from some lively remembrance of a mountain folklore demon story. He
knew that we were foxes or badgers who had assumed human form, and
that we had come to him with no good intentions. He suspected a subtle
poison. But he had courage from one thought. It is the common knowledge
of the countryside that while the demands of demon badgers may not
be directly refused, their evil intent may often be thwarted by the
crafty intelligence of man. The immediate problem was how to avoid the
appearance of refusing to eat the mysterious cake which was now getting
soft and moist in his hand. Suddenly he popped the chocolate into his
mouth, tin foil and all. Then he pushed back the square into his hand
almost in the same movement. I pretended not to be watching. He dropped
his hand with elaborate carelessness into the thickness of the grass. I
felt a sense of dramatic relievement myself.
During those minutes the ox had been no such respecter of enchantment
as had his master. Instead, he had stood sniffing at our boots and
pulling up bits of grass round and about our ankles, all the time
rolling a pair of red, angry eyes. Asiatic beasts of burden find
something antagonistic to their complaisance in the odour of the
Caucasian and this individual ox was progressing toward a positive
bovine dissatisfaction. Furthermore, we were sitting on the sweetest
and most tender tufts of grass remaining. We courteously dismissed the
peasant to go his way. His marked alacrity was quite welcome.
We lingered on the grass for a little while and I told O-Owre-san my
guesses. I elaborated them into the hazard that the poor man--he had
not once turned to look back over his shoulder--might even then be
fearing that the slight taste from the chocolate would turn him into
a frog and his ox into a stork to eat him up; or perhaps he might be
in distress that he and his beast might grow smaller and smaller until
they would disappear into thin air.
O-Owre-san had been examining the faintness of the path. “I hope none
of these things happen until the man gets over the hills to Narii. The
hoof prints make an excellent trail,” he said.
It was time to sling on our packs and follow. When we reached the next
turn we could see the peasant’s straw hat and the ox’s straw bonnet
bobbing along just over the bush tops. We maintained this distance
without closing the gap. As O-Owre-san had predicted, the hoof marks
were useful. The path often grew so faint that it had no other resolute
indication. We had been sure, without thought of other possibility,
that the crest of the hill we were climbing would be the summit of the
range. When we reached the crest we stood looking up at another peak
rising from a shallow valley at our feet.
“Which way does the ox say to go?” I asked.
The hoof marks were there in the soft earth, but where our feet had
stopped there they had stopped. They stopped as absolutely as if the
peasant and his ox had been whisked away in a chariot to the sunset
sky. The bushes were too low for concealment. There was no cave, nor
hole in the earth.
If there be no such thing as magic, in the Japanese mountains at least,
where did that man and his beast go? The disappearance was as complete
as the most exacting enchanter could have desired. We found no answer
to the riddle and the sun was sinking, adding the next question of how
we were going to get out of the hills in the night time if we delayed
for scientific investigation. We succumbed to expediency and took a
five-mile-an-hour pace over such trail as we had left, guessing at the
turns. When we finally reached the next crest, deep in the valley we
could see Narii. Before descending the steep, dropping path, we sat
down near a spring where the birds had come to drink. They were singing
evening songs mightily. Bright wild flowers were scattered in the open
spaces between the intense green of the fern patches. The world was
lustily at peace.
When we did start we swung down the long hill almost at a run and in a
half-hour reached the edge of the village to find Hori sitting under
a stone lantern in the temple yard. The evening peace had made us
positive that this is the best of all possible worlds, but Hori was
entertaining a different idea. He looked exceedingly gloomy. We were
impatient of any discontent. If he had said that men were starving for
rice in the village beyond, the fitting answer would have seemed to us
the historic words of the good queen: “Give them cake.” Undoubtedly
when the message about the starving peasants was brought to that Lady
of France she was sitting under the shrubbery at Versailles, and the
birds were singing, and it was springtime, and perhaps the fountains
were playing. Impellingly she realized with an insight deeper than any
historian has ever appreciated that upon such a glorious day, if there
is any such thing as right or justice at all in this world, a certain
amount of cake should be everybody’s inalienable possession.
