USHIGOME
"Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye
can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed,
although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we
betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door
opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all
Dopplegangers?--and is not the invisible the only life we
really enjoy?"
In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at
Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other
sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue.
To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things,
sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that
rustled through the bamboo-grove.
Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could
indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's
Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else.
This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and
humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time
he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's
"Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised,
also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but
in England.
The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his
pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that
"he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada
that could not sing."
No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of
hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking
that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit
of the public.
Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors,
and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University,
at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a
Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything
was favourable to absorption in his work.
He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one
hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling
well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write."
Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a
new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes
he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a
month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his
drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many
stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the
drawer of his mind when he passed away.
Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of
excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and
though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was
slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign
husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss
might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's
common-sense.
"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years
after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely
Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light,
things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so
impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I
have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned
to prize some of them at their weight in gold."
Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese
union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various
letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching
home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not
bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the
valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't
you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"
On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his
face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got
possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next
day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He
acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."
She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one
day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy
sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the
murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden
and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the
Japanese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals.
"He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish
sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a
catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he
laughed the whole household laughed, too."
His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was
kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with
them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his
merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's
nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude
towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the
cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would
play "_onigokko_," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in
the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in
learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song,
for instance--
"Yu-yake!
Ko-yake!
Ashita wa tenki ni nare."
"Evening-burning!
Little-burning!
Weather, be fair to-morrow!"
or the Song of "Urashima Taro."
He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating
quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these
which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming,
distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In
one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse
has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of
storm and impending disaster which is wonderful.
He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling,
crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle
severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see.
But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the
district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he
walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb
his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya,
Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little
note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as
they passed along.
An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite
resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this
piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so
miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for
some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the
university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly
stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and
contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore,
smoking his Japanese pipe.
Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his
professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half
of his stay at Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the
indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the
club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one
at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make
jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond:
"Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."
Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and
smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the
twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with
fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse,
though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I
think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided
the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and
in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine,
the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to
recall."
Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough
to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese
books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept
them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and
more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He
imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim
of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas
were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal
mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden
fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers,
ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.
We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune,
which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were
fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony
blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese
hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination
with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found
frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows
not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection
with the incident.
But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast,
where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for
sea-bathing, that he was in his element.
The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and
during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as
they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred
the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than
that of college professors.
As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi,
who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every
description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's
description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting
boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw
sandals, gourds for holding _sake_, and bottles of lemonade, while
surmounting all was the _kamidana_--the shelf of the gods--with its
_Daruma_, or household divinity.
Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at
Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim
relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the
gale--floating in the mists--shuddering in the leaf--flickering in the
light of waters--or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf,
to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a
boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and
imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating
round him.
It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at
Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published
after his appointment as professor of English at the university was
"Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East."
Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said
to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work
was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at
Matsue, Kobe, Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of
reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary
mill.
Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha
Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on
"Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous
statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for
substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: _and the outer-man
is the ghost_."
In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions
and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and
substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and
over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy.
In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that
the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West.
Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of
words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he
fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of
occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is
far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much
of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much
prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound
by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first
moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous,
and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on
the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove
that he is incapable of feeling them.
All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and
suggestive instead of detailed. "_Ittakkiri_" (entirely vanished, in the
sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who,
instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words.
The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom
consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs,
panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies,
curtains and women's crepe silk underwear, they are written by every one
and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes
poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his
thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple
poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you
can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The
translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street,"
contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep
feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island
Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them
are charming.
"To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going;
Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.
"Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:
The flowing of water, the Way of Love."
His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating
this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to
Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so,
as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character.
Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant
Friendship."
* * * * *
The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this
time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific
imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of
Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life
is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and
thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my
cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of
a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define."
The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful
a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry
of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a
hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with
faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the
mighty day.
The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory
of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad
millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme
of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour
when thought itself must fade.
* * * * *
"Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated
to
Mrs. Alice von Behrens
for auld lang syne.
We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was
one of his New York acquaintances.
"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of
this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the
Japanese poem on the first page.
To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to
do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he says, he has been and
gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly
packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to
Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods. To save himself further
trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased
about terms--and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a
man liberated from prison--smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring
day.
In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the
fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement
of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The
splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness
to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the
Now,--a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that
maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of
Heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.... Thus and only
thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes--the spectral
past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and
the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one
soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory."
"Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs.
Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang
Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book
is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written,
and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches,
inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a paean, as it
were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because
of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems.
"Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf.
... Ah! the autumn rains!"
And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing
butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:--
"Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone
to-day."