TOKYO
"... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of
circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line
of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always
too much for my own peace of mind,--places, things, and
persons,--and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and
becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a
great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an
All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil
falls, himself in each and all."
One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,--and he made many
for the sake of his wife and family--was the giving up of his life in
the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its _Yashikis_ and
ancient shrines--to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The
comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high
salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing
was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the _Kobe
Chronicle_, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the
ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate
horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling
surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have
been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place
pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle.
His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as
Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of
the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind;
she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.
Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the
beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would
do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description
of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived
ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing facade, a structure that
would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or
London.
After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the
capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21,
Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was
the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house
with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a
"rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so
beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.
In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to
remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at
Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary
work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.
When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of
the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo
suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in
dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the
quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a
_sake_-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the
neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where
Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great
trees, dreaming out of space, out of time.
The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university.
One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one
joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any
one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must
have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!"
Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his
celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the
Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly
realistic--the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here
the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted
American suburb--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several
centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor;
then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and
bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the
shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which
burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and
bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in
them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or
time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess,
was difficult. But Setsu was happy--like a bird making its nest, she was
fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly
weather it was.
In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo,
there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively
tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the
Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor,
seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable
and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him
by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner
in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at
variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers.
His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and
delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals,
and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a
people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if
England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an
impossible task.
In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his
interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while
professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be
forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and
Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo
University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students.
Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They
are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their
intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the
surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal,
therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical
explanation of technique and style.
The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in
which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in
a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the
order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where
intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the
adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy
and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form,
through every condition of society, and almost into every household.
Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was
influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea
off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling
round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with
fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation
about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from
dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he
would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part
would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and
confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or
clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted
for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."
The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship
were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.
Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to
dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a
university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official
banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty
invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical
colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.
No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he
exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first
the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold
at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of
gold--luckily for themselves.
He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the
university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that
inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on you!" All the
professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow--no overcoats
allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted
to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more
for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far
East--'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was
beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife
tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you
upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to
you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the
privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest.
There is a reason for things--for anything except--a plug hat...."
* * * * *
As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during
the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn,
representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful
memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he
alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who
had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five
years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the
Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about
them."
With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever
seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of
French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic.
Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the
Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only
because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original
owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested,
looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient
art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the
other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and
ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of
Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in
Japan. He describes his landlord, the old _sake_-brewer, coming to
definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught
sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,--you ought to have been a
girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his
father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at
seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that
he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that
really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to
imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under
civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think
superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."
He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion
one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as
a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century
false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and
Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies
in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and
recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.
After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn
retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was
dedicated:--
TOKYO
"to my friend
Amenomori Nobushige
poet, scholar and patriot."
We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he
left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that
Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous
correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on
the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To
Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial
surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the
place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the
approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new
sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead
sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to
feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for
me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality?
Alas! I don't know...."
Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little
genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and
apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese,
however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all
occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm
of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own
world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.
Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at
Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm
human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.
In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she
mentions McDonald of Yokohama--in brown boots and corduroys--as
escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in
Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction
of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost
immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one
of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar
Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.
"After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most
peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a
certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the
ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio."
Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that
above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in
uniform,--a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up
till midnight, talking about things.
The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of
Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour
wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never
seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for
the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Antaeus I feel
always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality,
not so much of a _literary_ man however."
The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the
breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks,
the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had
touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him
material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"--only real
facts--not names or dates--real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy.
He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there
were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this
world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in
Japan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible--"especially hidden
from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn."
If he could get together a book of short stories--six would be
enough--he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he
could.
Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his
friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past
life--that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the
outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying
that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you
can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for
twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the
disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?"
The communion between these two was more like that between some popular,
athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by
the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two
middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official
capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first
letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an
audacious proceeding that few ventured upon.
Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to
his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street--the charming
way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his
interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs.
In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's
visits. A rocking-chair,--rare piece of furniture in a Japanese
establishment--a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder.
McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn
was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and
lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was
doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald,
therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of
all sorts.
"With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man!
How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have
only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'"
They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed
and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their
dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and
"blue soul"--names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at
the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was
tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at
Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed
with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable
in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years.
"What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall
ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,--with
philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher
(Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is
altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the
world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in
these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the
little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an
indefinite way that some divine attribute was his.
McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief
in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti.
Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to
try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his
intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he
wished him to write fiction--he wanted him to make some profit out of
his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really
paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write
more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that
very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which
alone can furnish the material. They can _divine_, but must have some
chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like
Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them
and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who
think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social
existence."
Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or
even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to
officialdom--but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take
care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy
to college there must remain merely a possibility.
The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two
friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental
tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession,
and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary
tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get
behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.
He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen
from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at
his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.
He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him,
who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you
would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her
'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"
The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind
of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged
calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if
not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite
subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories
of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and
their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.
But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work,
believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings
and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly.
Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him
they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the
sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be
forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come."
Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or
cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet
here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and
brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I
right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought
never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these
protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and
again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink
good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with
characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald
wrapped him up in his own to send him home--an incident which Hearn
declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died.
Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy
doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a
humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home
the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest
and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius,
the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the
seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination.
It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to
the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings
seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When
he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least
notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper
again--treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his
attacks of temper at Cincinnati.
So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's,
lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally
stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed
duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the
sale of the copyright of his books in the United States.