As it happened, Hori’s worry had nothing to do with altruistic sorrow
for starving villagers, but existed from a lively interest in our own
affairs. The town was very poor, he explained, a town come down in the
world from ancient prosperity. Its neck was hung with the millstone
of decayed graces and thinned blood. The inn was so old that it was
senile. Hori had established some excuse before entering the door for
inspection which later allowed his rejection of the inn’s hospitality,
but it would never do for us in turn to venture in for a glance around.
That would be needlessly raising the expectation of the ancient host.
We would find, he suggested, that it would be only five or six or seven
miles to the next village. As we had had twenty-five or more miles
behind us and most of those had been along mountain paths, we were
not so inevitably tempted at that hour of night to be particular in a
choice of roofs as Hori, who had come by train, was imagining.
The inn, in truth, was very old. By any law of survival chances the
wandering wings should have burned to earth long ago. To greet us
there were no smiling and chattering maids gathered behind a mistress;
instead, an old man and a very small girl, his granddaughter or more
likely his great-granddaughter, met us in the dark entrance with
protests that the house was unworthy of our presence. We hastily denied
them their words. Hori could employ the polite phrases of Japan. We
impulsively, directly, and bluntly told them “no.” It was not alone the
pathos of the two figures which appealed. It was somewhat that their
dignity had not surrendered to ruin, and it was somewhat a something
else, indescribable, in the atmosphere that charmed.
We followed the master along a labyrinthine corridor. The soft wood
planks of the floor had been polished to a deep reddish gleam under the
bare feet of generations of hurrying _ne-sans_. He led us past inner
courtyards to the farthest wing. Our room hung over the river at an
elbow of the stream. Even with the _shogi_ pushed wide open we were
hidden completely from the eyes of the town by heavily leafed trees.
The mats on the floor had turned a dingy, mottled brown and black
from their once light golden yellow, but they were clean. The sacred
_takemona_ corner still compelled its importance. It had been built in
an age when the demand for its existence was the ardent faith of the
builders rather than an architectural tradition. The room was about
thirty-five feet long and fifteen feet deep, perhaps a little larger.
The ceiling was proportionately high.
Hori was still doubtful, not gloomily so, but from the knowledge that
an inn is proved by its service. The host was kneeling, as immobile
as a temple image, awaiting our orders. His skin was as bloodless as
the vellum of the painting which hung behind him. His watchful eyes,
however, were intensely bright in their deep sockets. Hori began
inquiries about dinner. The ancient bowed his head to the floor,
drawing in his breath sharply against his teeth. Dinner was now being
prepared for his family, he said, but it would be unworthy of his
guests. The formal phrase of polite deprecation carried this truth, as
Hori discovered by further questioning; it was not that the dinner was
or was not worthy--it was the failure of _quantity_. We should not have
long to wait, said our host, but food would have to be sent for.
As we sat in a circle planning what we should have, the old man smiled
and pointed to a patched square in the matting. Underneath the square,
he said, was a depression for holding bronze braziers. When the
nobility, in the old feudal times, had travelled the Nakescendo trail,
this was the room of honour that had been given to the _daimyos_. It
had been often the custom for the retainers of a _daimyo_ themselves
to prepare his dinner over the braziers. Our sitting there, planning
what we should have, had reminded him of the dead past. His words came
slowly as if between each word of recollection his spirit journeyed
back into the very maw of oblivion and then had to return again to the
world.
“Are the braziers still hidden there?” Hori interrupted.
Yes, the braziers were under the floor or somewhere to be found.
Hori turned to us and put us through a questioning until he
rediscovered the word “picnic” for his vocabulary. “That’s what we will
have, a picnic, right here,” he declared, and he turned back to the
host to explain. The old man almost gasped, at least approaching as
near to such escape of emotion as he probably ever had at the request
of a guest.
“But you will then have to have a special waitress,” he said. “My
granddaughter is indeed too young for that privilege.” Always when he
used depreciatory adjectives about the child’s unworthiness he failed
lamentably to harden his caressing tone. She was, however, as he had
said, little older than a baby. The services of a maid we should have
to pay for, but, under the spell of the conjuring up of the memories of
those bygone revels in our room, what cared we for saving our precious
_yen_? We had become reincarnations of the two-sworded swaggerers. We
waved our arms grandiloquently.
