grooved slides in the floor from the head of the stairs, creating two
complete rooms with a hallway between. The new guest, a woman, stood
waiting to take possession. From the quality of her _kimono_, the
refinement of her face, and the arrangement of her hair, we could judge
that she was of superior rank. We questioned with some wonder why she
was alone, but as it was extremely unlikely that that question or any
other about her would be answered, the passing query was dismissed.
However, it came about that we were to know one poignant chapter in
that woman’s life.
We went exploring to find the kitchen, there to deliver our
gooseberries and our recipe. The maids and cooks stood and listened.
We proceeded with our explanation until we reached the point where
one more suppressed giggle on the part of the _ne-sans_ might
have burst forth into full hysterics. We released them in time by
laughing ourselves and then left them to recover as best they could
and to experiment with the stewing. Their irresponsible laughing
for laughter’s sake had infected us with the mood. We went filing
back to our room. The guest of the second tower room was standing
on the balcony at the head of the stairs. She had changed from her
street _kimono_. Her eyes were shaded by her hand and she was looking
searchingly down the road. As we walked by she stepped a little farther
out on the narrow balcony but did not take her eyes from her quest.
The maid brought our dinner. It had been fourteen hours since breakfast
and we had been tramping mountain paths, but without the sauce of
appetite that dinner could have justified its existence. There were
fish fresh from the mountain waters of the lake, and there were grilled
eels, and there were strange vegetables with strange sauces. When the
rice came we poured our stewed gooseberry juice over the bowl. The
maid had left the screen pushed back when she carried off the tables
downstairs. At that moment of our contentment I looked up to see the
lonely watcher step back from the balcony. Her expression had changed
to joyful expectancy and radiant relief and trust. She went to her
room, then returned to the balcony, then ran again to her room. In
a moment or two the round, sleepy maid stumbled up the stairs and
whispered a message. The message again brought the woman to the head of
the stairs and in a moment we could hear a man’s step coming.
The greeting of affection in Japan is not a meeting of the lips.
Whatever the proper cherishing expression may be, it cannot be such a
casual acknowledgment as was that man’s indifferent greeting in the inn
at Kama-Suwa. A glance showed that he belonged to that new type which
modern Japan has produced, the mobile, keen, aggressive, calculating,
successful man of business and affairs. He was about thirty-five. Men
of this new stamp are seldom met with in the provinces where the old
order has changed so little but in Tokyo and the port cities their
ideas are the predominant influence. Their aggression and ability have
taken over the business and industries which the foreigner established.
When one thinks of Old Japan one can believe that the thought action of
this type of man by the very virtue of his being understood by us is
enigma to those who still seek their inspiration in the ideals of the
order that was.
“Well, I am here,” he said. “You sent for me and I came.”
The woman stood, making no answer.
“What’s it all about?” he went on. “Your message was very mysterious.
It cannot be that you have been so foolish--so unthinking--as
absolutely to make a break with your husband?”
“You are tired from your trip,” she said. “Come! Sit down! Your dinner
is waiting to be brought.”
He sat down and the woman clapped her hands for the maid. When the
stumbling, awkward girl came the man changed the order and told the
_ne-san_ to bring _sake_ first of all. He sat in silence until the
hot rice wine came. He drank several of the small cups. Then the maid
brought the lacquer tables with the dinner dishes. The man lifted up
one or two covers and then suddenly jumped to his feet and declared
that he was going to take a bath.
The maid led the way to the large room for baths which was just under
our rooms. The woman sat before her untasted dinner. Soon there was a
sound of laughing and chattering from below. There was the man’s voice
and the maid’s laugh. Finally the woman arose, walked out into the
hall, tentatively put a foot on the stair, then slowly walked down. She
waited outside the sliding paper door. The maid had committed no breach
against custom in lingering idly after carrying in towels and brushes.
