Kakemono

The little steamer lay tilted up against the end of the pier, for all the waters of the ocean were rushing madly through the Straits of Shimonoseki into the Inland Sea. The waters lay encircled as a lake, for the space between the inner and the outer strait is narrow, but they ran swift as a mountain river. The square-sailed junks, all sails set, were racing down the stream in the very eye of the wind, while those coming up with a strong breeze behind them hardly seemed to stir. And the little steamer at the end of the pier tilted herself up higher and higher.

She was a foreign-built boat, though only about the size of a launch, but she looked like a Moorish house afloat, for all the boat was cabin, and all the deck was roof, whitewashed, ribbed roof, with a striped awning. As we left the pier and struck the full force of the current, the striped awning and the uneven deck dipped down and down until the Moorish roof turned Gothic. We were in the full force of the current now, and tearing down the stream with, as somebody said, “all our engines going the wrong way.” Up the side of the boat the water climbed, pulling it down with long strong hands, until the flat deck was turned to a gable roof.

For five breathless minutes we balanced between air and water, and then we were through the inner strait which turns the waters of the Inland Sea between Moji and Shimonoseki into one big lake, and the coast of the South Island began to fall away. The tide was running less swiftly now, the ridge of our gable roof sank slowly into the water, and the little steamer floated a white, flat-roofed, Moorish house once more.

“There is nothing,” said the steward, “for the Ijin San to eat.”

He had been standing behind us, balancing himself on the steep gable roof, for some while, but the current and the laws of gravitation had been absorbing all our attention, and like a true Japanese he was much too polite to interrupt.

“There is nothing, nothing,” said he, “to eat.”

For the rare missionary, or the rarer tourist, who patronises the coasting steamer of the Inland Sea comes provided as for an Arctic expedition.

“But we shall eat Japanese food,” we explained.

He bowed, a low, polite bow, but I do not think he believed us. Then he went away, and returned bearing foreign cups with saucers, full of a hot brown liquor called, he told us triumphantly, “coffee.” It was of the kind bought ready mixed in cakes, and made with hot water. We were pleased to know it was coffee, and the attention touched us, still, Japanese tea would have tasted better. We thought the pinky-brown soup flavoured with orange peel, the fried fish with chestnut preserve, the custard stuffed with shrimps, and the bowls of rice eaten with salted plums and spiced roots off which we dined infinitely preferable; and the steward who fanned us with one hand, and served us with the other, saw that there was “something for us to eat.”

It was eight o’clock when we climbed the steep ladder which led to our Moorish roof, eight o’clock on a July evening, and already the tall, deep-dented mountains of Kyushu lay dark and indistinct. They lay cut sharp against a twilight sky as though they had no thickness. And slowly the coast-line fell away grey into the sea. Kyushu was dying as the ship and sun moved on, Shikoku was but a blur upon the ocean, and between them the open sea made a pathway to the sky, all silver-grey and trembling, a road of light to that sunken light beyond.

The sun had set, and the fleeting twilight of the East was night already. Japan’s green hills were turning grey. Night held sky and islands fast, but the pathway shone and trembled until it died in the last long streaks of light on the edge of the horizon. Night was come.

From Kobé to Shimonoseki stretch the two hundred and forty miles of the Inland Sea; and in it are gathered together most of the islands of Japan. Continuous as a mainland the coast of the big island runs down, while on the other side Kyushu and Shikoku with ancient Awaji, the firstborn of the Gods, dip their high green mountains in the sea; between, in lines and clusters, lie thousands upon thousands of baby islands; some large enough to hold a village, others too small for a single house; some green with trees and rice-fields, others a mere speck of rock reaching up out of the water. From morning until night we sat under the striped awning of our roof top, and watched as they glided past, green islands on the blue water; and always on our left hand the tall, deep-dented mountains of the mainland ran on and on.

In the morning sunlight Miyajima’s granite torī stood knee-deep in the pale blue waves. Its temple roofs were brown against the dark, green pines, and the sacred island, where neither Birth nor Death may come, slept blue-black with shadows in the dawn.

And still they glided by, the green islands on the blue water. The sun travelled up the sky; it grew hot—hotter.

At mid-day we had reached the narrow channel, where mainland and island are so close that the sea is but a canal between the houses; and the children of the two villages throw stones across the stream. Here, at the end of the passage, a great stone lantern stands deep in the idle water. Then, abruptly, as we turned, the canal was gone; and the wide, blue sea lay shimmering among the green islands in the summer sun.

Under the striped awning of our roof-top it was cool, but outside the sun was smiting sea and land, until sea and islands quivered, quivered, losing themselves, colour and outline, in one mist of shimmering, shadowy blue. And the ship and the sun travelled on.

Five sturdy naval cadets shared our luncheon with us, and knew the number and the tonnage of England’s smallest gunboats, and for all their blue uniform and “foreign” dirk, their Sayonara as they left us were courteous with an old-time courtesy.

And the sun grew hot and hotter. The light like a mist wrapt sea and islands round. The continuous quivering hurt. On the other side the deep-dented mountains of the mainland, grown bare and scraped now, caught the sunshine on their rocky patches, and sent it in glittering arrows of light across the still air. And yet in the brown villages, at the mountains’ feet, the blue-tuniced, brown-legged peasants were working in the sun; and at each stopping-place the bareheaded men and women came off in boats to offer their fruit and saké in long-handled fishing-nets, scent-bottles full of saké flavoured with plum-blossom, saké flavoured with chrysanthemum or peach-blossom, white rice, “woman’s” saké, saké to ward off old age, or all and any of the nine different kinds of saké for which Tomotsu is famous, and all in scent-bottles, artistically tied up and labelled, and costing, bottle and all, is-sen. One old lady was highly indignant when after much excitement we had contrived to haul up in the fishing-net the exact scent-bottle we coveted, and had sent her down one sen in return, for the patois of the district makes is-sen of jis-sen (10 sen = 2½d.), to the unaccustomed ear.

And the ship and the sun travelled on.

As the shadows grew the quivering ceased, the light no longer like a veil of darkness hid the land and sea. The islands grew a gradual green, as they drowsed on the clear blue water. And slowly the still sea opened wider; the islands passed more slowly until they ceased to pass at all; and then on the blue water there grew that indefinite look of ocean space. The Inland Sea was ending. Away on the still sweep of waters lay Awaji, the First-born of the Gods, the Eden of Japan.

“And when,” says the legend, “the first man and the first woman met after they had journeyed round a pillar set upon the land the woman cried, ‘How joyful a thing it is to meet a lovely man!’ Whereupon the man, displeased that language had been invented by a woman, required the circuit to be made again, that he might speak first. So again they journeyed round the pillar, and again they met, and loudly the man cried out, ‘How joyful a thing it is to meet a lovely woman!’ And thus,” says the chronicle, “was Speech invented, and the Art of Love and the human race begun.”

Dim grey on a grey sea lay Awaji; before us stretched the broad sweep of the landless ocean; the Inland Sea, dreaming among its islands, lay behind.