“Tell him to send for fowls for the pot,” we oratorically assailed
Hori. “Let us mix rich sauces and warm the _sake_. And tell him to
remember that for us there can be but one choice--the maid to serve our
dinner must be the prettiest maid in all Narii.”
I had not the slightest idea that Hori would translate our exact words,
but I found later that such was his act.
Thus the mountain village of Narii faced a problem. Two foreigners, and
a Japanese almost as alien as a foreigner, had appeared from nobody
knew where, not preceded, ’twas true, by retainers as had been the
travellers of old, but nevertheless demanded the old-time service with
as much gusto as if they were accustomed to having what they wished.
They had asked that the prettiest maid in all Narii be called to the
inn to exercise the privilege of guarding the steaming rice box. It was
obvious that there could be only one prettiest maid, and all Narii knew
with one mind that the prettiest maid was the daughter of the Shinto
priest. However, the daughter of a priest is not a likely candidate for
service in an inn, even if the master has ever been a faithful devotee
of the temple. Nevertheless there was the honour of the hospitality of
Narii at stake. Messengers (or even appropriately, it might be said,
heralds) were sent to explain the problem to the maid and her father,
and to use, if necessary, the pressure of “the state demands.”
Thus came O-Hanna-san to the inn. (In all Japan there cannot be
a prettier, a more bashful, or a more modest maiden.) Her eyes
were downcast behind long black lashes. Her soft cheek flushed and
paled--perhaps somewhat from the excitement of the adventure. Neither
she nor her friends had ever seen one of that strange race, the
foreigner. And, indeed, even a priest’s daughter may think that to be
chosen as the prettiest maid----!! Ah, her courage failed her to glance
up and words would not come to her lips to answer their questions, but
they did not seem to be so very predatory nor so very fearsome--and
they were very hungry.
Two great bronze braziers had been filled with glowing charcoal. The
foreigners and the outer-world Japanese who could speak their strange
words were busily cooking the fowls, chopped into dice, and they were
arguing about their respective talents and abilities, as do all amateur
cooks. Perhaps she could now look up for an instant unobserved. No, a
glance met her eyes and she felt hot blushes grow again on her cheek.
While they feasted and laughed she had to run many times to the kitchen
for forgotten dishes. When she passed along the hall by the entrance
to the street she was each time stopped and besieged by the questions
of the gathered mob. (Some of those inquiring investigators had also
gathered outside the wall of my bath an hour before. I had been
suddenly aware of an eye at every crack and crevice of the boards as
I was cautiously stepping into the superheated tub. There was not a
sound, merely the glitter of their star-scattered eyes.)
The foreigners put sugar on their rice and one of them even put sugar
in his tea. They handled their chopsticks so awkwardly that it was
marvellous that they did not spill the rice grains on the matting. She
thought of the twenty rules in etiquette for the proper and graceful
use of chopsticks and she imagined that if there had been a ten score
of rules they might have all been broken. At last the three feasters
finished their mighty meal and stretched out on the cushions to smoke
in deep contentment. She doubted whether they had even noticed that her
superior _kimono_ was not such as a maid of an inn would possess. After
the feast her quick feet, in spotless white _tabi_, carried away the
bowls and little tables. Then she sat down by the door to await any
further clapping of hands.
The host came in, moving silently across the matting. He kneeled and
bent his forehead to the floor. Before the meal he had himself arranged
the flowers, in an old iron vase, to stand in the _takemona_ corner. We
tried to express our appreciation for the flowers and our admiration of
the vase.
We asked him how old the inn was. It had been his father’s before
him, and his grandfather’s before his father. Yes, in those days the
Nakescendo had rivalled the Tokaido, and yearly, on the hastening to
Yedo to give obeisance to the Shogun, the great nobles of the northwest
provinces with their armed retainers had had to pass through Narii.
In the pride of their gifts to the Shogun, in their numbers, in their
courage, they had never yielded place to the envoys from the great
families of the South. This now forgotten inn had then been famous.
