Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (16 page)

Sorota soroimashita odorikoga sorota, Soroikite, kita hare yukata.

'Uniform to view
(as ears of young rice ripening in the field)
all clad
alike in summer festal robes, the company of dancers have assembled.'

Again only the shrilling of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the
gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence,
with mesmeric lentor—with a strange grace, which, by its very na´vetÚ,
seems old as the encircling hills.

Those who sleep the sleep of centuries out there, under the grey stones
where the white lanterns are, and their fathers, and the fathers of
their fathers' fathers, and the unknown generations behind them, buried
in cemeteries of which the place has been forgotten for a thousand
years, doubtless looked upon a scene like this. Nay! the dust stirred by
those young feet was human life, and so smiled and so sang under this
self-same moon, 'with woven paces, and with waving hands.'

Suddenly a deep male chant breaks the hush. Two giants have joined the
round, and now lead it, two superb young mountain peasants nearly nude,
towering head and shoulders above the whole of the assembly. Their
kimono are rolled about their waistilike girdles, leaving their bronzed
limbs and torsos naked to the warm air; they wear nothing else save
their immense straw hats, and white tabi, donned expressly for the
festival. Never before among these people saw I such men, such thews;
but their smiling beardless faces are comely and kindly as those of
Japanese boys. They seem brothers, so like in frame, in movement, in the
timbre of their voices, as they intone the same song:

No demo yama demo ko wa umiokeyo, Sen ryo kura yori ko ga takara.

'Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters
nothing: more than a treasure of one thousand ryo, a baby precious is.'

And Jizo the lover of children's ghosts, smiles across the silence.

Souls close to nature's Soul are these; artless and touching their
thought, like the worship of that Kishibojin to whom wives pray. And
after the silence, the sweet thin voices of the women answer:

Oomu otoko ni sowa sanu oya Wa, Qyade gozaranu ko no kataki.

The parents who will not allow their girl to be united with her lover;
they are not the parents, but the enemies of their child.'

And song follows song; and the round ever becomes larger; and the hours
pass unfelt, unheard, while the moon wheels slowly down the blue steeps
of the night.

A deep low boom rolls suddenly across the court, the rich tone of some
temple bell telling the twelfth hour. Instantly the witchcraft ends,
like the wonder of some dream broken by a sound; the chanting ceases;
the round dissolves in an outburst of happy laughter, and chatting, and
softly-vowelled callings of flower-names which are names of girls, and
farewell cries of 'Sayonara!' as dancers and spectators alike betake
themselves homeward, with a great koro-koro of getas.

And I, moving with the throng, in the bewildered manner of one suddenly
roused from sleep, know myself ungrateful. These silvery-laughing folk
who now toddle along beside me upon their noisy little clogs, stepping
very fast to get a peep at my foreign face, these but a moment ago were
visions of archaic grace, illusions of necromancy, delightful phantoms;
and I feel a vague resentment against them for thus materialising into
simple country-girls.

Lying down to rest, I ask myself the reason of the singular emotion
inspired by that simple peasant-chorus. Utterly impossible to recall the
air, with its fantastic intervals and fractional tones—as well attempt
to fix in memory the purlings of a bird; but the indefinable charm of it
lingers with me still.

Melodies of Europe awaken within us feelings we can utter, sensations
familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations behind us.
But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant totally unlike
anything in Western melody,—impossible even to write in those tones
which are the ideographs of our music-tongue?

And the emotion itself—what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be
something infinitely more old than I—something not of only one place
or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the
universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught
spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in
some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes—all trillings of
summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land.

THE first of the noises of a Matsue day comes to the sleeper like the
throbbing of a slow, enormous pulse exactly under his ear. It is a
great, soft, dull buffet of sound—like a heartbeat in its regularity,
in its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as
to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous
pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice—a sort of colossal wooden
mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a
pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the
naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back
by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its
fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is
the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land.

Then the boom of the great bell of Tokoji the Zenshu temple, shakes over
the town; then come melancholy echoes of drumming from the tiny little
temple of Jizo in the street Zaimokucho, near my house, signalling the
Buddhist hour of morning prayer. And finally the cries of the earliest
itinerant venders begin—'Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!'—the sellers of
daikon and other strange vegetables. 'Moyaya-moya!'—the plaintive call
of the women who sell little thin slips of kindling-wood for the
lighting of charcoal fires.

Roused thus by these earliest sounds of the city's wakening life, I
slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning
over a soft green cloud of spring foliage rising from the river-bounded
garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its
farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ohashigawa, opening
into the grand Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a
dim grey frame of peaks. Just opposite to me, across the stream, the
blue-pointed Japanese dwellings have their to
[30]
all closed; they are
still shut up like boxes, for it is not yet sunrise, although it is day.

But oh, the charm of the vision—those first ghostly love-colours of a
morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself resolved into a visible
exhalation! Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake
verge—long nebulous bands, such as you may have seen in old Japanese
picture-books, and must have deemed only artistic whimsicalities unless
you had previously looked upon the real phenomena. All the bases of the
mountains are veiled by them, and they stretch athwart the loftier peaks
at different heights like immeasurable lengths of gauze (this singular
appearance the Japanese term 'shelving'),
[31]
so that the lake appears
incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a
beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with
it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume, and visionary
strips of hill-ranges figure as league-long causeways stretching out of
sight—an exquisite chaos, ever-changing aspect as the delicate fogs
rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun's yellow rim comes into sight,
fine thin lines of warmer tone—spectral violets and opalines-shoot
across the flood, treetops take tender fire, and the unpainted façades
of high edifices across the water change their wood-colour to vapoury
gold through the delicious haze.

