Also, what is the origin of the curious shape of the little stoppers of the omiki-dokkuri?
Also, whether the ancestors are ever worshipped before the kamidana in the same way as they are worshipped before the butsudan.
Are the names of the dead ever written upon something to be placed in the miya, in the same way, or nearly the same way, as the kaimyō is written upon the ihai or Buddhist mortuary tablet.
In the Shintō worship of family ancestors (if there is any such worship, which I doubt), what prayers are said?
Are any particular family-prayers said by Buddhists when praying before the kaimyō, or do the common people utter only the ordinary prayer of their sect—such as “Namu Amida Butsu,” or, “Namu Myōhō Rengekyō?”
But do not give yourself too much trouble about these things, and take your own time;—in a month, or two months, or even three months will be quite time enough. And if you have no time, do not trouble yourself about it at all; and write to me that you cannot, or would rather not,—then I will ask some one who is less busy.
I shall be hoping really to see you in Kumamoto next year. You would like the school very much. Perhaps you would not like the city as well as Matsue; but the school is not in the city exactly; it is a little outside of it, and you would live in the school, probably,—or very near it. The students make excursions to Nagasaki and other places, by railroad and steamer.
Now about your letter. It was very nice. You made a few mistakes in using “will,”—and in saying “if I would have promote my school.” It ought to have been “if I should go to a higher school.”
“This will be a bad letter” ought to have been “I fear this is ... etc.” But you and I and everybody learn best by making mistakes.
With best remembrance from your old teacher, believe me
Ever truly yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Friend Nishida,—Your letter has just reached me. I am more sorry than I can express to hear of the death of Yokogi. Nature seems strangely cruel in making such a life, and destroying it before the time of ripeness. And the good hearts and the fine brains pass to dust, while the coarse and the cunning survive all dangers....
The name of the delightful old Samurai who teaches Chinese here, I think you know,—Akizuki. He was at Aizu, and made a great soldier’s name; and he is just as gentle and quiet as Mr. Katayama,—and still more paternally charming in his manner. He is sixty-three years old....
I have made no friends among the teachers yet. I attended my first Japanese dinner with them the night before last; and, because you were not there, I think I made some queer mistakes about the dishes—when to use chopsticks, etc. There were no geishas: the former director had forbidden their employment at teachers’ dinners; and I don’t think that Mr. Kano is going to revoke the order. The reason for it was not prudery; but the opposition paper used to take advantage of the presence of geishas at the teachers’ banquets to print nasty things against the school. So it was determined not to give the paper a chance to say anything more....
I have been very cautious in writing you about the climate, because I wanted to be very sure that, in case you should come here, it would be for the best. So far the climate is like this: every morning and night cold, with white frost; afternoons so warm that one can go out without an overcoat. Very little rain. No snow yet; but I am told that it will come.
As for me, I have become stronger than I have been for years. All my clothes, even my Japanese kimono, have become too small!! But I cannot say whether this be the climate or the diet or what. Setsu says it is because I have a good wife;—but she might be prejudiced, you know! My lungs are sound as a bell; I never cough at all. This is all that I can tell you at present.
No: O-Yone came with us. She took O-Yoshi’s place, when O-Yoshi went back to live with her mother. I am sorry to say I had to send the kurumaya away. He abandoned his wife in Matsue, and she went to the house of the Inagaki, crying and telling a very pitiful story. When I heard this, I told the man he must go back. But on the same days later, I found he had been doing very wrong things,—trying to make trouble among the other servants, and playing tricks upon us by making secret arrangements with the shopkeepers. I had bought him clothes, and given him altogether 14 yen and 50 sen, besides his board and lodging—including 5 yen to go back with. But he had squandered his little money and how he managed afterward I don’t know. I could not help him any more; for his cunningness and foolishness together made it impossible to keep him a day longer in the house. The cook is from the Nisho-tei,—to which you first introduced me. The kurumaya’s place would have been a nice place for a good man. I shall be very careful about employing another kurumaya by the month.
Now about the question you asked me. The words you underlined are from the Jewish Bible. The ideas of value and of weight were closely connected in the minds of the old Semites, as they are still, to some extent, in our own. Everything was sold by weight, and according to the weight was the value. The weighing was done with the scales or balance, of which there were several kinds. The balancing was done by suspending a weight at one end of the “balance,” or scales, as in Japan, and the article to be sold in the other. If too light, the article was “found wanting”—(i. e.: in weight). So in such English expressions as “to make light of” (to ridicule, to belittle, to speak contemptuously of)—the idea of weight thus estimated survives. Now, in the mythology of the Jews God is represented as one who weighs, in a scale or balance, the good that is in a man—(his moral weight or value)—and sends him to hell if he proves too light. Public opinion is now the God with the scales. If I am an author, for example, I (that is, my work) will be weighed in the balance (of public or of literary opinion) and found perhaps wanting. Poor Ito was weighed many, many times, and found wanting—before being expelled. I am afraid he will be found wanting also by the world into which he must enter.