Our room, overhanging the river, he repeated, had been only given to
the _daimyos_. The _samurai_ had crowded the other rooms. The inn
had boasted a score, two score, of trained and pretty _ne-sans_ to
wait upon those fiery warriors. (The modern _geisha_, in many of her
accomplishments, is daughter to the inn maidens of the feudal days
who sang and danced and played musical instruments in addition to the
graces of more domestic duties.) The inn had then rung with shouting
and laughter, and sometimes the dawn of the morning start of the
cavalcade found the retainers still sitting around the feast.
On the road to Yedo their purses had hung full, but the great city
always plunged both its hands into those purses filled from the rice
taxes, and it was often quite another story--the return journey back
to the provincial castles. No rare occurrence was it indeed, for some
haughty _samurai_ to declare in the morning that he could not pay his
inn bill, however modest it might be. Upon one occasion a certain
warrior had been forced to leave in pledge the first mistress of his
heart--his sword. A _daimyo_, overlord of a province, could, of course,
never be in debt to an innkeeper, although he might leave a _gift_ for
his host instead of money. When such eventuality as that arose the
host would declare (wisely) that his hospitality had been unworthy
of any remuneration and that he was a thousand times repaid by the
magnificence of the gift.
Yes, went on the old man, once a noble upon leaving the door had caused
a vase to be unwrapped from its encasements of one silken bag after
another and had given it to the inn. The donor had written a poem of
dedication with his own hand. The vase was shaped like a bottle and
the inn had been called “The Bottle Inn” from that day, seventy years
in the past. Our host, a youth on that day, had thought that the inn
would ever be rich and renowned. He sighed. The tradition of its renown
had faded and been forgotten in this age of railways. No longer did
turbulent guests demand that the bottle be brought out and shown.
If his dramatic genius had been subtly leading us toward turbulence, we
obeyed the pulling of the strings. We demanded to know whether the vase
was still under his roof. Our host smiled. The sacred vase was hidden
safely. Would we like to see it?
He returned, carrying an old wooden box. The great-granddaughter
dragged the unredeemed sword after her. The well-worn scabbard of the
sword was of mediocre, conventional design, but the blade had been
forged by one of the famous sword makers. Hori read the sword’s origin
from the characters carved in the steel. The old man slowly slipped
the sword back into the scabbard, leaving us to ponder what might have
been the tragic fate of the _ronin_ that he had never returned for his
pledge.
No casket of precious metal can be so alluringly suggestive of trove
as the simple, unpainted, pine boxes into which the Japanese put their
treasures. A woven cord clasped down the lid of the box. The untying of
it began the breathless ceremony. When the lid was lifted we saw the
first silken wrapping, then came another, and another, and another.
Some were of brocade, some were of faded plain colour,--red, blue, or
rose. Finally the drawing string of the last bag was pulled open and
the old man lifted the bottle. It was of yellow pottery with a thick
brown glaze overrunning the sides. The mouth of the vase was capped by
a bronze and silver band carved with an irregular motif.
The trustee of the possession allowed us to pass it from hand to hand.
What was one of our reasons for being in Narii at that very moment? It
was that our eyes were prying for those rarer treasures in Japan which
may be sometimes gleaned “away from the beaten path.” Unaccountable
chance had led us to the inn. The old man was hopelessly beaten in
his contest with poverty. I knew that he did not wish to sell, but
if there should be the jingling of a few _yen_--was it likely that
he could refuse? Our eyes were gleaming with desire. Surely, even if
it were a venal sin to take away the bottle from The Bottle Inn the
very greatness of the temptation would have brought its own special
forgiveness. But because temptation and conscience can generally be
argued around to our satisfaction, the gods have ironically added
impulse as the third part of us. It must have been some such impulse
which was the irrational lever which moved us to action. We soared
to the heights. It was a superior endurance to any flight that it is
likely either of us will ever attempt again. Truly such virtue is more
regretted than gloried in. We did not take the bottle with us. It still
functions in its environment, in harmony with its tradition. Taken away
it could be only a superior vase with a history, an object of art. In
that old inn it is a living part, an inspiration. In the forgotten
village of Narii no numbered museum tag hangs around its neck.
