Part 2

The Doctor took us on Sunday afternoon to his club--whose name I think means the perfume of the maple--to see and to listen to some Japanese plays which are given in the club theater built for the purpose. We went there in the afternoon, passing by the Shiba temples, and our _kurumas_ were drawn up at one end of the buildings. There everything was Japanese, though I hear stories of the other club and its ultra-European ways--brandies-and-sodas, single eyeglasses, etc. However that may be, on this side we were in Japan without mistake. We sat on the steps and had our shoes taken off, according to the Japanese fashion, so as not to injure mats, and we could hear during the operation long wailings, high notes, and the piercing sound of flutes and stringed instruments; the curiously sad rhythm mingled with a background of high, distinct declamation. We walked in with careful attention to make no noise, forgetting that in our stocking-feet we could have made none had we wished, and we found the Doctor's place reserved for him and us, and marked with his name, written large. Other low boxes, with sides no higher than our elbows as we sat on the mats, divided the sloping floor down to the stage. The stage was a pretty little building projecting into the great hall from its long side. It had its own roof, and connected with a long gallery or bridge, along which the actors moved, as they came on or disappeared, in a manner new to us, but which gave a certain natural sequence and made a beginning and an end,--a dramatic introduction and conclusion,--and added greatly to the picture when the magnificent dresses of stiff brocade dragged slowly along to the cadence of the music. The boxes were mostly occupied, and by a distinguished-looking audience; the _Nō_, as this operatic acting is called, being a refined, classical drama, and looked upon differently from the more or less disreputable theater. Hence the large proportion of ladies, to whom the theater is forbidden. Hence, also, owing to its antiquity and the character of its style, a difficulty of comprehension for the general public that explained the repeated rustle of the books of the opera which most of the women held, whose leaves turned over at the same moment, just as ours used to do at home when we were favored by French tragedy.

A quiet, sleepy appreciation hovered over the scene; even the devotees near us, many of them older people and belonging to the old régime, showing their approval or disapproval with restrained criticism. I could see without turning my head the expression of the face of my neighbor, a former _daimio_, a man of position; his face a Japanese translation of the universal well-known aristocratic type--immovable, fatigued, with the drooping under lip. Behind him sat former retainers, I suppose--deferential, insinuating remarks and judgments, to which he assented with inimitable brevity. Still, I thought that I could distinguish, when he showed that the youthful amateurs--for most of the actors were non-professional--did not come up to a proper standard, that his memory went back to a long experience of good acting. And so catching are the impressions of a crowd that I myself after a time believed that I recognized, more or less distinctly, the tyro and the master, even though I only vaguely understood what it was all about. For I need not tell you that the libretto would have been still more difficult for me than the pantomime before me; and very often it was but pantomime, the actor making gestures to the accompaniment of music, or of the declaration of the choragus, who told the poetic story. Occasionally these movements amounted to a dance, that is to say, to rhythmic movements--hence called the _Nō_ dance--to which emphasis was given by rising and falling on either foot, and bringing down the sole with a sudden blow.

There were many short plays, mostly based on legendary subjects, distinguished by gorgeous dresses, and occasionally some comic scenes of domestic life. The monotony of impression was too novel to me to become wearisome, and I sat for several hours through this succession of separate stories, patient, except for the new difficulty of sitting cross-legged on the mats. Moreover, we had tobacco to cheer us. On our arrival the noiseless servants had brought to us the inevitable little tray containing the fire-box with hot charcoal and the little cylinder for ashes, and tea and little sugary balls; and then, besides, notwithstanding the high-toned repose of the audience, there was enough to watch. There were the envoys from Loo Choo, seated far off in the dim light of the room, dressed in ancient costumes, their hair skewered up on the top of the head with a double pin--grave and dignified personages; and a European prince, a Napoleonic pretender, seated alongside, with his suite, and ourselves, the only foreigners. The types of the older people were full of interest, as one felt them formed under other ideas than those of to-day. And though there were no beauties, there were much refinement and sweetness in the faces of the women, set off by the simplicity of their dresses, of blacks, and browns, and grays, and dull violets, in exquisite fabrics, for we were in an atmosphere of good breeding. And I watched one of the young ladies in front of me, the elder of two sisters, as she attended to every little want of her father, and even to his inconveniences. And now it was time to leave, though the performance was still going on, for we wished to return in the early evening. Our shoes were put on again at the steps, our umbrellas handed to us--for sun and rain we must always have one--and we passed the Shiba temples and took the train back for Yokohama.

JULY 12.

We are doing nothing in particular, hesitating very much as to what our course shall be. One thing is certain--the breaking out of the cholera will affect all our plans. Even the consequent closing of the theaters shows us how many things will be cut off from us. We spend much time in such idleness as bric-à-brac, letting ourselves go, and taking things as they come.