As for the phrase, “not a hair of their head,” the singular is often used for the plural in the old English of the Bible, and other books. (To-day, we should use only the plural,—as a general rule.)
Examples from the Bible:
Poets to-day, or writers of poetical prose, may take similar liberties with grammar as that in No. 3.
There are very many quotations in the Bible about the words “weighed in the balance;” the most famous being that in the story of Belshazzar, in the book of Daniel. The first poetical use of the phrase is in the book of Job—supposed, you know, to have been written by an Arab, not a Jew.
Now I hope and pray that you will take good care of yourself, and not allow your Samurai-spirit of self-denial to urge you into taking any risks on bitterly cold days. Many, many happy new years to you and yours.
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Professor,—Your welcome postal to hand. One must travel out of Izumo after a long residence to find out how utterly different the place is from other places,—for instance, this country. Matsue is incomparably prettier and better built and in every way more interesting than Kumamoto. What Kumamoto is religiously, I have not yet been able to find out. There are no shops here full of household shrines of hinoki-wood for sale, no display of shimenawa over doors, no charms in the fields, no o fuda pasted upon house-doors, no profusion of Shintō emblems, no certainty of seeing a kamidana or a butsudan in every house, and a strange scarcity of temples and images. Religiously, the place seems to be uninteresting; and to-day it is infernally cold. Everything is atrociously dear, and the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist. My own people—four came with me—feel like fish out of water. My little wife said the other morning, with an amusing wonder in her eyes, that there was a mezurashii kedamono in the next yard. We looked out, and the extraordinary animal was a goat. Some geese were also a subject of wonder, and a pig. None of these creatures are to be seen in Izumo.
About Inari. I may enquire again, but I think that the representation of Inari as a man with a beard, riding upon a white fox, in the pictures of Toyokuni, for instance, and in the sacred kakemono is tolerably good evidence. Also the relief carving I have seen representing him as a man. Also the general popular idea concerning him, about which there is no mistake. Also the letter of Hideyoshi to Inari Daimyōjin cited in Walter Dening’s Readers, under the heading: “Hideyoshi’s Letter to Gods.”
As to Kwannon, it is true that in Buddhist history she figures both as a man and woman (as also does the daughter of the Serpent-King in the astounding sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law),—she is identified with the Sanscrit Avalokitesvara,— about whose sex there may be some doubt. I have a translation of her Japanese sutra, in which she is female, however;—and in China and in Japan she has come to be considered the ideal of all that is sweet in womanliness, and her statues and the representations of her in the numerous pictures of the Buddhist pantheon are of a woman,—maiden. And after all, the people, not the scholars, make the gods, and the gods they make are the best.
I cannot help thinking that the identification of the Japanese Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with those of India is not sufficiently specified by Eitel and others as an identification of origin only. They have become totally transformed here,—they have undergone perfect avatars, and are not now the same. Shaka, Amida, Yakushi, Fudō, Dainichi, etc., may have been in India distinct personalities: in Japan they are but forms of the One,—as indeed are the innumerable Buddhas of the Lotus of the True Law. All are one. And Kshitigarbha is not our Japanese Jizō,—and Kwannon is not Avalokitesvara, and the Ni-ō are not the figures of Indra, and Emma-O is not Yama. “They were and are not.” Don’t you agree with me that the popular idea of a divinity is an element of weight in such questions of doubt as we are chatting about?
With every wish that you may enjoy your journey in Shikoku, I remain, most truly ever,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S.... I have been teaching three days, and find no difference in the boys from those of Izumo, —they are gentle, polite, manly and eager. But I am greatly hampered by the books. There are not books enough, and the reading-books chosen are atrociously unsuited for the students. Fancy “Silas Marner” and “John Halifax,” with the long double-compound complex semiphilosophical sentences of George Eliot, as text-books for boys who can scarcely speak in English! A missionary’s choice! Ye gods of old Japan! I think the Mombushō is economical in the wrong direction. Too much money cannot be spent on good reading-books. Less money on buildings and more for books would give better results. Buildings worth a quarter of a million (as building costs in America), and “Lovell’s Library” and “George Munro’s” piracies bought for text-books. I could scream!!
