknowingly passed a
particularly renowned view of very holy Mount Ontake. We probably did
see the mountain, but being uninformed, as I said, of this special
view, we did not hold ourselves in proper restraint until reaching the
exact spot for appreciation. Instead we luxuriously and squanderously
revelled in all four directions of the compass. It is always thus
with the ignorant. Their indiscriminate enthusiasm is more irritating
to the intellectuals than no appreciation at all. I was later most
depressingly snubbed for having missed the sacred view by a scholar
of things Japanese. He knew it from prints and sacred writings. He
said that he himself would have journeyed to see the reality if it had
not been for the probable annoyance of having to come in contact with
so many natives on the journey. He appeared to be impatient that the
British Museum does not commandeer all views, temples, and abiding
places of art around the world and establish turnstiles which will keep
the natives out and let the scholars in. When he actually grasped that
our only reason for having arrived at that particular spot at all was
that we had taken a turning to the right instead of to the left, he
declared that our ideas of travelling evidence the same intelligence
as might the tripping of tumbling beans and that our very presence at
sacred places was a sacrilege.
We turned a corner that hung sharply over the precipice. Around the
bend the shelf spread out into a miniature meadow. A peasant was lying
on the grass and his straw-bonneted ox was leisurely nibbling. We sat
down beside him and O-Owre-san began searching in his rucksack for a
remaining cake of chocolate. During this hunt the peasant kept his eyes
carefully and earnestly averted. I made the remark to him that the view
was _kirei_ and he replied by a nervous _hei_. O-Owre-san found the
chocolate and broke it into three parts. He handed one of the squares
to the peasant. The fingers that reached out for it were trembling.