NISHI OKUBO
"From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending
in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold
the selfsame Moon."--_Buddhist poem translated by_ Lafcadio
Hearn.
It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from
21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo.
Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his
wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan.
It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain
Fujisaki--one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate
friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners'
Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show
of azaleas is held once a year.
After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as
it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi
for her occupation.
Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike
acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow
now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most
of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a
considerable circulation in England.
There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary
knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for
the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given
up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content
to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my
notions of things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald.
On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,--assisted by his
wife,--he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he
suddenly heard an _uguisu_ (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove
outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his
wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made
enough for you and the children."
During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his
eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was
obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the
paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as
copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of
setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers
of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any
necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in
conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully.
The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would
have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float
round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding.
Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the
practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical
life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity
flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most
probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his
Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought,"
he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove
of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and
regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a
year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging,
kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then
pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and
pleased."
"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no
two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of
each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can,
without reference to nationalities or schools."
Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the
highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his
strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole
song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and
religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people.
At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had
suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anaemia
common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things,"
as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not."
Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance.
Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it
already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he
did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead
of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain
thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency
was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly
apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude
of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into
the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library,
weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his
work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the
rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent
scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down,
while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with
uplifted hand and enigmatic smile.
Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from
memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and
realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his
curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his
house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath
his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his
wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of
Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky
and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac
spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natale_, the
flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the
growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey
sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir
under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs,
that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and
the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.
Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the
social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have
Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers'
ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's
incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by
any of our English essayists.
Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems
suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After
some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies
when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on
the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained
after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent
inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small
things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his
window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising
above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.
In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully,
almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject
of human desire and attainment.
"He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual
recurrence--he asked me for the Moon.
"Unwisely I protested:--
"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach
it.'
"He answered:--
"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock
it down.'
"... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately
truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.
"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that
brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and
fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some
inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to
freedom....
"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish
could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children
of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings
that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the
continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which
once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often
subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?
"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the
child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us
to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun,
and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."
He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife
tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became
more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings,
supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He
had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now
the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and
become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with
the rapture of wind and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was
so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of
life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.
"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch
myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three!
I shall see the sun again!
"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will
come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of
the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,--doubt right and wrong,
friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of
horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one
infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to
remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void,
has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and
destruction hath no covering.
"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that
I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But--
"_Must I believe that I really exist?..._"
Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and
ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have
been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost
circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but
seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without
shore I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face
of my depth....
"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of
things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly
lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and
multiplied. And the dimness flushed.
"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty
Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also
mine!..."
* * * * *
All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn
describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he
moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal
intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of
pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination
almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night,
the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere.
"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the
policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be
painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her
back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that
she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of
Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful
Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side;
and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight
hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_
(vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or
more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog;
but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.
His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of
newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the
garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the
little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on
"Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?
"The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from
the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the
neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises
the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the
South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies
of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing;
wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy
repairing their damaged habitations....
"... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy.
They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great
trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads
washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other
visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean
town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to
attempt an essay on Ants."
After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful
woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants,
and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his
ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants'
talk, he would hear of something to his advantage--
"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes
with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things
inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."
After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a
still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic
law, he thus ends his essay:--
"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures
capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.
"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power
supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no
gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would
seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency'
in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems
nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics
fundamentally opposed to human egoism."
In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect
Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of
"things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of
keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records
to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time
of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and
improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every
detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels
half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh
food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the
insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal
comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest
poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the
voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of
forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in
whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms
of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in
the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties
of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of
the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet
perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has
wasted and sterilised their paradise,--substituting everywhere for
beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly
hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend
the charm of that which we destroyed."
During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect
musicians," a grass-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was
exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so
small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides
of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about
the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antennae much longer
than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished
against the light.
"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than
his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...
"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber
... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the
room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness,
a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric
bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes
swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish
resonance....
"Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and
unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known
in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many
generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the
fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in
a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt
thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was
sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the
exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions
of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses
of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has
forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he
sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust
of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of
time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it.
They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere
shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he
goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the
unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant,
never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy
music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold
in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I
have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a
barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm
of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon
my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,--telling me
also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost
within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the
vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and
thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of
his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely,
nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had
eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,--especially Hana the
housemaid!
"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst
that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human
crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."
During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight,
every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the
polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title
"Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the
crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the
country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which
is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long
years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."
Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these
Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product
of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the
work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk
again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion
he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so
big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or
lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing
at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off
him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a
little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the
sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The
privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be
his.
In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and
comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation."
It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were
fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving
descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions.