Part 9

narrow streets; they are built on solid wooden wheels, and are dragged about by strings of coolies, the young men of the guild dancing and shouting in front of them, waving fans by day and lanterns after dark to direct the coolies’ movements, while the older members follow in white-curtained carts. The wood-work around the stage is lacquered, gold and black and red, with elaborate brass ornaments, and the pagoda-like roof which covers it is of burnished gold, surmounted with a dragon or phœnix or other mythical animal. The part behind the stage is enclosed with hangings, Chinese embroideries, Persian rugs, or silk brocades, and two of them had fine pieces of Flemish tapestry, which must have come over with the Dutch centuries ago; the buxom ladies and knights in armor looked odd, and yet pleasantly familiar, and my heart went out to the expatriated strangers, so lonely amid that Eastern crowd. In front of each stage hung a bunch of “gohei,” the twisted strips of white paper which are the universal emblem of the Shinto religion, the only simple things among the masses of gorgeous color, and they seemed to give the key-note to the whole; for Shinto is, above everything else, an ancestor-worship, a religious respect for the country and for the men whose heroic deeds still inspire its people, and the short dramas which the children acted were all founded on old stories--how Yoritomo’s son sacrificed his life to save the young Mikado, and other well-known motives from Japanese history. The boys were admirably trained and beautifully dressed; they rolled their eyes and grimaced in exactly the same way as their elders of the profession, and the crowd vigorously applauded their facial contortions. In one company there was a little mite of two years old; he had not to speak at all, only to cry out once or twice, but he knew his part as well as the rest, and always looked up at his boy father at the right moment. During the afternoon I walked round the town, first to the Buddhist temple, the great hall of which was crowded with people sleeping, eating, and praying, and then up the long avenue leading to the Shinto temple of Hachiman. It was lined with stalls and booths for refreshments of all kinds, with conjurers, purse-trick men, lucky wheels, quack-medicine vendors, and so on, and near the big granite torii and lanterns were the market-gardeners with dwarf pines, oranges laden with fruit, camellias, and other trees. One had nothing but orchid-plants, none of them, unfortunately, in flower. I joined a large circle of spectators who were watching a scriever, which is, I believe, the professional name for the artists who draw on the flag-stones; this one had no pavement, so he prepared an even ground by sprinkling some light gray sand over the dusty road; his colors were bags of black, white, red, and blue sand; from one of these he took a handful, and drew his design by letting the powder run from his closed fist in a line which varied in thickness as he tightened or loosened his grasp. He wrote or drew in this way with wonderful rapidity as he squatted on the ground, and he talked all the time, obliterating each drawing as soon as he had finished it. I watched him draw a figure of a girl, and he began by putting down the spots of the pattern on her kimono with blue, then added the shadow lines of the dress, relieved it here and there with white, sketched the face and hands in red, and finally added a bold outline in black, which completed the picture, thus working in that reverse way to our natural instincts which you so often notice in this land of Topsy-turvydom.

As evening approached, all the yama began to collect in the square in front of another Shinto temple, where the great Hachiman car with colossal swords, and the Mikoshi, a shrine carried about on men’s shoulders, were already placed. In the river on one side of this square many boats were moored, spread with rush mats and with the red blankets which have become so common in Japan, and in them people were picknicking; over the bridge which crossed it the unwieldy structures were dragged from the town by shouting crowds; each in turn gave a final performance in front of the temple, and was then drawn aside to make room for the next. This began at half-past five, and it was eleven o’clock before the last of

them had been ranged with the others to the right of the temple steps. As night came on they were covered with big lanterns, the stages were lighted by lamps in glass shades, and attendants with candles on long sticks illuminated the face of each little actor while he was speaking. When the six gorgeous yama with their attendants and gayly dressed performers were all drawn up in line against