Dear Ōtani,—Your long and most interesting letter gave me much pleasure, as well as much information. I am very glad to have had my questions so nicely answered; for I am writing an essay on Shintō home-worship in Izumo,—all about the kamidana, etc. I know a good deal about general forms and rules, but very little about the reverence paid in the house to the family dead (forefathers, father, mother, dead children, etc.)—in Shintō, which is very interesting to know. I think much of the modern customs shows a Chinese origin, though the spirit of pure Shintō seems to be wholly Japanese.
I think your first explanation of the form of the omiki dokkuri no kuchi-sashi is the correct one,—so far as this is concerned. I am not sure, but the shape is strikingly like that of the mystic jewel of Buddhist art. There is another form in brass, which I have, that seems intended to represent a folded paper; but I am not sure what it means.
Many thanks for your very valuable notes about the January customs. You told me quite a number of things I did not know before,—such as the rules about the twist of the straw-rope, and the symbolism of the charcoal and many other articles. But I would like to know why the pendent straws should be 3-5-7: is there any mystic signification in those numbers? I thought the Japanese mystic number was 8....
Take good care of your health.
Ever very truly yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Hendrick,—Your jolly letter just came—Jan. 3rd,—to find me celebrating the new year after the Japanese fashion. There is not one New Year’s day here, but three. Over the gate, and all the alcoves of each apartment, the straw rope (shimenawa), which is the Shintō emblem of the gods, is festooned; upon the kamidana, or “god-shelf,” lights are burning before the tablets of those deities who have pledged themselves in Japanese ideographs to love and protect this foreigner,—and I have given to them offerings of rice-cakes and sake. For the guests are dishes of raw fish, and others which it would take too long to describe, and hot sake. My little wife does the honours. Before the gate are Japanese flags and pine-trees—emblems of green old age and unflinching purpose.
—Well, here I am in Kyūshū, a thousand miles and more south of Yokohama, at a salary of 200 yen a month. All my Izumo servants came with me. Our house is not nearly so beautiful as that in Matsue, and the city is devilishly ugly and commonplace,—an enormous, half-Europeanized garrison-town, full of soldiers. I don’t like it; but Lord! I must try to make money, for nothing is sure in Japan, and I am now so tied down to the country that I can’t quit it, except for a trip, whether the Government employs me or not. I have nine lives depending on my work—wife, wife’s mother, wife’s father, wife’s adopted mother, wife’s father’s father, and then servants, and a Buddhist student. How would you like that? It wouldn’t do in America. But it is nothing here—no appreciable burden. The moral burden, however, is heavy enough. You can’t let a little world grow up around you, to depend on you, and then break it all up—not if you are a respectable person. And I indulge in the luxury of “filial piety”—a virtue of which the good and evil results are only known to us Orientals.
I translated into Hearnian dialect all you said. And my wife, whose name is Setsu, or Chi-yo (alternative), knows you well by your photograph, and said such nice things about that photograph that I dare not tell you. Which is all the more extraordinary because when I showed her some pictures of “distinguished foreigners” she and the girls all said that if they should ever meet such people they would “become Buddhas for fear”—i. e., die of fright. American and English faces—their deep-set eyes—terrify unsophisticated Japanese. Children cry with fear at the sight of a foreigner. So your photo must reveal exceptional qualities to make such an impression....
Everybody gets drunk here to-day; but a cultivated Japanese is never offensively drunk. To get properly, politely drunk upon sake is the summum bonum.... Although a gentleman knows how to act, however drunk, it is the custom, when your host makes you drunker than usual (which delights him), to call at the house next morning, and thank him for the entertainment—at the same time apologizing for any possible mistakes. Of course, there are no ladies at men’s dinners—only professional dancing-girls, maiko or geisha.
Work progresses; but the barrier of language is a serious one. My project to study Buddhism must be indefinitely delayed on that account. For the deeper mysteries of Buddhism cannot be explained in the Hearnian dialect.
