V
THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL
Enshrined in their white wooden boxes the dolls look down; and the gently drifting crowd stare their fill.
It is the eve of the Dolls’ Festival, and for a hundred yards along the wide Odōri, the street is wreathed across and across with swaying lines of paper lanterns.
On each matted floor, raised knee-high from the ground, a shopman sits on his heels, his hands eternally stretched out over the charcoal fire of the hibachi.
The background of dolls on three sides of him seem as interested in their sale as he. The crowd drifts, talks, points, looks, but he sits still, absorbed in his occupation. Occasionally he will turn a languid head over one shoulder in the direction of an inquiring voice, and tranquilly name a price four times bigger than he expects to get; but unless the customer pursues the bargain with vigour he does not stir. Even then, all the talking is done without moving more than a head. And when the culminating point arrives at which the would-be buyer shakes the dust off his feet and makes vigorously for the next shop, he murmurs an impassive “Yoroshī” (“All right”), and warms another finger, while a boy in the background, who for ever dusts the stock-in-trade, does up the parcel and takes the money.
I wonder—would anything stir this blasé image of indifference?
Perhaps if a fool or a foreigner, interchangeable terms in the East, paid the price he asked he might——. No, “Yoroshī, yoroshī,” he murmurs, and does not interrupt the warming of his hands by a finger’s-breadth.
For ten long days now the dolls, all in the quaint robes of old, have looked down on the gently drifting crowd, emperor and empress, lords and ladies, and court musicians. The red silk trousers and the flowing hair, the cut-glass chandelier-like head-dress and the wide, wide sleeved kimono; the court lady leading her lap-dog; the musicians with their instruments; and along the lower shelves, the long procession of lacquered bowls, and tables and furniture, the old, old shapes of Old Japan, the realities buried for ever in museums, and only these, their midget substitutes, enjoying a brief life once a year.
They are so neat and pretty, of such exquisite workmanship and finish, that I stay to look and look. Behind me the crowd closes in thicker and thicker, looking too—but at me; so thickly that they obstruct the rails of Tokyo’s main tramway, and cause it much embarrassment.
To-morrow is the Dolls’ Festival, and all the world is buying; I, too, would like to buy. So I sit still on the edge of the matted floor and watch. I shall learn what I ought to give and how to conduct the intricate matter of a purchase. But though they were here before me, and though they stay long after me, and though I wait with what I consider quite Oriental patience, they do not buy, not one of them, they only talk. So I am compelled to conduct my own purchase without the aid of native example, and to the certain advantage of the impassive shopman.
Does any one ever buy anything in Tokyo?
In all my many wanderings I have never seen them, patiently as I have stalked them. They are always just going—just going—just going——
Perhaps that is why the impassive shopmen are so impassive.