It was for no personal bitterness against the stupid maid that tears
had gathered in the woman’s eyes. There was nothing vulgar in the words
of the bantering chatter she heard. It was the fact that the man was
accepting the moment so carelessly, so unfeelingly for her anguish,
knowing as he must unquestionably that every word of his indifferent
greeting to her had carried a torturing thrust of pain.
The dinner was brought up again, warmed over. We heard the order for
another bottle of _sake_. We could not escape hearing through the
paper wall. We had intended taking a walk but a misty rain had come
down. The mosquitoes arose from the beaches of the lake. We sent for
the maid and asked for the beds and mosquito netting. In the meantime
Hori and I were tempted into taking another luxurious sinking into the
hot baths. O-Owre-san had turned out the light before we came back.
In the darkness we crawled carefully under the omnibus netting and I
went to sleep immediately. I awoke in about an hour. The misty rain had
been blown away and the moon was shining so clearly that when I turned
over I could see that Hori’s eyes were wide open. I heard the maid,
stumbling as always, come up the stairs with another bottle of _sake_.
I asked Hori whether he had been asleep. He said that he had not, that
after the woman had begun talking she had not stopped. I could hear her
low, ceaseless tones. The man was smoking one pipe after another. He
would knock out the ash against the brazier--four staccato raps--then
there would be a pause for the three or four puffs from the refilled
pipe, and then the staccato raps again.
“If we are ever going to get to sleep,” said Hori, “we’ll have to
complain to the mistress. Guests haven’t any right to keep other guests
awake.”
“Why wouldn’t it be better to make some such suggestion to them without
calling in the mistress?” I asked.
Hori shook his head. That was not the way. However, we delayed sending
for the inn mistress. Hori translated some of the conversation that he
had heard before I woke up. The woman had that morning left her home
and her husband. She had sent a message to the man now in the room with
her, but her news had evidently been one of his least desired wishes.
Before he sank into the silence of tobacco and _sake_ he had said his
disapproval.
“I thought you had more sense than to do anything so absurd, so almost
final. Don’t you see that it will be almost impossible for you to go
back now? How will you make any explanation that he can accept?”
“But,” she interrupted, “I came to you as you have so often said that
you wished I could. That was the only way I could be even a little bit
fair to him--to leave his house.”
“Everything was all right as it was.”
“No! No! I could not live that way.”
“I can’t see why. I don’t see it. Now you’ve pretty nearly ruined both
of us. However, we’ve got to think of some way for you to go back.”
“But I can’t. I’ve lost the possibility of that. If I had not thought
you wished me, I might not have come to you, but I could not stay
there.”
“That’s foolishness. Anyhow, you can go to your own family, and when he
finds that is where you are, he’ll want you to come back.”
Her mind was dully grasping that here, with this man, she had no
refuge, but her heart would not believe.
“I wished to make it complete,” she repeated. “I wanted to give up
everything for you.”
What folly, what sheer childish folly, he told her, that she had
listened seriously to his idle, passing phrases. Why, always, she must
have known that he was merely answering her vanity. Any woman should
have known and accepted that.
The ceaseless words and the staccato rapping of the pipe continued. We
dismissed from our minds any intention of sending for the mistress,
but not from prying curiosity. Our sleeping, or our not sleeping,
was not of importance. In merciful pity (at least as we thought) for
the woman, we knew that that contest must be settled as it was being
settled. “But,” Hori whispered, “it would be a mighty big satisfaction
to mix in a little physical argument.”
“No one at this inn knows who I am,” the man continued. “No one has any
idea that you have more than the slightest acquaintanceship with me. No
one would ever be convinced that you ran away to meet me.”
She ceased the argument that she had come to him in willing sacrifice
of all else--the supreme gift of her love for him. She began to plead.
He did not answer. His pipe struck against the brazier and now and
again the maid brought _sake_. Once she began to weep hysterically but
this surrender to her agony was only for a short moment.