Looking sunward, up the long Ohashigawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden
bridge, one high-pooped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most
fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw—a dream of Orient seas, so
idealised by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost that
catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly semi-
diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light.

And now from the river-front touching my garden there rises to me a
sound of clapping of hand,—one, two, three, four claps,—but the
owner of the hands is screened from view by the shrubbery. At the same
time, however, I see men and women descending the stone steps of the
wharves on the opposite side of the Ohashigawa, all with little blue
towels tucked into their girdles. They wash their faces and hands and
rinse their mouths—the customary ablution preliminary to Shinto
prayer. Then they turn their faces to the sunrise and clap their hands
four times and pray. From the long high white bridge come other
clappings, like echoes, and others again from far light graceful craft,
curved like new moons—extraordinary boats, in which I see bare-limbed
fishermen standing with foreheads bowed to the golden East. Now the
clappings multiply—multiply at last into an almost continuous
volleying of sharp sounds. For all the population are saluting the
rising sun, O-Hi-San, the Lady of Fire—Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami, the
Lady of the Great Light.
[32]
'Konnichi-Sama! Hail this day to thee,
divinest Day-Maker! Thanks unutterable unto thee, for this thy sweet
light, making beautiful the world!' So, doubt-less, the thought, if not
the utterance, of countless hearts. Some turn to the sun only, clapping
their hands; yet many turn also to the West, to holy Kitzuki, the
immemorial shrine and not a few turn their faces successively to all the
points of heaven, murmuring the names of a hundred gods; and others,
again, after having saluted the Lady of Fire, look toward high Ichibata,
toward the place of the great temple of Yakushi Nyorai, who giveth sight
to the blind—not clapping their hands as in Shinto worship, but only
rubbing the palms softly together after the Buddhist manner. But all—
for in this most antique province of Japan all Buddhists are Shintoists
likewise—utter the archaic words of Shinto prayer: 'Harai tamai kiyome
tamai to Kami imi tami.'

Prayer to the most ancient gods who reigned before the coming of the
Buddha, and who still reign here in their own Izumo-land,—in the Land
of Reed Plains, in the Place of the Issuing of Clouds; prayer to the
deities of primal chaos and primeval sea and of the beginnings of the
world—strange gods with long weird names, kindred of U-hiji-ni-no-
Kami, the First Mud-Lord, kindred of Su-hiji-ni-no-Kanii, the First
Sand-Lady; prayer to those who came after them—the gods of strength
and beauty, the world-fashioners, makers of the mountains and the isles,
ancestors of those sovereigns whose lineage still is named 'The Sun's
Succession'; prayer to the Three Thousand Gods 'residing within the
provinces,' and to the Eight Hundred Myriads who dwell in the azure
Takamano-hara—in the blue Plain of High Heaven. 'Nippon-koku-chu-
yaoyorozu-no-Kami-gami-sama!'

'Ho—ke-kyo!'

My uguisu is awake at last, and utters his morning prayer. You do not
know what an uguisu is? An uguisu is a holy little bird that professes
Buddhism. All uguisu have professed Buddhism from time immemorial; all
uguisu preach alike to men the excellence of the divine Sutra.

'Ho—ke-kyo!'

In the Japanese tongue, Ho-ke-kyo; in Sanscrit, Saddharma Pundarika: 'The
Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law,' the divine book of the Nichiren
sect. Very brief, indeed, is my little feathered Buddhist's confession
of faith—only the sacred name reiterated over and over again like a
litany, with liquid bursts of twittering between.

'Ho—ke-kyo!'

Only this one phrase, but how deliciously he utters it! With what slow
amorous ecstasy he dwells upon its golden syllables! It hath been
written: 'He who shall keep, read, teach, or write this Sutra shall
obtain eight hundred good qualities of the Eye. He shall see the whole
Triple Universe down to the great hell Aviki, and up to the extremity of
existence. He shall obtain twelve hundred good qualities of the Ear. He
shall hear all sounds in the Triple Universe,—sounds of gods, goblins,
demons, and beings not human.'

'Ho—ke-kyo!'

A single word only. But it is also written: 'He who shall joyfully
accept but a single word from this Sutra, incalculably greater shall be
his merit than the merit of one who should supply all beings in the four
hundred thousand Asankhyeyas of worlds with all the necessaries for
happiness.'

'Ho—ke-kyo!'

Always he makes a reverent little pause after uttering it and before
shrilling out his ecstatic warble—his bird-hymn of praise. First the
warble; then a pause of about five seconds; then a slow, sweet, solemn
utterance of the holy name in a tone as of meditative wonder; then
another pause; then another wild, rich, passionate warble. Could you see
him, you would marvel how so powerful and penetrating a soprano could
ripple from so minute a throat; for he is one of the very tiniest of all
feathered singers, yet his chant can be heard far across the broad
river, and children going to school pause daily on the bridge, a whole
cho away, to listen to his song. And uncomely withal: a neutral-tinted
mite, almost lost in his immense box-cage of hinoki wood, darkened with
paper screens over its little wire-grated windows, for he loves the
gloom.

Delicate he is and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be
laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at
precisely the same hour each day. It demands all possible care and
attention merely to keep him alive. He is precious, nevertheless. 'Far
and from the uttermost coasts is the price of him,' so rare he is.
Indeed, I could not have afforded to buy him. He was sent to me by one
of the sweetest ladies in Japan, daughter of the governor of Izumo,
who, thinking the foreign teacher might feel lonesome during a brief
illness, made him the exquisite gift of this dainty creature.