The Doctor's kindness is with us all the time. One feels the citizen of the world that he is when he touches little details of manners here, now as familiar to him as those of Europe.

I enjoy, myself, this drifting, though A---- is not so well pleased, and I try to feel as if the heat and the novelty of impressions justified me in idleness. Once only I was tempted to duty, however, when we went to the temples of Shiba and Uyèno, where are the tombs of the shoguns, rulers of Japan of the Tokugawa line. They are all there but the two greatest, Iyéyasŭ and Iyémitsŭ, who lie at Nikko, the sacred place, a hundred miles away. Here in Tokio are the tombs of the others, and the temples about them splendid with lacquer and carving and gold and bronze, and set among trees and gardens on these hills of the Shiba and Uyèno.

My dreams of making an analysis and memoranda of these architectural treasures of Japan were started, as many resolutions of work are, by the talk of my companion, his analysis of the theme of their architecture, and my feeling a sort of desire to rival him on a ground for fair competition. But I do not think that I could grasp a subject in such a clear and dispassionate and masterly way, with such natural reference to the past and its implied comparisons, for A----'s historic sense amounts to poetry, and his deductions and remarks always set my mind sailing into new channels.

But I must put this off--certainly for to-day--while we discuss whether we shall make our visit to ancient Kamakura and the great bronze statue and the island of Énoshima, or whether to put it off until our return from Nikko, and our seeing the other shrines of the shoguns there. The Doctor, who has just left Nikko, tells us of its beauty in the early summer, a few weeks ago, and I feel all the hotter as he talks of the cold mountain streams which run by his house and of banks of azaleas covering the high rocks. And then the Japanese proverb says, "Who has not seen Nikko cannot say beautiful."

FROM TOKIO TO NIKKO

July 20, 1886.

The cholera was upon us, and we decided to go to Nikko and spend a month there, near the F----s'. The Docs coolness and its other charms, was to pilot us and instruct us by the way, and much of the miscellaneous information that I shall give you has come more or less from him. Late in the morning we rode to Tokio, and lunched in Uyèno Park, looking down on the great pond and the little temple which stands in it, and which you know, having seen them on the fans and colored prints. They were veiled in the haze of the sunlight, as if in a spring or winter mist, and through this fog of light shone the multitudinous little sparkles of the ribs and swellings of the lotus-pads lapping one over another, and reaching to far streaks of clearer water. A denser lightness here and there marked the places of the flowers, and a faint odor came up in lazy whiffs. The roof of the temple seemed to be supported by the moisture below. Above there was no cloud. All things lay alike in the blaze, enveloped in a white glimmer of heat and wet, and between the branches of the trees around us the sky was veiled in blue. The locusts hissed with a crackling sound like that of heated wood. The ugly bronze Buddha at the corner of the tea-house shone as if melting in the sun. Then came the moment of leaving for the station, where, owing to delays of trains, we waited still longer in the heat. In the cleanly waiting-room we looked at the illustrations in the Japanese newspapers, and at the last report of the weather bureau, printed in English and fastened to the wall; or we read a little in that morning's edition of the excellent Yokohama English paper; all these comforts of civilization being supplied by the Road. At length the noise of hundreds of wooden clogs, worn by men, women, and children, clattered upon the stones outside and announced an end to waiting. The tightly-closed train had been baking in the sun all day, and we leaned out of the doors on the sides and gasped for breath.

Our train skirted the great hill of Uyèno, and its dark shadow, which did not quite reach us. Monuments and gravestones, gray or mossy, blurred here and there the green wall of trees. The Doctor told us of the cooler spring-time, when the cherry-trees of Uyèno cover the ground with a snow of blossoms, and the whole world turns out to enjoy them, as we do the first snows of winter.

But this is a lame comparison. The Japanese sensitiveness to the beauties of the outside world is something much more delicate and complex and contemplative, and at the same time more natural, than ours has ever been. Outside of Arcadia, I know of no other land whose people hang verses on the trees in honor of their beauty; where families travel far before the dawn to see the first light touch the new buds. Where else do the newspapers announce the spring openings of the blossoms? Where else would be possible the charming absurdity of the story that W---- was telling me of having seen in cherry-blossom time some old gentleman, with capacious sakè gourd in hand and big roll of paper in his girdle, seat himself below the blossom-showers, and look, and drink, and write verses, all by himself, with no gallery to help him? If there is convention in a tradition half obligatory; and if we, Western lovers of the tree, do not quite like the Japanese refinement of growing the cherry merely for its flowers, yet how deliciously upside-down from us, and how charming is the love of nature at the foundation of the custom!