It was now almost morning. The rapping of the pipe stopped. The man got
to his feet somewhat noisily. Passionately and despairingly the woman
begged him not to leave her. Then as suddenly she ceased all words
and said nothing as he made his preparations for going, nor did she
call after him when he left her. Her unbeating breast imprisoned her
breath through one last moment of hope. The spark of faith died but the
torture of life remained, and her breath was released in a long, low
moan. Until morning broke she sobbed, lying there on the floor.
She had not pushed back the wall panel which the man had left open.
When we went below to our baths she drew in her outstretched arm which
still reached gropingly into the narrow passageway. She dressed before
we returned. We met her on the stairs. She started to cover her face
with her _kimono_ sleeve, and then, listlessly, dropped her arm.
“Where will she go?” I asked Hori.
Hori did not know. In the old régime, he explained, when a woman of
the aristocracy left her husband she went to her family, but it had
been only under extreme duress that a woman would leave her husband.
There is much talk to-day in Japan that the social institutions are
crumbling. One is told that the “new woman” movement is a result of the
crumbling of the old order; and again one is told that the crumbling
has come from the new woman movement. These latter critics say that so
many women are leaving their homes that if any proper discipline is to
be retained and maintained, the tradition that a woman’s own family may
receive her into their house must be uncompromisingly discouraged as a
declaration of warning to others.
Hori, himself, now that the tragedy had ceased to be so present, was
somewhat inclined to look upon the history of the night in its relation
to collective society rather than as the drama of two individuals.
A Japanese instinctively regards a family as a family, and not as a
collection of units. Loyalty is the basic idea of that philosophy and
not the importance of the individual soul.
“There is one thing quite sure,” he added, “she was obviously from
a sheltered home and Japanese ladies know precious little about the
realities of the outside world. I don’t believe you could understand.
Why, they don’t even go shopping like American women. The shopkeepers
bring everything to them. If she hasn’t some place to go--well, you can
guess what will happen to her. She could never earn her own living any
more than a baby.”
“It may end with suicide,” I suggested.
Hori doubted that. Suicide is an escape often appealed to in Japan, but
he thought that if her temperament had been impulsively capable of
seeking such release, she would have made the attempt immediately.
“But,” I objected, “isn’t your other alternative impossible? Isn’t
there a rigid law that no woman of the _samurai_ class can enter the
_yoshiwara_?”
“Oh, yes,” said he, “but an agent can easily arrange to have her
adopted into some family of a lower order and then she loses her rank
and its protection.”
O-Owre-san came up from his bath and asked us what we were talking
about. He had slept through the night.
XI ANTIQUES, TEMPLES, AND TEACHING CHARM
For many days we had been passing through villages which yielded
no good hunting among the antique and second-hand shops. It should
be known that the lure of the curio carries poison. Two friends
who have lived blithely in affection, confident that no brutal nor
subtle assault could ever avail against the harmony of their intimate
understanding, perchance step through the doorway of a shop. Presto! A
candlestick, a vase, a box, a tumbledown chair, whatever it may be--the
desire for the thing magically energizes perception. We suddenly and
clearly perceive that the one-time friend at our side is hung with
many false tinkling cymbals. We never break the rules of the game; it
is the friend who always errs. Thus I was always learning O-Owre-san’s
abysmal depths, while he was encountering my superlative virtues of
unselfishness. However, as his chief fiendishness was for cloisonné and
my interest was in carved iron and bronzes and old Kyoto ware, we were
spared from too many overdoses of poison.
The little shops of Kama-Suwa really had curios. There were strange,
imaginative odds and ends which had been made to please the whims
of the eccentrics of a vanished and now almost un-understandable
age. Of such whimsicality were the costumes and the heap of personal
adornments which we discovered that had once been fashioned for a
famous wrestler of Kama-Suwa. Even his sandals were there. He must
have been a giant, truly, if his feet filled those _geta_. Everything
for the hero had been made in faithful exaggeration to many times the
size of the conventional. His leather tobacco pouch was as big as our
rucksacks. Every detail of the decorations of the pouch, such as the
_netsuke_, was increased to correct proportion. In the stockings for
his feet the threads were as thick as whipcord. The grain of the shark
skin binding the handle of his sword had come from some fish of the
Brobdingnag world. When fully equipped, that famous man--they spoke of
him reverently--must have given the effect that he had been blown into
expansion by some marvellous pump.
