XIV
CONCERNING INN MAIDS AND ALSO THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
The native inn is such an interweaving of privacy with no privacy at all that if the traveller has a sympathetic liking for the hospitality it should be put down to his temperament rather than to his reasonableness or unreasonableness. Calling upon all his reasonableness, the foreigner may still be miserable amid Japanese customs if he were born to a different crystallization. Hori considered the inn at Nirasaki to be rather superior to the average, meaning, I judged, not the luxury of the furnishings so much as the excellence of the service. The house was crowded. At most of the country inns which we had so far found we were the only guests, and the entire family of the host had usually requisitioned itself into service. Willingness and interest had made up for the few lacks but this home-made machinery might well have broken down if there had been a sudden descent of other guests. At Nirasaki, despite the crowding, we had not to wait an instant for the carrying out of any request. At all times two maids were listening for our handclapping and, for some of the time, three. They added to the customary willingness the knowing how of training. They were, in fact, trained inn ne-sans, a class whose manners and morals have been commented upon with some frequency by casual travellers, and it is possible that the outside world’s popular judgment of Japanese women has sprung largely from such observations.
In any argument about Japanese morals the likelihood is that the simplest discussion will soon march headlong into a controversy. There arises in a critical comparison of their standards with ours the temptation to assume as a basis our ideal standard against their everyday practice.
The Japanese maid, the daughter of the common people, has been again and again condemned for the easy lightness of her regard for her virtue. I have not found that foreigners who have lived in Japan and who have known the people intimately join their assent to this sweeping judgment. This charge has grown out of a confusion of possibility with fact. Although we consider that our Western individualism allows far more freedom of choice than does the Eastern family social regulation, particularly in the rigid customs and traditions for women, nevertheless in the morality of sex the guardianship of her chastity by an unmarried Japanese woman of the lower classes is a matter much more of her private concern and nobody else’s business than social opinion deems an advisable licence with us. But because the Japanese woman has this freedom it is as absurd to conclude that she makes but one choice as it would be to believe that all order in our society is maintained solely through the police and iron-clad restrictions. When conduct shall be entirely determined by rules, then it will be time to relegate character to the museum.
The duties of the maids of an inn have never included that she must be self-effaced and a silent machine. In the historic friendly relationship between maids and guests there exists a certain standard of manners and good taste, a subtle necessity to the continuance of such existence. One cannot compare the customs of a Japanese inn with the traditions existing in an Occidental hotel. The ne-san is unique. When simplicity and naïve amusement are spontaneously natural, vulgarity is starved.
After dinner the three maids brought a fresh brewing of tea and teapots filled with iced water. They also brought the message that a travelling theatrical troupe from Tokyo was giving both new and classical plays at the Nirasaki theatre. The actors and actresses were guests under our roof and the mistress of the inn sent the suggestion that the strollers would probably be pleased to entertain us in our room with an act from one of their plays and with dancing and music when they returned at midnight. After our thirty miles in the hot sun the hour of midnight sounded grotesquely post-futuristic. However, it might well have been possible, fortified by tea, iced water, and tobacco, to have awaited the hour if it had not been for another limit to our independence. Temperamentally we might take little heed of the morrow but we had also New England consciences about paying our bills. We could not invite the players to our room without inviting them to a midnight supper, and we knew that the joint treasury could not pay for such a supper.
Thus we made the excuse to the ne-sans that their laughter was more pleasing to us than the sound of the samisen. (This statement was not without truth in itself.) The responsibility of amusing us did not seem to weigh heavily upon them; in fact it was we who appeared to be amusing to them. Stupid creatures, we, who could not even play the game of “Stone, Scissors, and Paper!” Our Occidental wits were always a fraction of a second behind. Hori laughed at the bearded O-Owre-san until the toxic of the paroxysm made him delirious. At last we acknowledged the sheerness of our defeats at every venture by sending the victors for ice cream and cakes, and the evening ended with the solemn ceremonial of trying to move the small tin spoons back and forth between plate and lips quickly enough to make a transfer of the frozen mounds before the heat of the tropical night levelled them into liquid.
To escape the mid-day sun in the short walk to Kofu, we were off a little after sunrise. Kofu is more than two thousand feet lower than Fujimi and lies in the heart of a flat valley. It is an ancient city and has not lost its ancient pride, being the wealthy capital of the Kai province. We had so much time for the walk that we delayed continually, bargaining in little second-hand shops where the entire stock could hardly have been worth more than a yen, and stopping at the coolie tea places where labourers rested to smoke and to mop their faces with pale blue towels. When we were entering Kofu we were again tempted to halt upon seeing a kori flag floating in the air, proclaiming that an ice supply had arrived. We had not expected to see Hori before we should meet at the inn, but by chance he came wheeling along our street. We called out and he came into our shade. Listeners gathered around our bench, apparently not so much interested in seeing foreigners as in hearing a Japanese speak English.
In the crowd was a very old man, so old that his age seemed pathological rather than human. He made progress by a slow pushing of his feet through the dust. His red-rimmed, staring eyes leered into ours as if we exerted a direct line of magnetism. If we shifted our gaze he immediately shifted around until he again came into vision. Under his arm he carried a long glass bottle, stoppered with a cloth-wound plug. He held up the bottle before us. It was filled with a dirty, pale yellow liquid. Pushed into the bottle was a twisted root holding in the tangle of fibres two or three stones furred with slime. The stones looked somewhat like asbestos.
“What do you think it is?” he asked mysteriously.
We said that we had no idea.
“I wouldn’t dare tell you the secret,” he went on, “as the bottle is worth five hundred thousand yen. If you should pay me a hundred yen I would not allow you one taste.”
We expressed our happiness that he should have such a fortune. Then he asked if we were Americans and, upon hearing that we were, he formally inquired for an answer as to whether the American nation would buy the bottle. “I can tell you this much,” he concluded, “it contains the elixir of eternal life.”
The ancient seemed to be such proof in himself that he had lived forever that there was no arguing about eternity with him. For the sake of saying something Hori made the casual guess, “Is it radium?” He was startled into palsy. The crowd stared. Evidently they had heard of radium and it meant magic. Alas! We had gouged out the secret. “Ah-h-h!” said he, “since you know so much, how can you resist the opportunity of living forever?” We explained that under the circumstances of our poverty it looked as if we should have to die along with the rest of the world.
“I have been but testing your faith and knowledge,” he said. “The radium of the rocks is permanent. Listen! The bottle may be filled again and again without losing its strength. For only thirty yen you may drink.”
Forthwith he uncorked the bottle and there escaped an odour so vile that if he had said the tube was the sarcophagus of the lost egg of the great auk we should have believed without dispute. He poured a few drops into a glass and said: “Drink, and you will live forever!”
It is not alone honour that may make one choose death.
The crowd, however, sought eagerly for eternity. They passed the glass around and touched their tongues to the liquid. If any out of the number of that circle escaped typhoid that fact alone ought to convince them of their strength to continue a long way on the road to eternity.