Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools Part 37

While the aged landlord conducts me to the bath, the wife prepares for us a charming little repast of rice, eggs, vegetables, and sweetmeats.

She is painfully in doubt about her ability to please me, even after I have eaten enough for two men, and apologizes too much for not being able to offer me more.

"There is no fish," she says, "for to-day is the first day of the Bonku, the Festival of the Dead; being the thirteenth day of the month. On the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth of the month n.o.body may eat fish.

But on the morning of the sixteenth day, the fishermen go out to catch fish; and everybody who has both parents living may eat of it. But if one has lost one's father or mother then one must not eat fish, even upon the sixteenth day."

While the good soul is thus explaining I become aware of a strange remote sound from without, a sound I recognize through memory of tropical dances, a measured clapping of hands. But this clapping is very soft and at long intervals. And at still longer intervals there comes to us a heavy m.u.f.fled booming, the tap of a great drum, a temple drum.

"Oh! we must go to see it," cries Akira; "it is the Bon-odori, the Dance of the Festival of the Dead. And you will see the Bon-odori danced here as it is never danced in cities--the Bon-odori of ancient days. For customs have not changed here; but in the cities all is changed."

So I hasten out, wearing only, like the people about me, one of those light wide-sleeved summer robes--yukata--which are furnished to male guests at all j.a.panese hotels; but the air is so warm that even thus lightly clad, I find myself slightly perspiring. And the night is divine,--still, clear, vaster than the nights of Europe, with a big white moon flinging down queer shadows of tilted eaves and horned gables, and delightful silhouettes of robed j.a.panese. A little boy, the grandson of our host, leads the way with a crimson paper lantern; and the sonorous echoing of geta, the _koro-koro_ of wooden sandals, fills all the street, for many are going whither we are going, to see the dance.

A little while we proceed along the main street; then, traversing a narrow pa.s.sage between two houses, we find ourselves in a great open s.p.a.ce flooded by moonlight. This is the dancing-place; but the dance has ceased for a time. Looking about me, I perceive that we are in the court of an ancient Buddhist temple. The temple building itself remains intact, a low, long peaked silhouette against the starlight; but it is void and dark and unhallowed now; it has been turned, they tell me, into a schoolhouse. The priests are gone; the great bell is gone; the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas have vanished, all save one,--a broken-handed Jizo of stone, smiling with eyelids closed, under the moon.

In the centre of the court is a framework of bamboo supporting a great drum; and about it benches have been arranged, benches from the schoolhouse, on which the villagers are resting. There is a hum of voices, voices of people speaking very low, as if expecting something solemn; and cries of children betimes, and soft laughter of girls. And far behind the court, beyond a low hedge of sombre evergreen shrubs, I see soft white lights and a host of tall gray shapes throwing long shadows; and I know that the lights are the _white_ lanterns of the dead (those hung in cemeteries only), and that the gray shapes are the shapes of tombs.

Suddenly a girl rises from her seat, and taps the huge drum once. It is the signal for the Dance of Souls.

II

Out of the shadow of the temple a professional line of dancers files into the moonlight and as suddenly halts,--all young women or girls, clad in their choicest attire; the tallest leads; her comrades follow in order of stature. Little maids of ten or twelve years compose the end of the procession. Figures lightly poised as birds,--figures that somehow recall the dreams of shapes circling about certain antique vases; those charming j.a.panese robes, close-clinging about the knees, might seem, but for the great fantastic drooping sleeves, and the curious broad girdles confining them, designed after the drawing of some Greek or Etruscan artist. And, at another tap of the drum, there begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal,--a dance, an astonishment.

All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a strange floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance. Then the right foot is drawn back, with a repet.i.tion of the waving of hands and the mysterious bow. Then all advance the left foot and repeat the previous movements, half-turning to the left. Then all take two gliding paces forward, with a single simultaneous soft clap of the hands, and the first performance is reiterated, alternately to the right and left; all the sandaled feet gliding together, all the supple hands waving together, all the pliant bodies bowing and swaying together. And so slowly, weirdly, the processional movement changes into a great round, circling about the moon-lit court and around the voiceless crowd of spectators.

And always the white hands sinuously wave together, as if weaving spells, alternately without and within the round, now with palms upward, now with palms downward; and all the elfish sleeves hover duskily together, with a shadowing as of wings; and all the feet poise together with such a rhythm of complex motion, that, in watching it, one feels a sensation of hypnotism--as while striving to watch a flowing and shimmering of water.

And this soporous allurement is intensified by a dead hush. No one speaks, not even a spectator. And, in the long intervals between the soft clapping of hands, one hears only the shrilling of the crickets in the trees, and the _shu-shu_ of sandals, lightly stirring the dust. Unto what, I ask myself, may this be likened? Unto nothing; yet it suggests some fancy of somnambulism,--dreamers, who dream themselves flying, dreaming upon their feet.

And there comes to me the thought that I am looking at something immemorially old, something belonging to the unrecorded beginning of this Oriental life, perhaps to the crepuscular Kamiyo itself, to the magical Age of the G.o.ds; a symbolism of motion whereof the meaning has been forgotten for innumerable years. Yet more and more unreal the spectacle appears, with silent smilings, with its silent bowings, as if obeisance to watchers invisible; and I find myself wondering whether, were I to utter but a whisper, all would not vanish forever, save the gray mouldering court and the desolate temple, and the broken statue of Jizo, smiling always the same mysterious smile I see upon the faces of the dancers.

Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves--apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitation of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place, there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted. But no! these gracious, silent, waving, weaving shapes are not of the Shadowy Folk, for whose coming the white fires were kindled: a strain of song, full of sweet, clear quavering, like the call of a bird, gushes from some girlish mouth, and fifty soft voices join the chant:--

_Sorota soroimas.h.i.ta odorikoga sorota, Soroikita, kita hare yukata._

"Uniform to view [as ears of young rice ripening in the field] all clad alike in summer festal robes, the company of dancers have a.s.sembled."

Again only the shrilling of the crickets, the _shu-shu_ of feet, the gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence, with mesmeric lentor,--with a strange grace, which by its very navete, seems as old as the encircling hills.

Those who sleep the sleep of centuries out there, under the gray stones where the white lanterns are, and their fathers, and the fathers of their fathers' fathers, and the unknown generations behind them, buried in cemeteries of which the place has been forgotten for a thousand years, doubtless looked upon a scene like this. Nay! the dust stirred by those young feet was human life, and so smiled and so sang under this self-same moon, "with woven paces and with waving hands."

Suddenly a deep male chant breaks the hush. Two giants have joined the round, and now lead it, two superb young mountain peasants nearly nude, towering head and shoulders above the whole of the a.s.sembly. Their kimono are rolled about their waists like girdles, leaving their bronzed limbs and torsos naked to the warm air; they wear nothing else save their immense straw hats, and white tabi, donned expressly for the festival. Never before among these people saw I such men, such thews; but their smiling beardless faces are comely and kindly as those of j.a.panese boys. They seem brothers, so like in frame, in movement, in the timbre of their voices, as they intone the same song:--

_No demo yama demo ko wa umiokeyo, Sen ryo kura yori ko ga takara._

"Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters nothing: more than a treasure of one thousand ryo, a baby precious is."

And Jizo, the lover of children's ghosts, smiles across the silence.

Souls close to nature's Soul are these; artless and touching their thought, like the worship of that Kishibojin to whom wives pray. And after the silence, the sweet thin voices of the women answer:--

_Oomu otoko ni sowa sanu oya wa, Oyade gozaranu ko no kataki._

"The parents who will not allow their girl to be united with her lover; they are not the parents, but the enemies of their child."

And song follows song; and the round ever becomes larger; and the hours pa.s.s unfelt, unheard, while the moon wheels slowly down the blue steeps of the night.

A deep low boom rolls suddenly across the court, the rich tone of some temple bell telling the twelfth hour. Instantly the witchcraft ends, like the wonder of some dream broken by a sound; the chanting ceases; the round dissolves in an outburst of happy laughter, and chatting, and softly-voweled callings of flower-names which are names of girls, and farewell cries of "Sayonara!" as dancers and spectators alike betake themselves homeward, with a great _koro-koro_ of getas.

And I, moving with the throng, in the bewildered manner of one suddenly roused from sleep, know myself ungrateful. These silvery-laughing folk who now toddle along beside me upon their noisy little clogs, stepping very fast to get a peep at my foreign face, these but a moment ago were visions of archaic grace, illusions of necromancy, delightful phantoms; and I feel a vague resentment against them for thus materializing into simple country-girls.

NOTES

Lafcadio Hearn, the author of this selection, took a four days' journey in a jinrikisha to the remote country district which he describes. He is almost the only foreigner who has ever entered the village.

=Bon-odori=:--The dance in honor of the dead.

=Hiroshige=:--A j.a.panese landscape painter of an early date.

=kuruma=:--A jinrikisha; a two-wheeled cart drawn by a man.

=hibachi=:--(hi ba' chi) A brazier.

=Bonku=:--The Festival of the Dead.

=The memory of tropical dances=:--Lafcadio Hearn had previously spent some years in the West Indies.

=Akira=:--The name of the guide who has drawn the kuruma in which the foreigner has come to the village. (See page 18 of _Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan_.)

=yukata=:--p.r.o.nounced _yu ka' ta._

=geta=:--p.r.o.nounced _g[=e][=e]' ta_, not _j[=e][=e]' ta;_ high noisy wooden clogs. (See page 10 of _Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan_.)

=Buddhist=:--One who believes in the doctrines of Gautama Siddartha, a religious teacher of the sixth century before Christ.

=Buddha=:--A statue representing the Buddha Siddartha in a very calm position, usually sitting cross-legged.

=Bodhisattvas=:--p.r.o.nounced _b[=o] di saht' vas;_ G.o.ds who have almost attained the perfection of Buddha (Gautama Siddartha).

=Jizo=:--A j.a.panese G.o.d. See page 297.

=Etruscan=:--Relating to Etruria, a division of ancient Italy. Etruscan vases have graceful figures upon them.

=soporous=:--Drowsy; sleep-producing.

=crepuscular=:--Relating to twilight.

=Kamiyo=:--The Age of the G.o.ds in j.a.pan.