I had a queer time of it last night.
About 8 o’clock I reached the hotel. It had already closed up for the
night, and was but dimly lighted. I could not, of course, tell, then,
the plan of the house or the lay-out of its garden, to say nothing of
its bearing on the points of the compass. I was led by the nose, as it
were, through a long, long winding sort of passage, at the end of which
I was put in a small room of about six mats. I could not at all tell
where I was; the place had so completely changed since I was here last.
After supper, and then a dip in the hot spring bath, I was sipping tea
in my room, when a young girl came in, and asked me if she should make
my bed.
What struck me as not a little strange was that it was the same girl
who had come out to let me in when I arrived; it was this same girl
who had brought me supper and waited on me; it was this same girl who
had showed me to the bath room; and it was again this same girl who
took upon herself the trouble of making the bed for me. This little
woman seemed to have everything on her shoulders in this establishment;
and yet she seldom spoke a word. I would have done her injustice,
however, if I said she was country-looking. When she went before me,
with her girlish crimson “obi”(14) tied unsentimentally on her back,
and with an old-fashioned burning candle in her hand, taking me round
and round along a corridor-like and stairway-like passages, when she
with the same crimson “obi” and the same candle-stick, led me down
places, of which it was difficult to say whether they were corridors or
staircases, down to the bath tank, I felt as if I were myself a figure
in a picture moving in a world of canvas.
♦ “corriders” replaced with “corridors”
When she waited on me at supper, she begged me to put up with the room
I was in, which was, she said, one of family use, as the other rooms
were undusted, no guests coming these days. When she finished making my
bed she spoke humanly, wishing me “a good night of rest”, before she
left my room. My ears followed her footsteps along the long wriggling
sort of passage until they finally died out far away. Then stillness
fell and the whole place seemed to have become deserted by all things
human.
Only once before in all my life, I went through an experience
like this. Long ago I crossed Boshu from Tateyama to the Pacific sea
coast, and went on foot from Kazusa to Choshi along the sea shore. On
the way I stopped overnight at a place. At a place, and I cannot say
less vaguely as the name of the locality and of the inn where I lodged
had both long since been forgotten. It is not even clear that it was
really an inn where I passed the night. The house was very large but
inhabited by only two women. I asked them if they would let me stop
overnight. The older of the two said “yes” and the younger said: “This
way please.” I followed the latter past many spacious but deserted and
neglected rooms, and was finally shown up the innermost semi-two-storey
flat. I mounted three staircases and was about to enter my room, when a
gust of evening wind made a bunch of bamboos, growing bendingly under
the eve, rustle against my head and shoulders, somehow chilling me to
the bones. The wooden flooring of the verandah, I stepped upon, was
almost crumbling with age. I remarked, then, the sprouts would pierce
through the flooring and take possession of the room next spring. The
young woman said nothing but went away grinning.
That night, the rustling of bamboos robbed me of all my sleep. I slid
open the front paper screen and found myself looking over, in the
clear Summer moonlight, a grass-grown garden, which had no boundary
hedge or fence, but stretched into a weedy elevation, beyond which the
great ocean roared with its tumbling breakers, menacing the world of
man. I passed the whole night nervously awake, imprisoning myself in
an apology of a mosquito net. My lot that night might be, I thought, a
page from some weird story book.
♦ “slided” replaced with “slid”
I had never since felt as I did then, until my first night at Nakoi.
I was lying on my back in my bed, and my eyes accidentally caught
sight of some Chinese writing mounted in a vermilion frame, hung high
up a wall. It consisted of seven big characters which said: “Shadow
of bamboos sweeping no dust rises.” It was signed “Daitetsu.” Then my
fancy travelled for a while into the realm of autographs. A Jakuchu in
the picture hanging niche next entered my eyes. It was a picture of a
crane standing on one foot, a production of a bold sweep of brush, that
pleased me marvellously. In a little while I fell asleep and was
soon lost in dreamland.
The Maiden of Nagara appeared before me, in a long-sleeved bridal
gown, crossing a mountain on a pony. The Sasabe Otoko and the Sasada
Otoko suddenly slipped into the scene, and began struggling to carry
away the maiden. Thereupon the girl changed as suddenly into Ophelia,
mounting a branch of willow tree, and then floating down a stream. She
was singing sweetly. Eager to rescue her, I reached a long pole and ran
along Mukojima with it. She showed no sign of struggle, but was smiling
and singing as the tide carried her down, down to where I knew not. I
hallooed and hallooed to her, with the pole on my shoulder.
