Kakemono

Midnight and yet as hot as mid-day. Over our heads the velvet darkness lay as a visible lid above the streets, warm and still. Not a breath of air was stirring from one end of Kyoto to the other; the city seemed a vast dark house with all its windows shut. Only the rapid running of the kurumaya produced the slightest breeze, and that was but the fanning of a heated ballroom; and when it stopped the hot still air settled down hotter, stiller, than before.

We had reached the bank of the river, the bridge and Theatre Street lay beyond; and, as suddenly as one opens a door in a dark passage, we were there, inside, in the press and the noise, the lights and the crowd of Kyoto’s nightly soirée.

Restaurants and hairpin stalls, geisha booths and theatres, the interesting show of the two-headed fish, or the tragic story of the Forty-seven Rōnin, embroideries, and bīru, jugglers and phonographs, cheap stalls for the sale of shaved ice and sugar syrup, elegant restaurants with fish dinners; dancing-booths at two sen a head, where white-painted geisha girls continually sang four notes and assumed four postures, and sang the same four notes and repeated the same four postures to a tightly packed audience sitting on its heels, silent but appreciative; and all, restaurants, booths, theatres, stalls, blazed with lights and posters, deafened with the banging of big drums and the invitations of the proprietors, reeked with the smell of burning tallow, the fragrance of boiling tea, the scent of crushed geranium, the odour of an eastern summer’s night and of the press of clean-washed, hot humanity.

Along the street, inside the stalls and out, the crowd was dense, cheerful, polite and contented. There was no pushing, no ill-humour, no fights, no drunkenness, nor one policeman. The people of Kyoto were enjoying themselves like well-bred guests in a ballroom, with the courtesy of self-control, and the self-abandoned pleasure of a child. The road with its shifting crowd, and the two long lines of brightly lighted buildings, covered with paper lanterns and cotton banners on bamboo poles, looked more like a “set” in a theatre than real houses in an out-of-doors street. Not a candle-flame quivered, not a banner stirred, and the long perspective of the arched bridge was still as a painted background.

Down in the river, in the actual bed of the stream, were more lights, whole crowded restaurants afloat. Sitting on the tops of tables, whose four legs driven down into the sand brought them within six inches of the water, supper parties innumerable ate and talked; while the children, slipping off their gheta, paddled their feet in the stream. Even the little waitresses, as they ran from customer to customer, would leave the long polished gangways that led from tea-house to table, and take the shorter way through the water. Every one was eating, and every one was happy—shaved ice with sugar syrup, at two sen a glass, or dishes of brown eels and rice at two yen, gratuitous tea or bīru in thirty-sen bottles. And with the summer night above, the water all around, the hundreds and hundreds of little tables floated on the water bright with kimono and lanterns. The broad shallow backwater either side the bridge was full of them, and the gentle rushing of the actual river beyond the circle of bright light lent a sense of freshness to the shadows that they did not in themselves possess.

Up on the bridge the crowd grew thicker, Theatre Street more full; the hairpin stalls were surrounded with women and little girls, buying long hairpins carved at the end, or ornamented with silk lanterns or flowers, or ingenious designs of tortoises made of shells, with legs that quivered realistically. And the velvet blackness lying above the streets and beyond the river was warm to feel.

Suddenly, as when one throws a stone into the water, the crowd surged forwards, then rippled slowly back; half a dozen white-uniformed policemen, with the distinctive, distinguished face of the samurai, were coming over the bridge, driving the people before them, back and back. The confused noise of indistinct shouting filled the air. Suddenly on to the bridge came running in a sort of jog-trot a crowd of bareheaded men, their short white tunics hardly reaching to the thigh and their brown legs naked beneath, all tugging and straining at a huge unwieldy car, which moved in jerks on its wheels of solid wood. On each side ran bands of men brandishing flaming torches in their hands, while priests in gorgeous apparel came behind. And priests and people, torch-bearers and car-pullers, were chanting as they ran, a fierce, wild cry, which went on and on. The car-pullers swayed from side to side, tossing their hands above their heads, the torch-bearers rocked, sending great flaming fragments among the crowd, and we all stood pressed together, shrinking back from the burning torches, and the feet of the car-pullers, singed here, trampled there, in one sweating mass of hot humanity.

In the middle of the bridge the car stood still. The men in white tunics moved restlessly on their feet, straining at the cords; the torch-bearers chanted louder, tossing their torches in the air; the priests hurried to the front, and stood gesticulating while the wild, monotonous cry, gathering fierceness and frenzy from its very monotony, thundered and roared. Then with a sudden swirl the car turned round, and torch-bearers, car-pullers and priests were rushing back again to the same fierce wild cry, the same frenzied swaying of the bodies, and the same mad tossing of the arms. The sacred procession had come, was gone.

Slowly the crowd rippled back, on over the bridge, back down the street, the policemen disappeared, the drums of the geisha booths and the invitations of the stall-owners rang out again. Down on the surface of the river the floating tables grew fuller and fuller.

Kyoto’s nightly soirée was at its height.