From the rustling of leaves and reëchoing of trees we passed into the open country, and into free air and heat. In the blur of hot air, trembling beneath the sun, lay plantations and rice-fields; the latter, vast sheets of water dotted with innumerable spikes of green. Little paths raised above them made a network of irregular geometry. Occasionally a crane spread a shining wing and sank again. In the outside ditches stood up the pink heads of the lotus above the crowded pads. At long intervals small groups of peasants, men and women, dressed in blue and white, knee-deep in the water, bent their backs at the task of weeding. The skirts of their dresses were caught up in their girdles, and their arms were freed from their looped-back sleeves.

The Doctor spoke to us of the supposed unhealthiness of rice-planting, which makes life in the rice-fields short, in a country where life is not long.

We are told that the manuring of the rice-fields taints all the waters for great distances, and we are warned not to drink, without inquiring, even from the clearest streams. Not even high up in the mountains shall we be safe; for there may be flat spaces and table-lands of culture which drain into the picturesque wildness below. We learn that with all these hardships the rice-growers themselves cannot always afford this staple food of the country, for cheaper than rice are millet, and buckwheat, and the plants and fungi that grow without culture.

Contrasting with the tillage we were passing, islands of close foliage stood up in the dry plain, or were reflected, with the clouds above, in the mirror of the wet rice-fields. Occasionally a shrine was visible within, and the obligatory Torii stood at the edge of the grove, or within its first limits.

Looking through a Torii one is sure to be in the direction of something sacred, whether it be temple or shrine or holy mountain. Neither closeness nor distance interferes with this ideal intention, and the sacred Fusi-yama is often seen a hundred miles away in the sky, framed by these lines, built for the purpose. This assemblage of four lines of stone or wood or bronze is to me one of the creations of art, like the obelisk or the pyramid. Most impressive, most original of symbolic entrances, whether derived from sacred India or from the ancestral innocence of Polynesia, there is something of the beginning of man, something invented while he lived with the birds, in this elementary porch, whose upper line, repeating the slope of hill and wave, first embodied the curve that curls all upper edges in the buildings of the farther East.

And if indeed, the Torii[1] be nothing but the first bird-perch, then I can imagine the father of all peacocks spreading his gigantic fan across its bars; or I may prefer to suppose it the rest for the disk of the sun-god, whose lower curve is repeated by the Torii's upper beam.

* * * * *

Sometimes there were traces of inclosure about these woods; sometimes they had no edgings but their own beautifully-modeled contours. Long ages, respectful care, sometimes fortunate neglect, have made of these reserved spaces types of an ideal wildness, for these are sacred groves, and they are protected by the divine contained within them.

This preservation of a recall of primeval nature, this exemption of the soil from labor, within anxious and careful tillage, is a note of Japan constantly recurring, and a source of perpetual charm.

Notwithstanding the men and women working in the fields, there was a certain desolateness in the landscape, and A---- made out its reason more easily than I, and recalled that for miles and miles we had traveled without seeing any of the four-footed beasts which the Western mind always associates with pastoral life and labor.

As the evening came on we crossed a large river and looked down from the height of the new bridges upon the discarded ferry-boats, and upon the shape of a more fantastic one that was never meant to sail--a pine-tree, shaped and trimmed, which spread its green mast and sails in a garden by the water. Far away were lines of mountains and the peaks of extinct volcanoes.

At every station now the country people gathered to stare at the novelty of the train; we saw the lighting up of the farm-houses as we passed; in the dooryards, behind high hedges reminding me of Normandy, bonfires were being made to keep off mosquitoes: then temples and shrines with lights before them, and at eight o'clock on a festal night we came into Utsunomiya.

The streets were full of people carrying lanterns; children ran about together, with little toy shrines, and the whole town was drowned in noise. We got into a _basha_, a sort of omnibus, attached to two wild horses, and were hurled through the crowded streets, much as if carrying the mails, with apparent disregard of the lives and limbs of the inhabitants.

The hotel, where we were expected and where the Doctor had represented us as distinguished visitors, opened its whole front, in a Japanese way, to receive us, for there was no outside wall to the lower floor. We were driven quite into the house, and beheld an entire household drawn up in line on the platform, which occupied a full half of this lower space. The Doctor did all that was right, while we remained in amused embarrassment before our prostrated host and the kneeling attendants. As we sat helpless on the steps of the platform our shoes were taken off, and in stockinged feet we were ushered through the crowd and the lower part of the house, through the preparations for passing travelers, the smell and heat of washing and cookery, and an inexpressibly outrageous odor, even for this land of frightful smells, evidently of the same nature as that of the rice-fields.