My hallooing awoke me. I was wet with perspiration. What a curious
mixture of the poetical and vulgar, I thought. Priest Ta Hui in the
Sung days of China, who claimed to be able to have everything his way
after he had attained his Buddhistic emancipation, complained that he
was nevertheless vulnerable to unworthy thoughts that cropped up in his
dreams. He is said to have suffered long and greatly from this failing.
I thought that was quite natural. It would do little credit to any
one making art one’s life to dream a not more beautiful dream. One such
as I dreamed would in greater part make neither a picture nor poetry
worthy of the name. Thinking thus, I turned my body over in bed and saw
the moon shining on the paper screen, casting on it the shadow of some
branches of tree. The night looked almost bright.
Possibly just a fancy; but I thought I heard some one singing or rather
chanting softly. I pricked my ears to know if it was a song that had
escaped from dreamland into this world of reality, or a real voice
flowing into dreams? I was sure there was some one singing. The voice
was indisputably thin and low; but faint as it was, it was pulsating
the Spring night, which was on the verge of sleep. The weird part of it
was that, whatever its tune, its wording, of which there was no reason
that it could be heard clearly, being not uttered near me, nevertheless
came distinctly, the sinking voice repeating over and over the song of
Nagarano Otome: “Even like the dew drop, that when autumn comes, lodges
on grass leaves, must I roll off to die.”
The chanting sounded first near the verandah; but it gradually grew
fainter and farther. What ceases suddenly produces a feeling of
suddenness; but it leaves little room for sentiment. A voice that
speaks peremptorily resolution rouses also a feeling of peremptoriness
and resolution in others. But confronted by a phenomenon that had
no definite limit but went on thinning and thinning until it would
imperceptibly disappear altogether, you could not help feeling that
you must mince up the minute and split the second, your sense of
helplessness and hopelessness momentarily deepening. The chant sounded
dying like a dying man, becoming more and more feeble like an outgoing
light; and in that song that distracted the heart as if with the
approaching end, there was a tune that spoke for all the sorrows of the
Spring of the whole world.
I listened to the song, holding myself down in the bed; but as it went
farther and farther, I felt, I must chase it, despite the consciousness
that it was luring me out by the ear. The thinner it grew the more I
felt that I should let my ear only fly after it. Just at the moment I
thought, however hard I might listen, my ears would hear no more, I
could constrain myself no longer and unconsciously I slipped out of my
bed. The same moment I opened the “shoji,”(15) and stood out in the
verandah, with the lower half of my body bathing in the moonlight and a
tree throwing its waving shadow on my night clothes. These details did
not occur to me, however, at the instant I opened the “shoji.”
But that dying sound? I looked in the direction toward which my ear was
running. There I espied a shadowy form in the moonlight as it were,
with its back to a tree, which, if in bloom, might be an aronia. The
misty dark thing flanked right, stepping on the shadow of blossoms on
the ground, even before it had left on me a clear impression that “it
must be it.” A corner of the roof, thrown on the ground, of a room
adjoining mine, seemed to move lithely, and the next moment shut out
from view a tall figure of a woman.
I was lost to myself for many moments, as I stood thinly clad in my
night gown, with my hand on the screen. The minute I returned to
myself, I was made keenly conscious that a night of Spring in the
mountain was decidedly chilly. As it was, I did not hesitate to permit
myself to creep back into the bed from which I had crept out, and
started on another train of thought. I took out my watch from under
the pillow and found it pointing at ten past one. I put the watch
back under the pillow, and returned to my thoughts. “It cannot be a
spook,” I thought. If not an apparition, it must be a human being, and
if a human being, it must be a woman. She might have been the O-Jo-san
of this house. If so, it seemed rather defying propriety that a young
woman, who had taken a divorce of her husband should, at that hour
of night, be out in the garden, that ran into the mountain. In any
case, sleep had become impossible, that watch of mine under the pillow
ticking me to irrepressible wakefulness. The tiny ticking of my watch
had never before troubled me; but on this particular night it seemed
to say “No sleep for you to-night, but think, think, think.” It was
outrageously extraordinary.