What some people say about Miss Bisland—ah! I mean Mrs. Wetmore—being only beautiful when she wants to be is, I think, perfectly true. She can change into seventeen different women. She used to make me almost believe the stories about Circe and Lilith. She laughed to scorn the terrible scientific test of the photograph—of the science which reveals new nebulae and tells a man in advance whether he is going to get the small-pox or not. No two photos of her ever represented the same human being. In ordinary mortals the sort of thing called Ego, which is not “I” but “They,” is worked up into a recognizable composite photo. But in her case, ’tis quite otherwise. The different dead that live in her, live quite separately from each other, in different rooms, and receive upon different afternoons. And yet—if even Rudyard Kipling were to write the truth about that person—or rather that ghostly congregation of persons called Elizabeth Bisland,—who but a crazy man would believe that truth? Assuredly Mr. W. ought to think himself lucky. Ever to get tired of Elizabeth is out of human possibility. There are too many different Elizabeths, belonging to different historical epochs, countries, and conditions. If he should tire of one Elizabeth,—lo! there will appear another. And there is one very terrible Elizabeth, whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement. But I am glad for the compound Elizabeth that she has this Protector in reserve.—Lord! how irreverently I have been talking! But that is because you can read under the irreverence....
What can’t be insured against is earthquake. I have become afraid. Do you know that the earthquake the other day in Gifu, Aichi, etc., destroyed nearly 200,000 houses and nearly 10,000 lives? My house in far-off Matsue rocked and groaned like a steamer in a typhoon. It isn’t the quake one’s afraid of: it is being held down under a ton of timber and slowly burned alive. That is what happened to most of the dead. Five millions of dollars will scarcely relieve the distress....
Well, here’s a thousand happy New Years to you and yours,—all luck, all blessings, all glorious sensations.
Ever from your old disoccidentalized chum,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Hendrick,—Just had a long and delightful letter from you, and Mallock’s book. I hate the Jesuit; but he has a particular cleverness of his own indeed. I hate him first because he is insincere, as you suggest; then I hate him because he is morbid, with a priestly morbidness—sickly, cynical, unhealthy. I like Kipling’s morbidness, which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the teeth of God and hell and nature,—but the other—no! This book is not free from the usual faults. It is like Paul Bourget boiled into thin soup, and flavoured with a dash of M. de Camors. The Markham girl was certainly Feuillet’s imagination; but she is excellently done. Really, I don’t know;—I asked myself: “If it was I?” ... And conscience answered: “If it was you, in spite of love and duty and honour and hellfire staring you in the face you would have gone after her,—and tried to console yourself by considering the Law of Attraction of Bodies and Souls in the incomprehensible cosmical order of things, which is older than the gods.” And I was very much inclined to demur; but conscience repeated: “Oh! don’t be such a liar and quibbler;—you know you would! That was the only part of the book you really liked. Your ancestors were not religious people: you lack constitutional morality. That’s why you are poor, and unsuccessful, and void of mental balance, and an exile in Japan. You know you cannot be happy in an English moral community. You are a fraud—a vile Latin—a vicious French-hearted scalawag.”
And I could not say anything, because what conscience observed was true—to a considerable extent. “Vive le monde antique!” ...
I have been thinking a heap, because of being much alone. (The Japanese do not understand Western thought at all—at least not its emotional side. Therefore devour time and devour thought even while they stimulate it.) ...
Now about these Shadows. Yes, there are forces about one,—vague, working soundlessly, imperceptibly, softening one as the action of air softens certain surfaces of rock while hardening others. The magnetism of another faith about you necessarily polarizes that loose-quivering needle of desire in a man that seeks source of attraction in spite of synthetic philosophy. The general belief in an infinite past and future interpenetrates one some how. When you find children who do wrong are always warned, “Ah! your future birth will be unhappy;” when you find two lovers drinking death together, and leaving behind them letters saying, “This is the influence of our last birth, when we broke our promise to become husband and wife;” and last, but not least, when some loving woman murmurs, laughingly: “In the last life thou wert a woman and I a man, and I loved thee much; but thou didst not love me at all,”—you begin to doubt if you do not really believe like everybody else.
About the training of the senses. The idea is admirable, but alas!—a very clever Frenchman five years ago, in the Revue Politique et Littéraire, almost exhausted it. He represented a man who had cultivated his eye so that he could see the bacteria in the air, and the grain of metals,—also being able to adjust his eyes to distance. He had trained his ear so as to hear all sounds of growth and decomposition. He had trained his nose to smell all substances supposed to have no smell. He made a diagram of the five senses thus:—
The way impressions come to—
YOU ME
I translated it for the T.-D.
For a little while, good-bye and best happiness.
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear E. H.,— ... Your thoughts about the Shadows of the East are touching. You ought to be able to write something beautiful and quite new if you had time....