After we had shaken a dozen or so curio shops through our sieve we
wandered off into the rain seeking the village temple in the hills. By
festivals and gorgeous pageants the people around the shore of Suwa
still celebrate their faith and belief that its towns were built by the
gods in the beginning of time. The upkeep of the temples, I suppose,
must now come from the worshippers or the state as there are no longer
lavish feudal patrons with immense incomes of rice. Nevertheless these
temples do not seem to suffer poverty.
We easily found the path. A spring bursts from the rock of the
precipitous hill back of the temple garden and its waters keep green
the shrubs and grasses and the bamboo, and cherish the flowers. Perhaps
the garden has achieved its perfection by minute alterations through
hundreds of years, but its appeal bespeaks the original conception of
its first master artist, who, by creating a subtle absence of formal
arrangement, offered the supreme compliment to the beholder to carry
on through his own creative imagination that approach to the ideal
perfection which can never be reached.
After a time the rain, which had begun falling in torrents, drove us
back from the dream garden to the shelter of the overhanging temple
roof. A sliding door opened behind us and we turned around to see
an old woman kneeling on the matting. She bowed low and then arose
to disappear and to return again with tea and rice cakes and fruit.
She placed the dishes on a low, black lacquer table. We untied our
muddy shoes and moved in onto the mats. The rain fell in dull, droning
monotony on the tiles of the roof far above our heads; back in the deep
shadows our eyes could see the gleaming of the reddish gold edges of
the lacquered idols. Every suggestion was hypnotic of sleep and I had
been awake almost all the night before. I grew so sleepy that even the
touch of the cup in my hand had the feeling of unreal reality. Between
the raising of the cup to my lips and the putting of it down I actually
plunged for an instant into sleep, then came to consciousness with a
start. I looked at Hori. His eyes were blinking waveringly and with
much uncertainty. Were there ever such guests of a temple? I vaguely
remember that our hostess put a cushion under my head, and then came a
rhythmic coolness from her fan over my face. I would have slept on the
rack.
We slept until we awoke to find the sun shining. Our hostess, with
immobile, gentle face, was still fanning us. We were abjectly,
guiltily remorseful. We sat up and she brought fresh tea. We appealed
in a roundabout way for forgiveness by praising the teacups and the
teapot. They were very fine. She explained that they had been the gift
of some _daimyo_, she thought. Whoever he was, he had made many rich
gifts to the temple. She pushed back panels and brought out bowls and
vases, and told us romantic legends. The legends were colourful rather
than of plot. I knew then that I could never remember more than their
impression. The old woman’s own personality had drifted into limbo and
she had absorbed in its place a reflection of those dark, mysterious
temple rooms. She held out robes and porcelains before us and then
carried them away quickly. She led us through the shadows, stopping to
light incense at the feet of the Buddhas with the reverence that such
acts were her life and not her task.
We said good-bye and walked away, following along the crest of the
hill. The temple roof disappeared behind the treetops and we were
again in the modern world, for at that instant across the valley we
saw a huge, nondescript, barracks-like building. It had been erected
in the worship of efficiency, and was more completely mere walls of
windows with a roof above than even an American factory. As we stood
watching, a man paced out of the gate and behind him stepped a girl,
and then another girl, and another, until it was a long procession. The
line pursued a twisting way, sometimes in measured steps, sometimes in
undulating running. At last the line formed a serpentine coil in an
open space.