A frightful thing will make poetry when you regard it merely as the
form itself of frightfulness; just as a weird eerie sight may be
worked into a picture, if you treat it as something horrid in itself,
independent of you. Likewise a disappointed love makes an excellent
theme of art when gentleness, sympathy, worries and, indeed, even the
very overflow of pains, it occasions, are turned objectively into
visions before you, divorced from the actual torments felt in your
heart. Nay, some people imagine that they are disappointed in love in
order to enjoy the pleasure of agonising themselves. Ordinary mortals
laugh at them as idiotic, as lunatic; but they are no more unbalanced,
from the point of view of having their own artistic ground to stand on,
than those who go into the ecstacy of living in a world of their own by
creating scenery that nowhere exists.
Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common
people, idiots, lunatics—whatever be their qualification in their daily
life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till
night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit
subjects for their canvas or for their pen. But they betray not even a
shadow of grievance when they tell others of their experiences. They
not only narrate gleefully the things they enjoyed and were delighted
with, but are enthusiastic over events that once tortured them but now
come back as sweet memories. Not that they mean to deceive themselves
and others; but the truth is that when out on the road they see and
feel as ordinary mortals do, but they become poets when they talk
of their past. And this accounts for their inconsistencies. He may be
called an artist, then, who lives in a triangle, built by knocking off
a corner called common-sense of the four-angled world.
Be it in nature or in the world of man, artists thus discover countless
gems and stones of inestimable value, in places which the multitude
dare not approach. The secret of such a discovery is commonly called
beautifying. But in reality there is no beautification about it at all,
light and colour having in their brilliancy always existed in this
mundane world; but because flowers fall from the sky in vain for common
eyes; because worldly trammels are unshakable; because the thought of
success and prosperity hang so heavy on the human mind, nobody has been
able to see the beauties of a railway train till Turner showed them,
and the world waited for Ohkyo to be shown the æsthetics of a ghost.
The shadow I had just seen had, as a phenomenon complete in itself
and nothing more, something poetical about it that none could deny
who saw or heard it. A sequestered spa in the bosom of a mountain—the
shadow of flowers in a Spring night—The soft warbling of a song under
a tell-tale moon—a dreamy figure in pale moonlight—every one of
them would have made a capital subject for an artist. For all that, I
was trying unnecessarily to see what might be behind the vision, and a
blood-chilling sensation that had taken possession of me blinded me to
the elegance of the situation, which was perfectly consistent in itself
and the picturesqueness that could not be hoped for. I thought myself
unworthy of my professed unhumanity and felt I must go through more
training before I could proclaim myself a poet or an artist. Salvator
Rosa of Italy came vividly before my eyes with his perilous tale of
joining the ♦banditti of the Abruzzi. I had wandered away from my home
with just a sketch book, and I should be ashamed of myself, if I had
not Rosa’s resolve.
♦ “banditi” replaced with “banditti”
How should I rehabilitate myself as a poet in such circumstances?
All that is necessary is, I argued to myself, I may put myself in a
condition that would enable me to take hold of my feelings, lay them
before me, stand a step behind, and examine them calmly unprejudicedly
as if I were another person, not myself. The poet is under an
obligation, when he dies, to dissect his own body and publish the cause
of his malady. There may be various ways of doing this; but the
easiest and nearest is to make an instantaneous survey of everything
you can lay your hand on, and reduce it into a seventeen syllable
“hokku”. The seventeen syllable effusion is the simplest of poems, and
you can have it, when you are washing your face in the morning, or
when you are going in a tram car. It makes a poet of you most simply
and most easily. To be a poet is to be enlightened, and I mean no
disparagement, when I say, it is the simplest and easiest. The simpler
the more beneficial it is, and should the more be respected. Suppose
you lose your temper. You make a seventeen syllable “hokku” of your
indignation. The moment seventeen c get into shape, your anger
becomes something outside of you—you cannot be fuming with anger and
composing a “hokku” at the same time. You are moved to tears; you make
seventeen syllables, and they delight you. When your tears are changed
into seventeen syllables, your tearful anguish has left you, and you
have become a self only joyous of being a man capable of weeping.
This has always been the stand I insisted upon, and I now wanted to put
it to a practical test. Lying abed, I set about making a series
of seventeen syllables of the events of the night. A very deliberate
enterprise as I was undertaking, I lay open my sketch-book near the
pillow, to jot down in it as fast as I got the lines, lest they might
become lost as fugitive thoughts, hard to recapture.