The bottle dropped back into the brocade bag lined with faded crimson
silk. Then the other wrappings, one by one, muffled it. It went into
the box, the lid was fitted into place, and the cord was tied. Do we
gain strength from resisting such temptation? The writers of the Holy
Church of the Middle Ages said so. By refusing that bottle I merely
gained exhaustion. This moment I am stifled by the dust of the ashes
of that murdered passion. My conscience replies with no response. It
has lost the vitality of recoil, and thus, if ever such time may come,
I may yet glory in a greater vandalism, some supreme Hunnish act, and
there will be no rasping regret.
The breezes up among the snows of the mountains came down into the
valley for the night. Wherever they were going they seemed to be quite
undetermined as to their path. They blow from every side and into every
corner of the room by turn. Little by little, to escape the draughts,
we had kept pushing along the wooden shutters until we were at length
completely walled in. It was not possible to imagine that a few miles
away, down on the rice plains, the millions were nudely stifling while
we were going to bed to get warm. The daughter of the priest had
been dragging layers of bedding to the door and, when we clapped our
hands, she had innumerable mattresses for each of us. For once it was
unnecessary to stretch the mosquito netting. There seemed to be nothing
left but to blow out the lights and cry: “_O yasumi nasai!_” to the
retreating patter of her footsteps.
“What’s the midget granddaughter waiting for?” I asked Hori.
“She wants you to go to bed,” said he from under his quilt.
I jumped into the soft centre of my mattresses as requested. Then the
butterfly dropped on her knees and crept backward around our beds.
Out of a box she was pouring a train of powder until she had us each
enclosed in a magic circle.
“Why?” I demanded.
Kenjiro laughed at me.
“It’s _nomi-yoke_,” he said. “Insect powder--what do you say in
America? Bug medicine?”
I insisted that I had not seen the sign of a bug or an insect or a flea
or anything looking like a marauder.
“Of course not,” Hori stopped me as if I should have known better.
“It’s just courtesy to honoured guests, to show you that they would
wish to protect you if there were any. If there were crawlers,” he
concluded with some scorn, “do you suppose they’d make such an effort
to call attention to the fact?”
That _bushido_ explanation satisfied Hori but I was doubtful. For the
sake of verification I carefully destroyed the integrity of the rampart
around my bed by opening up passages through the powder. I was willing
to display a few bites in the morning to prove the truth. I went to
sleep dreaming about two-sworded _samurai_ who looked like pinch bugs,
and they were swaggering around a wall of insect powder. However, the
morning proved that Hori was quite correct. The delicate attention had
been born of pure courtesy.
VII THE IDEALS OF A SAMURAI
In the morning we found great brass basins of water waiting for us in
the sunny iris garden. One of the super-errors that a foreigner can
make in a native inn is to ask to have the basins brought to his room.
Such a request can be understood only as a perversion, or a barbarity.
One reason why the houses and inns seem so clean is that they eliminate
so many of the chances for their being otherwise; and this defence
might be added into the weighing when criticizing Japanese nudity at
ablutions.
Breakfast was brought to us steaming under the lacquer covers of the
bowls, but the priest’s daughter was not holding the wooden ladle
for the rice. It was a rather late hour when she had returned to her
father’s house, but the mothers and daughters of a Japanese home are
accustomed to having their working hours overlap into the night. In
subtlety we brazenly accused each other of having frightened the gentle
_ne-san_ into not returning. The truth was--as it afterwards came
out--that we had each found opportunity to hint to the host’s ear the
night before that the maid’s slumber by no means should be disturbed
for our morning’s start. Thus we each privately thought we knew the
secret of her non-appearance, but just as we were tying on our shoes
at the door a breathless message was brought by her small brother. She
had overslept. It had not been our late hour which was responsible. The
family of the Shinto priest had sat up almost until the first light in
the East to listen to the wonder tale of their daughter who had endured
such a singular and daring adventure.
The ancient host gave us presents and we gave him presents. We said our
farewells at the door and then, after that, he and his granddaughter
walked along with us half through the village. Finally we bowed our
formal seven bows of farewell. When we reached the end of the street we
turned and saw them still standing where we had left them.