Kakemono

The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the Iris, Hana-shōbu, and along the raised causeway, between the fields, the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the kurumaya, silhouette against the blue sky.

You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden, and they are an hour’s ’ricksha ride from the city, so that the fête is select. In the covered court of the entrance the kuruma are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while the kurumaya, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the slender shafts and smoke their pipes—three whiffs from the metal thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp tink, tink, as the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long kuruma ride proving prohibitive; but the grey kimono of the classes, Tokyo shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack of the wooden gheta on the earthen pathway, as the little musmé carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed summer-houses, is incessant.

We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit on the cushions, with our feet on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous to see the Ijin San sitting on the tables with their legs hanging uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each little white tabi sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea, inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the Ijin San’s legs are not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized boot could only have been invented by people without toes?

The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea, and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly doing something, not even the children.

In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes; one of them is writing a poem. And a bourgeois Sabbath peace is over the land.

The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack of the musmé’s gheta on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers.

Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend, Iris, Hana-shōbu. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving people alone know how to create—and how to read. For many generations have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to black or to the purest white.

The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read.