You have been seized by the fascination of monstrous cities built up to heaven, and eternally sending their thunder to the smoke-blacked sky,—cities where we live by machinery. I can shudder now only to think of walking down a street between miles of houses two hundred feet high, with a roaring of traffic through them as of a torrent in a cañon. And that fascination means elegance, fashion, social duties.... I have been trying to deal with these two problems: “What has been the moral value of Christianity to mankind?” and The answer to the former seems to be that without the brutal denial of the value of life and pleasure by Christianity, we could never have learned that the highest enjoyments are, after all, intellectual, and that progress can be effected only by self-sacrifice to interest and indifference to physical gratifications. And the latter question, though I have not yet solved it, seems to suggest that the hypocrisy itself may have large hidden value,—may be in process of transmutation into a truth.
Yes, Japanese women are all that your question implies you would wish them to be. They are children, of course. They perceive every possible shade of thought,—vexation, doubt, or pleasure,—as it passes over the face; and they know all you do not tell them. If you are unhappy about anything, then they say: mdash;and they light a little lamp, and clap their hands and pray. And the ancient gods hearken unto them; and the heart of the foreign barbarian is therewith lightened and made luminous with sunshine. And he orders the merchants of curious textures to bring their goods to the house, which they do—piling them up like mountains; and there is such choice that the pleasure of the purchase is dampened by the sense of inability to buy everything in this world. And the merchants, departing, leave behind them dreams in little Japanese brains of beautiful things to be bought next year.
Also Japanese women have curious Souls. The other day in Nagano, a politician told a treacherous lie. Whereupon his wife robed herself all in white as those are robed who are about to journey to the world of ghosts, and purified her lips according to the holy rite, and, taking from the storeroom an ancient family sword, thereupon slew herself. And she left a letter, regretting that she had but one life to give in expiation of the shame and the wrong of that lie. And the people do now worship at her grave, and strew flowers thereupon, and pray for daughters with hearts as brave.... But the worms are eating her.
Because you sent me that horrid book, I revenge myself. I send you a much more horrid book. But if you do not enjoy it, I shall commit hara kiri, or seppuku, which is the polite name. And a woman wrote it—a woman! Christopher Columbus! what a terrible woman she must be!...
The you sent is giving much amusement to friends here. Send anything really good of that sort you can find: it makes life happier for the exile.
I am not easy about my book, of which I now await the proofs. It lacks colour—it isn’t like the West Indian book. But the world here is not forceful: it is all washed in faint blues and greys and greens. There are really gamboge, or saffron-coloured valleys,—and lilac fields; but these exist only in the early summer and the rape-plant season, and ordinarily Japan is chromatically spectral. My next book will probably be on Buddhism in common life.
You write me delightful letters, which, alas! I can’t answer. Well, they are not answerable in themselves. They are thinking. I can only say this about one point: the isolation ought—unless you are physically tired by the day’s work—to prove of value. All the best work is done the way ants do things—by tiny but tireless and regular additions. I wouldn’t recommend introspection,—except in commentary. You must see interesting life. Of course only in flashes and patches. But preserve in writing the memory of these. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging, kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,—and trying to live. Then play God, and breathe into the nostrils,—and be astonished and pleased.
Lovingly ever yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Page,—To-day, second of June, your kind letter came, enclosing a draft for £163; and I write in haste to catch the mail.... And now, ten thousand thanks, from the bottom of my much-scarified heart.
I am sorry I did not get the T.-D., as it would have helped me to get out my book quicker,—my first book. It ought to be out this Fall; and I think it will be tolerably large,—a little larger than but it is only an introductory book.
Really, it is very queer; but you seem to be the best friend I’ve got outside of Japan. You really do things for a fellow—great big things; and nobody else seems inclined to do much of anything....
I send you to-day a better photo of my little wife, and some other things; and you will shortly get a copy of Chamberlain’s I have ordered for you.... As for making a present to Setsu (that is her name in Japanese; in Chinese Chi-yo, or Tchi-yo[1]), I don’t think you could send her anything Western she would understand. And I would not wish you to take so much trouble. The best thing you can do to please her is to be good to me. She has really everything she wants (you know Japanese women wear no earrings, necklaces, or jewelry as ours do); and what she really wants is only made in Japan; and I am wickedly trying to keep her as innocent of foreign life as possible. So whenever she shows a liking even for foreign textures (many are now thrown on the market) I persuade her that Japanese goods are twice as pretty and durable, and for fear she might not believe me I usually manage to find some Japanese stuff that really is much better than the foreign article on sale....
