Kakemono

The white wing of a blossoming plum-tree casts a pale shadow across the pebbled steps of the causeway, and the spring sunshine is warm. Behind, under the great gate of the temple, is a stall with souvenir tea-bowls of the Forty-Seven Rōnin and the red blankets of a tiny chaya. In front, at the end of the causeway, stands a Japanese father with his little son, buying bundles of incense sticks from the Buddhist sexton. Coming up the path are two peasants with bare, brown legs, one wearing the old-fashioned gunhammer top-knot. And the plum-tree, its scent warm and fragrant, lies a white wing above the path.

The Japanese father, samurai from his face, and modern by his clothes, and his son have passed into the graveyard before us. But we all stand together in the little square garden on the side of the hill, with its thickly clustered tombstones, shaped like Moses’ Tables of the Law in the Child’s Bible, set in the flat brown earth.

Below, a sharply falling line of dark green shrubs; above, the overhanging trees of the hillside; and the garden is quiet and still, with a little chill of damp and death that sobers and subdues.

Before each stone tablet on the earthen path are bamboo vases filled with freshly cut branches of evergreens, and the burning incense sticks trail a thin scarf of smoke along the ground.

The two old peasants are busy sticking their thin, brown incense tapers into the little heaps of grey ash—to become grey ashes in their turn. The little son has already lit his before the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké; and the father, gravely feeling in the pocket of his “foreign” coat, takes out a visiting-card, and lays it reverently among the pile of others on the grave.

Then they go away slowly. And I catch the names of Asano Takumi no Kami and Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, and I know that the little son is listening to the story of the Forty-Seven Rōnin.

For two hundred years now they have come up the pebbled pathway into the graveyard, country peasant and Tokyo gentlemen coming with incense sticks and flowering branches, to keep green the memory of the loyal retainers who died to revenge their lord: coming in kimono and top-knot: still coming in foreign clothes and shappo, for the old spirit lives though the outer form is changing. The fierce unswerving loyalty, the utter self-sacrifice, the tenacity and strength of the Forty-Seven Rōnin still stir the soul of the modern Japanese under their foreign envelope as it stirred the heart of those fierce old samurai, with their hands ever on the hilt of their long two-handed swords.

“Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth as the enemy of thy father or thy master,” says the Scripture. And the Forty-Seven died, and more than died, to fulfil the commandment.

In the temple below their wooden effigies stand to this day. Among them are old men and young boys—one with the grey locks of seventy-seven, one with the boyish cheeks of seventeen—but neither the old man nor the young boy faltered, through all the long months of waiting, in the dangerous moment of the struggle or after. They plotted and endured; they fought and slew; they brought the bloody head of Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, washed in the well beyond the plum-tree, here to the grave of their dead lord; they gave themselves up to Justice; they carried out the sentence of death on their own bodies with their own hands—all with the same quiet self-control which only the sense of a supreme, absorbing duty can produce.

And the Forty-Seven were buried here, in the quiet cold graveyard, beside the body of their lord. And when they had been laid to rest there came a fierce two-sworded samurai to the little garden, and, kneeling down in front of the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké, he took his dirk from his belt and stabbed himself above the grave. For he had insulted Oishi Kuranosuké, in the long months of the waiting, thinking he had forgotten his lord.

So they buried him among the Forty-Seven, and before his tomb are flowering branches and burning incense tapers.

The two old peasants are gone, but the sound of coming steps is on the pebbled pathway.

It is the feet of the nation. They come to keep their age long watch above the graves of the Loyal Rōnin.