a background of solemn cryptomerias, with an excited crowd dancing and waving lanterns in front of them, the spectacle was more beautiful than any words of mine can suggest. In spite of the excitement, I saw only one quarrel; a young man, in order to get nearer to the stage, had pushed past a big coolie, who had evidently taken as much saké as he could carry, and for a few seconds I thought there would be a fight; but a bystander pointed out to the indignant man that the youth had to get nearer because he was short-sighted and wore spectacles, and peace was at once restored. On the way back to our tea-house, where my friends from Tennenji had dined with me, we passed a street full of stalls, with pipes and pouches, cheap jewelry, hair-pins and combs, and many other knick-knacks suitable for presents. I wanted a few of them, and found that O Shige San was a talented shopper; she had her limit, ten sen, and usually succeeded in getting the article for that sum, whatever the original price might have been. As I wandered round early the next morning I found that the yama had already been moved to their stations in various

streets, and were being cleaned up in preparation for the day’s performances. The town is studded with tall fire-proof go-downs, in which the precious vehicles are safely stored during the rest of the year.

Near Maibara there were large orchards of persimmons with brilliant-colored fruit, which, as Andrew Marvel says of the oranges, “hang like gold lamps in a green night.” They were particularly beautiful in the well-designed garden of Seigwanji, where I made some sketches. It is a fine example of a temple garden, and some massive evergreen oaks form an impressive background to the gray stones, the carefully trained pines, and the trimly clipped shrubs; but except for the persimmons, a few reddening maple leaves, some late blooms of platycodon, and the scarlet berries of a little ardisia, it was all green and gray.

In the cottage gardens near Suzukawa, a little station on the Tokaido to the south of Fuji where I made a short halt late in October, I began to see some chrysanthemum flowers; they were not particularly fine or effective, but I found plenty to paint there, and wished very much that the days and my remaining weeks in Japan were not getting so short. The village lies behind a range of sand dunes, which are overgrown with ancient pines, and beyond them is the shore of Suruga Bay, a grand expanse of gray volcanic sand, called by the Japanese Tago-no-ura, where fishermen are always hauling at nets in lines of naked brown figures against the blue sea, or wandering back in groups across the sands in long dark-blue coats, with pale-blue and white handkerchiefs tied over their heads, carrying their nets and parcels of fish wrapped in straw. At my tea-house, the Koshuya, I reaped the result of their labors, and got excellent dinners of red or gray tai, lobsters, and huge prawns, cooked by a man who was a real artist and took a pride in his profession.

The first really fine chrysanthemums I saw were in Yokohama, when I got back there early in November; I was disappointed to find that they were in temporary sheds put up to protect them from rain and sun, and not in masses out-of-doors, as I expected to see them; but they were excellently grown, and in the softened light of the oil-paper shades their colors showed to great advantage. The plants are treated much as they are with us, raised in pots from cuttings taken in the spring, and encouraged with plenty of manure until the buds are formed; before flowering they are removed from their pots and planted out in bold groups of color in the beds which have been prepared for them. Some plants are reduced to a single stem, on which only one enormous blossom is allowed to develop; these are generally arranged in a line, with each flower stiffly tied to a horizontal bamboo support, and the effect is very sad; but the excellence of the gardeners is best shown in growing large bushes, which have been known to carry as many as four hundred flowers of medium size, all in perfect condition, on the same day. An English gardener who had visited every show within reach of Tōkyō, including the Emperor’s celebrated collection in the palace grounds, told me that he had seen no individual blossoms equal to the best dozen or so at a first-rate London exhibition, but that these great plants with their hundreds of flowers were

