My curiosity brought me, the next day, to the Kagamiga Ike, a pool of
water, not more than half a mile in circumference, by an actual survey,
but looking immeasurably larger, when seen through openings in the
brushwood, embowering its zigzag water-edge. I left it to my feet to
take me where they liked, and I stopped when they came to a halt at a
spot close to and falling into water, determined not to move till I
got sick of it. Lucky that I could indulge in a whim like this; for in
Tokyo I would be run over by a tram car, if not sternly chased away
by a policeman. Ah! the city is a place where they make a beggar of a
peaceful citizen, and pay a high salary to detectives who are all but
boss pickpockets!
I sat on a damp cushion, which I found in incipient Spring grass,
satisfied that I was in the bosom of nature, where neither wealth nor
power could disturb me, and where I could heartily laugh at the folly
of Timon’s wrath. I then took out and lighted a cigarette, and as a
streak of smoke from the match took the shape of a dragon with
its tail tapering to a line, and vanished in a moment, I drew nearer
to the water edge. I looked into the clear and placid water of the
pond and saw some slender weeds reposing as in eternal peace in its
not necessarily unfathomable depth. Unlike the shear grass on the bank
which moved in the breeze, the weeds down in the bottom were doomed, I
fancied, never to stir till their surrounding water moved in ripples,
an event, which in all appearance, seemed never to come. Possessed
of willingness to be animate, but imprisoned in the watery dungeon,
they appeared to have been waiting in vain, morning after morning, and
evening after evening, for an opportunity to be sported with, and eking
out a life of forced immobility, unable to die. I picked up a couple of
pebbles and dropped one of them into the water. I saw a couple or three
of the thin stalks of weeds move wearily, as some bubbles came up to
the surface; but the next moment more bubbles hid them from sight, as
if they must not be seen in motion. I threw in the other pebble, with
some force this time; but the poor resigned thing would not respond to
my efforts to awaken them, and I left the place and walked a little way
up the slow incline.
A huge tree stood over my new position of vantage, screening me from
the sun and making me feel chilly. Near the water’s edge, on the other
side of the pond, was an overhanging camellia tree in full bloom. There
is something very heavy and dull in the green of camellia leaves, even
when seen in the sunshine, and I would have never known this particular
plant but for its blood red flowers, which are never attractive, though
fiery and striking. I never look at camellia flowers in a deep forest
or mountain without wishing that I had not seen them; their red is not
a common red, but a red with something weird in it like a she-demon
in a fair woman’s mask, who fascinates you with her black eyes and
beauty and breathes poison into your pores before you know it. The pear
blossoms in rain never fail to arouse a sentiment of pity; the aronia
in pale moon light awakens love; but the camellia’s cheerless red
be-speaks a dark poison and something ominous.
As I was looking at those dark red flowers, as if under a spell, one of
them fell into the water below, absolutely the only thing in motion in
the still Spring day. Presently another dropped. The eerie thing
about the camellia flower is that it never breaks up when it falls, as
do most other flowers, but keeps compactly together, never to let its
secret out, as it were. But one more fell, followed by another, after
an interval, by still another, and still another, like the minute gun.
Surely, I thought, the whole surface of the pond would turn red, by
and by. I fancied the water looked slightly reddish already where the
flowers were floating. Would they ever sink? Their red would melt, they
would rot, become mud and fill up the pool, until there would be no
more Kagamiga Ike, but a dry land after thousands of years. Hoy! one
more extra-big blood red flower fell, and drop, drop, drop, followed by
others, never ceasing to pass into eternity.
I now became seized with a queer idea, how it would look to paint a
pond like this, with a beautiful woman floating in its water. I went
back to the spot where I first stopped and there continued to think
on the imaginary picture. Then with a tingling sensation, rushed back
to my memory, the joking remark of Nami-san of the hot spring hotel,
yesterday, that she should like to have me paint her dead, but floating
with a pleasant face in the water. Suppose, I thought, I made her
float in the water under that camellia. I wondered if I could make my
brush tell that the blood red flowers were forever dropping, dropping,
dropping into the water on her, and she was forever lying in her watery
bed, in her eternal peaceful repose. But it was no easy matter, I told
myself, to give expression to the idea of super-human eternity, without
rising above the level of mortal humanity.