Notwithstanding this horror, we found, on clambering up the steep little staircase of dark, slippery wood, better fitted to stockings than to boots, a most charming, cleanly apartment ready for us: ready, I say, but its three big rooms, which took all one side of the court, contained nothing but a drawing hanging in each room and a vase filled with flowers; in justice, I ought to add a European table of the simplest make, and three European chairs. Under them was spread a piece of that red cloth which seems to have a fascination for the Japanese--perhaps as being European.

Everything was of the cleanest--wall, floor, stairs, tables; everything was dusted, wiped, rubbed, polished.

It was too hot and we were too tired to go out and see the town, noisy with the excitement of a festival. The Doctor directed the preparation of a meal on a Japanese basis of rice, mingled and enlivened with the contents of various cans; and meanwhile I went down another little staircase of cleanly white wood, at the farther end of our apartment, to our little private bath-room below.

This was about six feet square, and its furniture consisted of a deep lacquer tray to lay clothes in. The bathtub was sunk in the floor, but so that its edge rose high above the level of the room. I had declined the "honorable hot water," which is the Japanese necessity, and obtained cold, against protest. I had yet to learn the luxury and real advantage of the Japanese hot bath. I closed my door, but my window was open, and through its wooden bars I could see our opposite neighbors across the garden of the courtyard--a whole family, father, mother, children, and young daughter--file down to the big bath-room at the corner, whose windows were open to mine. I heard them romp and splash, and saw heads and naked arms shining through the steam. Meditating upon the differences which make propriety in various places, I joined my friends at dinner and listened to what the Doctor had to say upon the Japanese indifference to nudity; how Japanese morals are not affected by the simplicity of their costumes, and that, of course, to the artist it seems a great pity that the new ideas should be changing these habits in a race so naturally law-abiding; for even the government is interfering, and enforcing dress within city limits. Then came the question whether this be a reminiscence of Polynesian ancestry and simplicity, or born of climate and cleanliness. And, indeed, all Japan spends most of its time washing, so that the very runners bathe more times a day than our fine ladies. Meanwhile the servant-girls were spreading for us the blue-green mosquito nettings, put together with bands of orange silk. They were slung by cords from the corners of the beams, which serve for a cornice, and they made a good-sized square tent in the middle of the room. Inside, our beds were made up on the floor, of well-wadded coverlets folded one upon another. One of these I took for a pillow. I have not yet dared to try the block of wood, hollowed out for the nape of the neck, which serves for a pillow in Japan, notwithstanding that it has a pad to relieve its severity--a pad of paper fastened on, and which you remove sheet by sheet as you want a clean pillow-slip. I can understand, however, how precious it must be in a country where the women keep, day and night, undisturbed, those coiffures of marvelous black hair, glistening with camellia oil, the name of which I like better than its perfume. From inside my netting I could see, as I was lying,--for the screens, which made our windows, remained wide open,--through the topmost branches of the trees of the garden, the Japanese family opposite, now ending their evening meal.

Laughter and chatter, clattering of cups, rap of pipes against boxes, a young man came in and bent over one of the women seated upon the floor; the girl repeated some prayer, with clapping hands outstretched; the lights were put out, all but the square "ando," or floor night-lantern, and they drew their screens. I fell asleep, to be waked with a start by the watchman, who, every hour, paced through the garden, striking a wooden clapper, and impertinently assured us of the hour.

* * * * *

This weary noise marked the intervals of a night of illness, made worse by nightmares of the cholera, from which we were flying. The earliest dawn was made hideous by the unbarring and rolling of the heavy _amados_,[2] the drawing back of the inside screens (_shojis_), and the clattering of clogs over pavement, through other parts of the house. Our Japanese family across the way I could hear at their ablutions, and, later, tumultuously departing for early trains; and at last I slept in broad daylight.

* * * * *

Late in the morning we entered our friend the _basha_. In the daylight I noticed that the horses wore something like a Dutch collar, and were harnessed with ropes. Two men, one the driver, the other the running groom, sat on the low front seat. Our trunks and bags and Japanese baskets encumbered the omnibus seats, on which we stretched our sick and wearied bodies, for the Doctor himself was ill, and smiled mechanically when I tortured him with questions. We left town at a full gallop, and at risk of life for every one in the streets; one of our drivers meanwhile blowing wildly through a horn, to the inspiriting of the horses and the frightening of the Japanese small-boy. Soon one of our men plunged off his seat and began running by the horses in the old Japanese way--hereditary with him, for they follow the calling from generation to generation. Running without pause and without sweating, he threw his body back as if restraining his pace to that of the horses. At the limits of the town, in full run, he stripped his upper garments and showed himself tattooed at every visible point. Above the double strip of his breech-clout, a waterfall, a dragon, and a noble hero made a fine network of blue and pink on the moving muscles.