triumphs of horticulture. The most curious examples of chrysanthemum-growing were to be seen in the Dangozaka quarter of Tōkyō. The long hilly street is bordered on each side with gardens enclosed with high bamboo fences, and in every one, by paying three rin, you could see groups of life-size figures mainly covered with chrysanthemum leaves and flowers. They represented scenes from history, the drama, or Buddhist mythology, and were constructed with frame-works of bamboo, inside which the flower-pots were concealed, the shoots being brought through the openings and trained over the outer surface. The heads and hands were made of painted wood, and swords and other accessories were added to make them more life-like; the draperies of living leaves and flowers were skilfully arranged in large folds, and, as in most of the popular shows, they depicted the costumes of Daimio and Samurai of the past. At each entrance I was given a sort of play-bill, a roughly printed broad-sheet with a wood-cut and a description of the different groups, serving as an advertisement of the gardener’s establishment. One of the finest places for autumn colors is the large garden behind the arsenal in the Koishikawa quarter, laid out by a former Prince of Mito as a quiet retreat for his old age. It covers several acres, and is certainly very beautiful, with its lakes and islands, solemn groves and shrines; but it is silent and deserted; the people are only admitted by a special permission; and I liked better the maples which line the banks of the Taki-no-gawa near Oji, where crowds were quietly enjoying themselves, sipping tea and saké as they sat in front of the tea-houses and gazed down on the trees, or strolling along in picturesque groups under the crimson canopy of foliage. The little river glides along with barely a ripple, and it reflected all the glory of the leaves which stretched over it in sprays of scarlet and gold, reminding me of a Japanese poem, “I wish to cross the river, but fear to cut the brocade on its surface.” Another poem, dating from the time when it was customary to present silk or cloth to the Shinto gods instead of the “gohei,” which now serve as a symbol, shows the national admiration of the autumn leaves: “This time I bring no offering; the gods can take the damask of the maple-trees on Tamukeyama.”

There are many other trees in the rich flora of Japan which are as gay as the maples, though no others which show as great a variety of color; the dark leaves of the tulip-tree turn to a rich cadmium yellow, and the icho (Salisburia) is covered with pale gold, while many of the shrubs, grasses, and herbaceous plants with bright and varied tints help to relieve the solemn everlasting green of the pines and cryptomerias which clothe the eternal hills.

And so in a blaze of glory the Japanese year ends; but long before these last leaves have fallen the camellias are once more in flower, and continue until the plum blossom comes in February, a connecting link in the chain of beauty and flowers which encircles this happy land. One of my last days in Tōkyō was spent in showing my drawings to the students of the Uyeno School of Art, where Professor Okakura, the president, who combines with a good knowledge of Western art a great reverence for that of his own country, is attempting with no small success to keep up the artistic tradition, and to revive those artistic industries which were falling into decay. He had invited artists of other schools, some of whom had studied in Paris and Rome, but I was most interested in the remarks and questions of the purely Japanese students, and in their eagerness to discover any motive, besides the reproduction of nature, in work so different from their own.

At the Asakusa matsuri they were already selling emblems suited for the new year--the rice-rake to scrape

together dollars; the rice-bag, daikon, and red tai, suggestive of good fare; and the target with an arrow in the bull’s-eye, meaning, “May you hit the mark!” arranged round a mask of the goddess of fortune; and with a stock of these to bring me good-luck, I sailed away on the 10th of December across the dreary and flowerless Pacific.

* * * * *

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FOOTNOTES:

[A] Before I left Tennenji he wrote in one of my sketch-books the poem inscribed above in Japanese characters. The reading is, “Yukuri no Omi no midzu-umi no fukaki kokoro wa chiyomo chigiran,” and it may be roughly translated thus: Deep as the water of Lake Biwa, my heart has been ever true and changeless since chance brought us together.

[B] “Daikon” is a large kind of white radish, which is boiled and cut in strips and served as a savor with every meal; it is very tough, and both the smell and the flavor are repulsive. A well-known Yokohama poet has written some verses on the subject, which show a great knowledge of culinary French, and a rooted dislike to the vegetable which is shared by most foreigners. It commences in this way:

_Cook loquitur (gently)._ Won’t daikon do To stew With carrots and a bean or two? Methinks ’twould give a savor rare To cutlets à la Financière. Won’t daikon do?

_Master (decisively)._ No--daikon will _not_ do!