The building was the high school for girls and the man leading the
line was the physical instructor. The pupils wore the distinguishing
universal reddish-purple skirt of the high schools which are bound
over the _kimonos_. These skirts look heavy and uncomfortable. They
must have been designed by some minister of education in those days of
translation when the demand for modern ideas included always that they
must be served raw. It was believed with loyalty and devotion that the
principle at the base of the secret of foreign success was the axiom
that nothing useful can be ornamental.
The physical instructor was inhumanly military and dignified--and so
overwhelmingly efficient in his instruction that it was annoying to
see such perfection. Secretly perhaps, but always, the male animal
instinctively protests and resists that women should unite into
solidarity to do things. To his roots he begs that if they do so do,
they shall not achieve success in the essay. Man has always run in
packs, but woman has been the eternal individual. Our wrath was against
the traitor in sleeveless gymnasium shirt and tight foreign trousers
who was teaching so systematically and effectively to that line of
girls the secret of team work. By the sorrow of his eyes it could be
seen he acknowledged to himself his infamy to his sex, but his loyalty
to his Emperor was that he must conduct that exercise drill and conduct
it professionally.
Hori suggested that we visit the school, insisting that such a visit
would be considered a great compliment. It seemed to us more like an
impertinence of vagrants, but Hori continued firm that it was our duty
as itinerant foreigners to interrupt the machinery. He took a couple of
our visiting cards, mere innocent slips of pasteboard, and proceeded
with his fountain pen to make them pretentiously formidable. He raked
up all the detritus of our past lives. We did have sufficiency of
conventional shame to cough apologetically when Hori read aloud the
outrageous qualifications of our scholarship and degrees which he had
added after our names. We learned that it is a mistake to believe that
there can be no utilitarian value in a college degree: letters after
one’s name are seeds ready to burst into useful bloom under an exotic
sun, and the flowering may be a pass into a provincial high school for
Japanese maidens.
A servant took those remarkable cards from Hori’s hand and walked off
down the long corridor. The result was that a smiling diplomat came to
us empowered to minister to our entertainment and instruction. We were
honoured as the first courtesy by _not_ being allowed to remove our
heavy walking shoes. Every step that I took on those shining, spotless
floors made me feel as if I were perpetrating a clownish indecency. The
remorse that follows one’s own wilfulness can never be so keen as the
agony when sheer fate ordains unavoidable vulgarity. Still, in leaving
heel marks in the polished wood, there was the saving humour of the
idea that our hosts thought they were honouring us by encouraging our
foreign barbarity.
There were unending rooms of maids in purple skirts. They were studying
every sort of subject from the abstract to the practical, and from
the aesthetic to the ethical. There were girls with the refinement
of profile which one seeks and finds in the ideal drawings by the
great Japanese artists; and there were those other faces, the round,
good-natured O-Martha-sans. We looked over their shoulders at their
paintings of flowers, at their embroidery, at their arithmetic sums,
their maps, and their English composition. The Japanese say, “Perhaps
rich nations can afford to economize in education and to exploit
ignorance, but we, being very poor, must be practical. We cannot take
such risk of ignorance.”
A modicum of truth lies in the statement that the Japanese have taken
up education as a new religion. (And some of the bumptious youthful
devotees in Tokyo impress one that it was a mistaken bargain to have
allowed them to exchange pocket shrines for text-books.) Theories of
education have many splits everywhere in the world and the Japanese
fervour has not escaped having to face the necessity of certain
decisions. One difference of opinion, which might almost be called
theological, rests in the question whether the youth should be educated
to think according to conviction or to think according to conformity;
to think or to be taught what to think. A Japanese told us that the
government must risk its last penny to-day to guarantee the future,
that the people are being educated to understand national policies in
the faith that understanding will breed willing cooperation and willing
self-sacrifice. When I asked him which he meant, whether students
were being taught to understand the policies of the state or whether
they were being taught to believe in them, I rather thought that he
considered my question argumentative and perhaps unfriendly. However,
without his having answered the question, it is obvious that Japan is
trusting its fate to the system of educating toward solidarity, the
impulse to think alike.