Besides, the greatest difficulty lay in the choice of the face.
Nami-san, with her usual expression of a discordant mixture of
derision, impetuosity and soft heart, would never do, I thought. The
face must bear no trace of mental or physical agony; but one with
effulgent light-heartedness would be worse. Perhaps I had better borrow
another woman’s face; but the racking of my head revealed to me none
to fit my imaginary picture, so that I felt that it must be Nami-san,
after all. Yet there was something lacking in her to suit my purpose,
and the tantalising part of it was how to make up for that something,
it being impossible to work my whilom fancy into it to fill up what
was lacking. How would it do to give the face a touch of jealousy?
But that would make it look too uneasy. How about hatred, then?
That would again be too strong. Anger? No, it would spoil the whole
effect. Resentment for some particular cause is sometimes poetical and
acceptable; but as an every day feeling, it is too commonplace.
I thought and thought and thought, and it suddenly flashed upon me that
what was missing from Nami-san was pity and compassion. Compassion is
a feeling unknown to the gods, and yet is one that makes man as near
gods as possible. This was one sentiment which I had never yet seen
reflected in Nami-san, and I was convinced that my picture would become
an accomplished fact, the moment I saw it aroused by some impulse or
other and flashed across her handsome face. For the moment, however, I
had absolutely no idea as to when or if ever, I should have the good
fortune to see it in her.
A bantering sort of smile and a knitted brow bespeaking an eager desire
to get the better of you are the ever constant features of her face
and nothing can be done with them only. Hark! A rustling sound as of
somebody wading through dry leaves came, and the mental plan of my
picture, two-thirds of which I had finished forming went to pieces.
Looking up, I saw a man in tight sleeved kimono, loaded with some
faggots on his back, coming through the creeping bamboo growths towards
the Kaikanji, apparently from the neighbouring hill.
“Fine weather, Sir,” said the man to me, taking off a towel from his
head. He made a bow, and as he did so, a flash from a sharpened ♦hatchet,
stuck in his belt, caught my eyes. He was a sturdily built men of
about forty, with a face I remembered seeing somewhere. He spoke to me
familiarly:
“Danna paints, too?” I had my colour-box open by me.
♦ “hachet” replaced with “hatchet”
“Yes, I have come out here, thinking I might make a picture of this
pond. This is a very lonely place; nobody comes round.”
“Yes, it is very much in the mountain.... Danna, you had a time of it
in rain, on that pass. I am sure, it was a bad toiling along you had
that time.”
“Eh? why, yes, you are the mago-san I saw, then?”
“Yes. I gather faggots as you see and take them down to the town to
sell.” Gembey took his load down from his back and sat on it. His hand
brought out a tobacco pouch, a very ancient affair, that refused
to tell whether it was of leather or of imitation leather. I gave him a
lighted match and said:
“It must be a great job for you to cross a place like that, every day?”
“No, Danna, I am used to it. Besides I don’t do it every day, but only
once in three days, and sometimes four days.”
“For myself, I should be excused even for once in four days.”
“Aha, ha, ha, ha. It is hard on my pony, and I generally make it four
days or so.”
“That is, you think more of your horse than yourself, eh? Ha, ha, ha,
ha!”
“Not quite that....”
“By the way, this pond looks very old. Have you any idea, how old it
is?”
“This has been here from olden times.”
“From olden times? How old?”
“Well, from a very long time ago.”
“From a very long time ago, I see.”
“A very long time ago, anyway, from the time when the Jo-sama of Shiota
threw herself into it.”
“Shiota? That spa-hotel you mean?”
“Yes.”
“You say the O-Jo-san drowned herself here? But she is alive, very
much alive there?”
“No, not that Jo-sama, but a Jo-sama of long, long ago.”
“Long, long ago? About when?”
“Well, a Jo-sama of very great long ago....”