Oh, about distances. I am in Kyūshū, the southern island, you know,—very far from Tōkyō, and by the route much farther than as the crow flies. What I meant by 2000 miles south of Tōkyō was the Loochoo Islands. You know they belong to Japan, but perhaps I am wrong as to distance. The Loochoo Islands compose what is called Okinawa Ken (ken is province).... I find I shall not be able to go to Loochoo this summer, however; I must make studies somewhere else for a new book. Of course you will get my book as soon as it comes out.
In that book you will find a good deal about what you ask in relation to my way of living, etc. But as to eating, I have said very little. The fact is I lived for one year exclusively on Japanese food, which Europeans, among others Mr. Chamberlain, consider almost impossible. I must confess, however, that it broke me down. After twelve months I could not eat at all. You know Japanese food is raw fish and fresh fish, rice, bean-curds (they look like custard), seaweed, dried cuttle-fish,—rarely chicken or eggs. In short, of five hundred Japanese dishes, the basis is rice, fish, beans, lotus, various vegetables, including bamboo shoots, and seaweed. Confectionery is eaten between meals only, and sparingly. Tea is never allowed to become strong: it is a pale straw-colour, without sugar or milk, and once used to it, you cannot bear the sight of European tea any more. But I had to return to the flesh-pots of Egypt. I now eat Japanese food only once a day; and morning and evening indulge in beefsteak, bread, and Bass’s Ale.
One becomes fond of Japanese sake (rice-wine); but it can only be eaten with Japanese food. A barrel of the best costs about $3.50. It is extremely deceiving. It looks like lemonade; but it is heavy as sherry. Happily it has not the after-effects of sherry. There is no liquor in the world upon which a man becomes so quickly intoxicated, and yet none of which the effects last so short a time. The intoxication is pleasant as the effect of opium or hasheesh. It is a soft, pleasant, luminous exhilaration: everything becomes brighter, happier, lighter;—then you get very sleepy. At Japanese dinners it is the rule to become slightly exhilarated; but not to drink enough to talk thickly, or walk crooked. The ability to drink at banquets requires practice—long practice. With European wines, the rule is, I believe, that hearty eating prevents the drink from taking too much effect. But with Japanese sake it is exactly the opposite. There are banquets of many kinds, and the man who is invited to one at which extensive drinking may be expected is careful to start in upon an empty, or almost empty, stomach. By not eating one can drink a good deal. The cups are very small, and of many curious shapes; but one maybe expected to empty fifty. A quart of sake is a good load; two quarts require iron nerves to stand. But among the Japanese there are wonderful drinkers. At a military officer’s banquet a captain offered me a tumbler holding a good pint of sake,—I almost fainted at the sight of it; for it was only the first. But a friend said to me: mdash;which I did. Stronger heads emptied cup after cup like water. my friend said; He showed me something like a wash-basin for size,—a beautiful lacquered bowl, holding, I should guess, at the very least a quart and a half. “A valiant warrior was expected,” he said, “to swallow this at one draft, and wait for more.” I should not like to attempt it, unless I were suffering very badly from chills and fever. When very tired and cold, one can drink a great deal of sake without harm.
About my every-day life. Well, it is the simplest and most silent of lives,—in a simple Japanese house. I use one chair, only for writing at a high table on account of my eyes. Most of my life I spend squatting on the floor. Europeans can seldom get used to this; but it has become second nature to me.
I always wear Japanese clothes in the house, of course. We rest, eat, talk, read, and sleep on the floor. But then, you do not know, perhaps, what a Japanese floor is. It is like a great soft mattress: the real floor is covered by heavy mats, fitted to one another like mattresses set edge to edge; and these cannot be lifted up except by a workman: they are really part of the building. Then this floor is spotlessly clean. No dust is ever suffered upon it,—not a speck. Therefore we live barefooted in summer, or wearing only stockings in winter. The bed consists of a series of heavy quilts of pretty colours—like very thick comforts, piled one upon the other on the floor. By day these are rolled up and stowed out of sight. So in a Japanese house you see no furniture,—only in some recess, a graceful vase, and one kakemono, or hanging picture painted on silk. That is all—except the smoking-box (hibachi) in the middle of the room, surrounded by kneeling-cushions. In the evening the Japanese bath is ready. It is almost scalding always—hard to get used to; but the best in the world because you can’t take cold after it. It consists of an immense tub, with a little furnace in it which heats the water. For amusements we have the Japanese theatres, the street-festivals, visits of friends, Japanese newspapers, occasional pilgrimages to curious places, and—delight of delights in some cities—shopping, Japanese shopping.