“Kaidono tsuyuo furu-u-ya monogurui,”(a) I wrote down as my first
production. If the reading of it did not strike me as particularly
captivating, neither did it give rise to any uncomfortably creepy
feeling. I next jotted down: “Hanano kage, onnano kageno oborokana.”(b)
It was faulty with a redundancy. I forgave myself for it; because all
I wanted was to recover calmness and humour myself into an easy frame
of mind. For the third piece, I ventured: “Shoichi-i onnani bakete
oborozuki.”(c) It sounded droll and amused me.
All was right at this rate, I thought, and getting into the spirit of
the thing, I scribbled down all that follow, one after another:
“Haruno hoshio otoshite
Yowano kazashikana.”(d)
“Haruno yono kumoni
Nurasuya araigami.”(e)
“Haruya koyoi
Uta tsukamatsuru onsugata.”(f)
“Kaido no seiga
Detekuru tsukiyokana.”(g)
“Uta oriori gekkano
Haruo ochikochisu.”(h)
“Omoi kitte fukeyuku
Haruno hitorikana.”(i)
Sleep was stealing over me by the time I had finished committing the
last piece to the sketch-book.
I was half asleep and half awake, in a condition, to describe which
was invented, I thought, the expression “as in a trance.” Nobody is
conscious of self in a sound sleep; but in wakefulness the world
outside is never forgotten. Between the two regions lies the borderland
of vision, where things look too misty to be called awake, and yet too
animate to be in sleep. It is a condition in which “up awake” and “lie
asleep” are put in one and the same cup and stirred and mixed up with
the straw of poetry and song. Shade off the colours of nature into
all but a dream, push this universe of reality adrift into the sea
of haze, and smooth into curves all sharp angles with the magic hand
of the genie of sleep. Breathe slow pulsation into the world so
tempered. Imagine clouds of smoke crawling the surface of such a world,
unable to fly away though it would; imagine again your soul about to
depart lingering, unable to leave its shell. Such is the condition I
mean. It is again the state in which the soul is lambently struggling,
and finally unable to preserve its entity dissolves into an ethereal
existence and clings and hangs about with no heart to depart.
♦ “Breath” replaced with “Breathe”
I was traversing this borderland of dreamy consciousness when the
“karakami”(16) of my room opened, as if of its own accord, and in the
opening appeared the figure of a woman, like a phantom. The apparition
did not cause me surprise, nor did it frighten me: I simply looked
at it with easy pleasant sensation. Perhaps I put it too strongly to
say I “looked at”; for the truth was, the shadowy thing ♦slid with no
permission of mine behind the lids of my eyes, which were closed. The
phantom slowly came into my room, with the smoothness of a fairy queen
walking across a placid surface of water. The matted floor gave no
sound of human foot steps. I could not tell distinctly as I was looking
through closed eyelids; but she looked fair, with a wealth of hair
and a long well-shaped neck, making me feel as if I were throwing my
eyes on a vignette of latter-day vogue, held up against a light.
♦ “slided” replaced with “slid”
The vision stopped before a cupboard in the rear of the room. A
karakami screening the cupboard was pushed open and a slim arm visible
in the dark came out of a sleeve. The screen closed then and the
phantom sailed noiselessly back to the opening, which, in the next
moment, closed of itself. Sleep now gathered faster and faster on me.
The dead must feel as I did then, I obscurely imagined, before being
reborn into a horse or an ox.
I did not know how long I had been wandering between man and horse;
only I opened my eyes. The curtain of night had apparently been raised
long since, and the world was light from end to end, with the bright
Spring sun printing darkly bamboo lattices on the window “shoji,”♦
leaving no room, as it appeared, for any spooky things to lurk about on
the face of the earth. The mysterious apparition must have hied into
the far, far away world on the other side of the Styx.
♦ “(7)” redundant footnote indicator removed
I went straightway down to the bath-room for a morning dip. I just
held my head above water for a full five minutes, perfectly will-less
to wash my face or to be getting out. How could I have gone, I
wondered, into such state of mind as I did last night and how could the
world go head-over-heels so completely by merely crossing the boundary
line of night and day.
I was too lazy to dry myself and was coming out of the bath-room almost
wet, when to my surprise, simultaneous with my opening the bath-room
door from within, a voice—that of a woman—outside said: “Good morning,
did you sleep well last night?”