“What made that Jo-sama of so long ago throw herself into water?”
“That Jo-sama was, it is said, as beautiful as the present Jo-sama,
Danna-sama.”
“Yes?”
“One day there came along a bonroji....”
“Bonroji? You mean that begging minstrel that used to come round of
old, playing his ‘shakuhachi’ pipe?”
“Yes, that ‘shakuhachi’ bonroji. While this bonroji was stopping at
Squire Shiota’s house, the beautiful Jo-sama took a fancy to him. Would
you call it fate or what? Anyhow, she said she must have him, and
cried.”
“Cried? You don’t say!”
“But the Squire would not have a bonroji for his son-in-law, and drove
away the party.”
“Drove away the bonroji?”
“Yes. The Jo-sama ran out of the house after him, and coming here, she
threw herself into the water from where that yonder pine tree is
standing. The whole place went into an awful excitement then. It is
said that the young Jo-sama had, at the time, a mirror with her, and
the pond has since come to be called Kagamiga Ike. We still call this
the Mirror Pond.”
“Oh, the pond has made a grave, already, at least for one person?”
“A very scandalous affair, indeed.”
“This was about how many Squires back, do you know?”
“It is said to be a very long time back, and ... it is between you and
I, Danna-san.”
“What?”
“Every generation has had its mad one born in that Shiota family.”
“Oh?”
“A curse must be on that house. They are all saying that the present
Jo-sama is getting queer of late.”
“Ha, ha, ha, ha. That seems improbable.”
“You don’t think so? But let me tell you that her mother had a touch of
it, too.”
“Is the old lady there?”
“No, she died last year.”
“Hum,” I said, looking at a thin cord of smoke rising from live
tobacco ashes, Gembey emptied on the ground, and then closed my mouth.
The man went away with the faggots on his back.
I had come out on my unhuman tour to do some painting. But what with
my thinking and musing, what with being made to listen to old tales, I
knew there would be no picture, no matter how many days I might be at
it. This very day I was at the pond with my colour-box and tripod, and
I thought I owed it to myself to make a picture of the place, somehow
or other. I sat on my tripod and began to make a visual survey of the
pool and its surroundings, to make up my mind, on how much of the
scenery I should take into my picture. I knew my materials were pine
trees, giant-leaved creeping bamboos, rocks and a mirror-like pool of
water.
The question was, how much of them should be covered in my canvas. The
creeping bamboos were growing quite close to the edge of the water,
and some of the rocks were ten feet high, while the pine trees were
scraping the sky and cast their shadows into the water far and long, so
much so that I could not see how I might take them all on my canvas.
I had half made up my mind that I should paint only the reflections
of the waters in the pond, feeling almost certain that the novel
idea would astonish the people. But then the astonishment must be
one arising from the sense of admiration and appreciation for the
substantial artistic value of the production. How to solve this part
of the problem occupied my attention next. Naturally, my eyes directed
themselves, to the reflections in the pond.
Strangely enough no definite picture would come from the study of
shadows only, and it was irresistible that I should try to make
something by following the watery reflections back to their originals
on land. My eyes were closely studying the ten foot rock, from its
lowest point in the water to its body above, when I felt myself under
the spell of a fairy’s wand, just as they had travelled to the summit
of the cliff. I saw there a face in the struggling rays of setting sun
that stole through the leafy screen and were faintly falling on the
darkish top of the rock, the face of the woman, who had surprised me
as a midnight shadow, or a vision, who had surprised me in her wedding
gown, and had surprised me outside the bath-room! My eyes refused to
turn elsewhere, as if rooted to the centre of the pale face of the
woman who was standing fixedly on the rock, gently straightening
herself up to her full height. Oh! that instant! I jumped on my feet.
But the apparition had vanished, nimbly hopping down the other side of
the rock and as she did so, I thought I perceived something red which
resembled the camellia in her sash. The declining sun, slanting closely
over tree tops, was faintly dyeing the trunks of the great pines, and
below the creeping bamboos looked greener than ever. I was once more
taken by surprise.