Bad boys,—and not obliged to give good and great moral examples,—people who are not strictly moral in their virtues like you and me,—sometimes hire geisha or dancing girls to amuse them....
At all banquets—except those of teachers here—there are geisha. When you sit down (I mean kneel down) to eat, a band of beautiful girls come in to wait upon you, with exquisite voices, and beautiful dresses, etc. These are geisha. After a while they dance. If you wish to fall in love with them, you may....
In Matsue I often saw geisha dance: they were at all banquets. But at teachers’ banquets in Kumamoto they are not allowed. We are strictly moral in Kyūshū....
Lo!—it’s nearly time to close the mail for the outgoing steamer. So, dear Page, I must conclude for the moment in great haste.
With best regards to Mrs. Baker, best remembrances and gratitude to you, excuse this scrawl, and believe me ever faithfully
Your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Really, it seems to me as if I hadn’t thanked you at all. You are simply divine about doing kind things. My little wife sends you this greeting with her own hand,—
It means: “May you live a thousand years!”
Dear Nishida,— ... It made us both very happy to hear you had been persuaded to stop at our little house; for although it is hot and small, still you would feel more homelike there, with Izumo folk, than at the big dreary hotels of Kumamoto. I hope you will be able to stop a little while with us now at Mionoseki.
I like Oki very, very much—much better than Kumamoto. I like country people, fishermen, sailors, primitive manners, simple ways: all these delight me, and they are in Oki. To watch the life and customs of those people is very pleasant, and would be profitable to me in a literary way if I had time to spare. Oki is worth six months’ literary study for me. I hope to see it again. The only unpleasant thing is the awful smell of the cuttle-fish. But I will tell you all my impressions when we meet....
With kindest regards from myself and Setsu,—hoping to see you soon, as ever,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Nishida,—We felt quite lonesome after you went away, and especially at supper-time,—when there were only two mats, instead of three, laid upon the suzumi-dai, overlooking the bay, and the twinkling of the Golden Dragon.
Next morning the water was rough, and made a great noise; and I said, “That is because Nishida San has sent us some eggs.” But in the afternoon the bay again became like a mirror; and I succeeded in teaching Masayoshi to lie on his back in the water. Quite late in the afternoon the little Sakai Maru came in, and brought a magnificent box of eggs, and your letter, and a copy of the Nippon.
You are too good; and I felt not less pleased to find myself so kindly remembered than sorry to think of the trouble you took for us. But the eggs were more than welcome. The landlord cooked them in a little quadrangular pan; and each one looked like a Japanese flag, with the Red Sun in the middle. A thousand thanks to you, and to your kindest mother,—and to all your family warmest regards.
By the way, speaking of the Great Deity of Mionoseki, last evening we had a good laugh at the arguments of a clever barber, who came to cut my kappa-hair. I noticed he had a soldier’s belt instead of an obi. I questioned him, through Setsu; and found he had been many years in the army. In the army they gave the soldiers eggs; and he hated eggs at first. But he learned to eat them, and found that they made him stronger. Whenever he ate many eggs, he could blow his bugle much better. Then he became fond of eggs. Still he gets his friends secretly to send him eggs; and the Great Deity of Mionoseki is not angry. He says: “What nonsense! Suppose the Cock did crow at the wrong hour, is not Koto-shiro-nushi no Mikoto a Kami sama?—and how are we to believe that a Kami sama does not know the right time? And suppose the wanizame did bite him,—then it is at the wanizame he ought to have been angry,—not at the Cock. I don’t believe Koto-shiro-nushi no Kami could be so foolish. Indeed it is very wrong to tell such a story about him. I like eggs. I pity the people of Mionoseki, who do not know the rare pleasure of eating a well-cooked egg” (etc., etc.). “If the Deity was angry with the Cock, he should have eaten him.” ...
With many grateful regards,
Ever most truly,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Old Fellow,— ... What a beastly nightmare that woman who married the preacher! High-pressure civilization only produces these types.—But, Lord! what is to be the end?... The race will still be to the mentally strong as well as to the physically strong. But the women fit for fertile maternity, and equally fit to discuss the fourth dimension of space, are yet rare,—and apt to be a little terrible. The cost of intellectual race-expansion is more terrible,—is frightful; and then the expansion cannot ever become universal. The many must profit by the few. To make 1 of the few, there must be, I suppose, at least 111,111 of such monstrosities created as that one you wrote of.
