With a view to self-protection I have been reading Dr. Howard’s book,
“Mosquitoes.” I am persecuted by mosquitoes. There are several species
in my neighborhood; but only one of them is a serious torment,—a tiny
needly thing, all silver-speckled and silver-streaked. The puncture of
it is sharp as an electric burn; and the mere hum of it has a
lancinating quality of tone which foretells the quality of the pain
about to come,—much in the same way that a particular smell suggests a
particular taste. I find that this mosquito much resembles the creature
which Dr. Howard calls _Stegomyia fasciata_, or _Culex fasciatus:_ and
that its habits are the same as those of the _Stegomyia_. For example,
it is diurnal rather than nocturnal and becomes most troublesome in the
afternoon. And I have discovered that it comes from the Buddhist
cemetery,—a very old cemetery,—in the rear of my garden.
Dr. Howard’s book declares that, in order to rid a neighborhood of
mosquitoes, it is only necessary to pour a little petroleum, or
kerosene oil, into the stagnant water where they breed. Once a week the
oil should be used, “at the rate of once ounce for every fifteen square
feet of water-surface, and a proportionate quantity for any less
surface.” ...But please to consider the conditions in _my_
neighborhood!
I have said that my tormentors come from the Buddhist cemetery. Before
nearly every tomb in that old cemetery there is a water-receptacle, or
cistern, called _mizutamé_. In the majority of cases this _mizutamé_ is
simply an oblong cavity chiseled in the broad pedestal supporting the
monument; but before tombs of a costly kind, having no pedestal-tank, a
larger separate tank is placed, cut out of a single block of stone, and
decorated with a family crest, or with symbolic carvings. In front of a
tomb of the humblest class, having no _mizutamé_, water is placed in
cups or other vessels,—for the dead must have water. Flowers also must
be offered to them; and before every tomb you will find a pair of
bamboo cups, or other flower-vessels; and these, of course, contain
water. There is a well in the cemetery to supply water for the graves.
Whenever the tombs are visited by relatives and friends of the dead,
fresh water is poured into the tanks and cups. But as an old cemetery
of this kind contains thousands of _mizutamé_, and tens of thousands of
flower-vessels the water in all of these cannot be renewed every day.
It becomes stagnant and populous. The deeper tanks seldom get dry;—the
rainfall at Tōkyō being heavy enough to keep them partly filled during
nine months out of the twelve.
Well, it is in these tanks and flower-vessels that mine enemies are
born: they rise by millions from the water of the dead;—and, according
to Buddhist doctrine, some of them may be reincarnations of those very
dead, condemned by the error of former lives to the condition of
_Jiki-ketsu-gaki_, or blood-drinking pretas.... Anyhow the malevolence
of the _Culex fasciatus_ would justify the suspicion that some wicked
human soul had been compressed into that wailing speck of a body....
Now, to return to the subject of kerosene-oil, you can exterminate the
mosquitoes of any locality by covering with a film of kerosene all
stagnant water surfaces therein. The larvae die on rising to breathe;
and the adult females perish when they approach the water to launch
their rafts of eggs. And I read, in Dr. Howard’s book, that the actual
cost of freeing from mosquitoes one American town of fifty thousand
inhabitants, does not exceed three hundred dollars!...
I wonder what would be said if the city-government of Tōkyō—which is
aggressively scientific and progressive—were suddenly to command that
all water-surfaces in the Buddhist cemeteries should be covered, at
regular intervals, with a film of kerosene oil! How could the religion
which prohibits the taking of any life—even of invisible life—yield to
such a mandate? Would filial piety even dream of consenting to obey
such an order? And then to think of the cost, in labor and time, of
putting kerosene oil, every seven days, into the millions of
_mizutamé_, and the tens of millions of bamboo flower-cups, in the
Tōkyō graveyards!... Impossible! To free the city from mosquitoes it
would be necessary to demolish the ancient graveyards;—and that would
signify the ruin of the Buddhist temples attached to them;—and that
would mean the disparition of so many charming gardens, with their
lotus-ponds and Sanscrit-lettered monuments and humpy bridges and holy
groves and weirdly-smiling Buddhas! So the extermination of the _Culex
fasciatus_ would involve the destruction of the poetry of the ancestral
cult,—surely too great a price to pay!...
Besides, I should like, when my time comes, to be laid away in some
Buddhist graveyard of the ancient kind,—so that my ghostly company
should be ancient, caring nothing for the fashions and the changes and
the disintegrations of Meiji (1). That old cemetery behind my garden
would be a suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty
of exceeding and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been
shaped by some old, old ideal which no longer exists in any living
brain; even the shadows are not of this time and sun, but of a world
forgotten, that never knew steam or electricity or magnetism
or—kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness
of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the
nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them
make me afraid,—deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal
but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part
of my ghost,—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light
beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope
to remain within hearing of that bell... And, considering the
possibility of being doomed to the state of a _Jiki-ketsu-gaki_, I want
to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or
_mizutamé_, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent
song, to bite some people that I know.