I had expected no one on the other side of the door, and the greeting
came with such absolute suddenness that I was at a loss for an answer.
The voice then said: “Put this on and be good; so there.” This was said
as the person, from whom the voice proceeded, went behind me and put
gently on my back a kimono deliciously soft to the ♦skin,(18) Then and
only then did the command of words return to me sufficiently to enable
me to blurt out: “So kind of you, thank you.” The woman withdrew a step
or two backward as I turned to say this.
♦ “skin,(8)” replaced with “skin,(18)”
Now, it is an unwritten law for novelists, from time immemorial,
to give the minutest portrayal of their hero or heroine. If words,
phrases, clauses, and effusions employed by ancients as well as by
moderns, of the East and of the West, in describing and speaking of
beautiful women, were collected, they might, indeed, out-volume even
the great Buddhist Sutras. The words might mount up to a countless
number, if I were to pick out, from this overwhelming accumulation of
adjectives, those that would fit the woman, who was standing three
steps from me, with her body slightly twisted half way round toward
me and looking at me from the corner of her eyes, as if enjoying my
amazement and embarrassment. To confess the truth, I had never yet
seen an expression like this woman’s in the thirty years of my life.
According to the Greek sculptural ideals, the artists say, calmness
seems to be that state of force in which it is ready for, but has not
yet gone, into action. Roused into action it may awake the winds and
clouds and bring down a thunder-storm. But one does not know what,
and it is precisely the consciousness of this profound and unseen
potentiality that makes the Greek art live for centuries and centuries
with its unchanging powers of fascination. This serene calmness with
its electric possibilities, it is which forms the source of what the
world calls dignity and augustness. But once in motion the force
must take one form or another, and once in form it can no longer retain
its mystic powers, nor can it recover its perfection. There is always,
thus, something low and mean in motion. This one word motion, it was,
that made failures of Unkey’s Niwo and Hokusai’s comic pictures. Motion
or rest? That is where the vital question hangs for us artists. The
qualities of beautiful women, from the oldest of times, may be brought
under either one of these categories.
But the woman before me was a puzzle, her expression defying my power
of judgment. Her lips were tightly sealed, and yet they seemed to
speak. Her eyes were ceaselessly on the alert, indeed, motion itself.
Her face was a lovely oval, somewhat fleshy downward and altogether
calmly composed. Her brow was narrow, not quite in keeping with her
generally classical features. Especially noticeable were her eyebrows
that almost joined, and the nervous twitching going on between them as
if a drop of mint oil were drying there. Not so with her nose, which
was neither too thin and sharp, bespeaking flippancy nor beetle-like,
indicating dullness, but was of such shape as would make a fine
picture. In short, her features, taken separately, had each its own
point of significance, and it was no wonder I was at a loss as they all
at once crowded into my eyes with no claim to harmony.
Supposing an earthquake occurred, convulsing the earth. Suppose
that awakening to the fact that motion is against one’s nature, one
strives to recover one’s former repose; but carried by the force of
lost balance, one keeps on in motion, in spite of oneself, and wants
in desperation to be now agitated with a vengeance. Suppose one is
capable of an expression reflecting such a state of things, then it was
precisely such an expression that I saw in the woman before me.
Thus it was that behind her look of contempt, I could see a flicker of
yearning, and the gleam of a careful mind from under a mocking air. She
looked as if she thought nothing of a hundred men, when she let loose
her wit and rode on her high spirits. There was no unity of expression.
I might have said, light and darkness of mind were living under
the same roof, quarreling. The fact that there was no unity in her
expression was evidence, as I took it, that there was no unity in her
mind. That there was no unity in her mind must be the consequence
of there being no unity in the world in which she had lived. Hers
was the face of one struggling to overcome the unhappiness that was
weighing down upon her. She must be a woman standing under a star of
ill-luck.
“Thank you.” Repeating the words, I lightly bowed to her.
“Your room is dusted. Go back and you will see. I will come to you
later.”
No sooner had she said this than she nimbly turned round and lightly
hurried away along the passage. She had her hair done up in the
“butterfly” style. I could espy her fair neck under the black hair.
Quite striking was her black satin “obi,” wound round her shapely
waist. Perhaps the satin lined only one side of the sash, I reflected
as I stood watching her.