Isn’t the hunger for the eternal feminine much like the other hunger?—to be completely exorcised in the same way. Marriage seems to me the certain destruction of all that emotion and suffering,—so that one afterwards looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into the friendship of marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see the dangerous sea-currents, running like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I’m a poor judge of such matters) that it doesn’t make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife—unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more lovable: so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness. For intellectual converse a man can’t have really with women: womanhood is antagonistic to it. And emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the god come equally near to the eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilization is really a terrible problem: there are so many questions involved.
Oh!—you talk of being without intellectual companionship! O ye Eight Hundred Myriads of Gods! What would you do if you were me. Lo! the illusion is gone!—Japan in Kyūshū is like Europe;—except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an educated Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. Here is an astounding fact. The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child—perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated, the further you push him from you. Why? Because there the race-antipodalism shows itself. As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis sweetness, sympathy, friendship. Now, my scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the college (two miles away) by jinrikisha and return after class,—always alone, no mental company but books. But at home everything is sweet.
At the college there is always a recess of half an hour at noon, for dining. I do not dine, but climb the hill behind the college. There is a grey old cemetery, where “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.” From between the tombs I can look down on the Dai Go Kōtō Chūgakkō, with its huge modern brick buildings and its tumultuous life, as in a bird’s-eye view. I am only there never alone. For Buddha sits beside me, and also looks down upon the college through his half-closed eyelids of stone. There is moss on his nose and his hands,—moss on his back, of course! And I always say to him: “O Master, what do you think of all this?—is it not vanity? There is no faith there, no creed, no thought of the past life nor of the future life, nor of Nirvana,—only chemistry and cube-geometry and trigonometry,—and the most damnable ‘English language.‘” He never answers me; but he looks very sad,—smiles just like one who has received an injury which he cannot return,—and you know that is the most pathetic of all smiles. And the snakes twist before my feet as I descend to the sound of the bell.—There is my only companion for you! but I like him better than those who look like him waiting for me in the classroom. Ever with best regards,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Dear Nishida,—I do not know how to thank you enough for your last letter;—indeed I must tell you frankly that I felt ashamed of having put you to such trouble involuntarily, for I had no idea how complicated the matter was when I wrote to you for information about the origin of the belief. And now let me beg of you never to take so much trouble again on my account. I think I can hear you protesting that it was only a pleasure. I am sure it was a pleasure to help me; but I am too much of a literary man not to know exactly the time-cost of the work, especially in a language not your own. So I will again beg you not to take so much trouble for me at any future time—as it would cause me pain.
And now let me say something else about other letters. You spoke of mistakes. Do you know that I think your letters are very wonderful? There are extremely few mistakes; and there are very seldom even incorrectnesses in the use of idioms. This is rare in Japan. Very few Japanese, even among those who have been abroad, can write an informal letter without mistakes of a serious kind. You write letters much as a well-educated German or Frenchman would—showing only rarely, by some unfamiliar turn of expression, by the elision of a preposition, or (but this is very seldom indeed) by a sudden change of tense, that it is not an Englishman who writes. And in a few years more, even these little signs will disappear. It is very wonderful to me to see how a few Japanese have been able to master English without ever leaving Japan.
A point of much value to me in your explanation was the fact that too many souls are held to be as bad as too few. I had imagined the opposite to be the case, and had so written. But as I put the statement into the mouth of a story-teller, it will read all right enough; and I can correct the erroneous impression by a footnote.
There is rejoicing here over the non-abolition of the school. Your predictions have been well fulfilled. Several new books I recommended have been adopted; but there were changes made in my list, I think for the worse. Kingsley’s “Greek Heroes” (Ginn, Heath & Co.’s school-text edition) has been adopted for the younger class. I recommended this book for the extreme purity and simplicity of its English, which reads like a song. I tried to get “Cuore” adopted, but could not succeed: they said it was “too childish.” I tried Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome;” and that I think they will get. Then some classic texts—Burke’s Essays (selected) were adopted instead of a volume of stories I proposed. They adopted also “The Book of Golden Deeds,” a volume of anecdotes of virtue and courage. As for my own classes, they still give me no books at all; and I teach entirely by word of mouth and chalk. Still, considering the short time given to each class, I believe this is best. The main thing is to teach them to express themselves in English without books to help them. I have noticed that at one period of the course there is always a sudden improvement, as if there had been also a sudden development of intelligence,—between the third and fourth class. It corresponds to a change of capacity I noticed also in the Jinjō Chūgakkō. It might be indicated by lines, thus:—