Noto: An Unexplored Corner Of Japan Part 3

"It was," they said, "on very clear days." "Did I know Noto?" What shall a man say when questioned thus concerning that on which he has set his heart? He cannot say yes; shall he say no and put himself without the pale of mere acquaintance? There is a sense of nearness not to be justified to another, and the one to whom a man may feel most kin is not always she of whom he knows the most.

"I am by way of knowing it," I said, as my eyes followed my thoughts horizonward. Was it all mirage they saw or thought to see, that faint coastline washed a little deeper blue against the sky? I fear me so, for the lime-burners failed to make it out. The day was not clear enough, they said.

But the little heap of charcoal at least was real, and it had once been a tree on that farther sh.o.r.e. Charcoal to them, it was no longer common charcoal to me; for, looking at it, was I not face to face with something that had once formed part of Noto, the unknown!

VII.

Oya Shiradzu, Ko Shiradzu.

Toward the middle of the afternoon we reached a part of the coast locally famous or infamous, for the two were one; a stretch of some miles where the mountains made no apology for falling abruptly into the sea. Sheer for several hundred feet, the sh.o.r.e is here unscalable.

Nor did it use to be possible to go round by land, for the cliffs are merely the ends of mountain-chains, themselves utterly wild and tractless. A narrow strip of sand was the sole link between Etchiu on the one hand and Echigo on the other. The natives call the place Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu, that is, a spot where the father no longer knows the child, nor the child the father; so obliterating to sense of all beside is the personal danger. Refuge there is none of any kind. To have been caught here in a storm on the making tide, must indeed have been to look death in the face.

Between the devil of a precipice and the deep sea, he who ventured on the pa.s.sage must have hurried anxiously along the thread of sand, hoping to reach the last bend in time. As he rounds the ill-omened corner he sees he is too late; already the surf is breaking against the cliff. He turns back only to find retreat barred behind by rollers that have crept in since he pa.s.sed. His very footprints have all been washed away. Caged! Like the walls of a deep-down dungeon the perpendicular cliff towers at his side, and in the pit they rim, he and the angry ocean are left alone together. Then the sea begins to play with him, creeping catlike up. Her huge paws, the breakers, buffet his face. The water is already about his feet, as he backs desperately up against the rock. And each wave comes crushing in with a cruel growl to strike--short this time. But the next breaks closer, and the next closer still. He climbs a boulder. The spray blinds him. He hears a deafening roar; feels a shock that hurls him into s.p.a.ce, and he knows no more.

Now the place is fearful only to fancy. For a road has been built, belting the cliffs hundreds of feet above the tide. It is a part of what is known as the new road, a name it is likely long to keep.

Its sides are in places so steep that it fails of its footing and is constantly slipping off into the sea. Such sad missteps are the occasion for bands of convicts to appear on the scene under the marshaling of a police officer and be set to work to repair the slide by digging a little deeper into the mountain-side. The convicts wear clothes of a light brick-color which at a distance looks a little like couleur de rose, while the police are dressed in sombre blue. It would seem somewhat of a satire on the facts!

The new road is not without its sensation to such as dislike looking down. Fortunately, the jinrikisha men have not the instinct of packmules to be persistently trifling with its outer edge.

In addition to the void at the side, another showed every now and then in front, where a dip and a turn completely hid the road beyond.

The veritable end of the world seemed to be there just ahead, close against the vacancy of s.p.a.ce. A couple of rods more and we must step off--indeed the end of the world for us if we had.

When the road came to face the Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu, it attacked the rise by first running away from it up a stream into the mountains; a bit of the wisdom of the serpent that enabled it to gain much height on the bend back. Trees vaulted the way tapestrying it with their leaves, between which one caught peeps at the sea, a shimmer of blue through a shimmer of green. The path was strung with pedlars and pilgrims; the latter of both s.e.xes and all ages, under mushroom hats with their skirts neatly tucked in at the waist, showing their leggings; the former doing fulcrum duty to a couple of baskets swung on a pole over their shoulders. The pilgrims were on their way back from Zenkoji. Some of them would have tramped over two hundred miles on foot before they reached home again. A rich harvest they brought back, religion, travel, and exercise all in one, enough to keep them happy long. I know of nothing which would more persuade me to be a Buddhist than these same delightful pilgrimages. Fresh air, fresh scenes on the road, and fresh faith at the end of it. No desert caravan of penance to these Meccas, but a summer's stroll under a summer's sky. An end that sanctifies the means and a means that no less justifies its end.

While we were still in the way with these pious folk we touched our midday halt, a wayside teahouse notched in a corner of the road commanding a panoramic view over the sea. The place was kept by a deaf old lady and her tailless cat. The old lady's peculiarity was personal; the cat's was not. No self-respecting cat in this part of j.a.pan could possibly wear a tail. The northern branch of the family has long since discarded that really useless feline appendage. A dog in like circ.u.mstance would be sadly straitened in the expression of his emotions, but a cat is every whit a cat without a continuation.

With the deaf old lady we had, for obvious reasons, no sustained conversation. She busied herself for the most part in making dango, a kind of dumpling, but not one calculated to stir curiosity, since it is made of rice all through. These our men ate with more relish than would seem possible. Meanwhile I sat away from the road where I could look out upon the sea over the cliffs, and the cat purred about in her offhand way and used me incidentally as a rubbing post. Trees fringed the picture in front, and the ribbon of road wound off through it into the distance, beaded with folk, and shot with sunshine and shadow.

I was sorry when lunch was over and we took leave of our gentle hostesses; tabbies both of them, yet no unpleasing pair. A few more bends brought us to where the path culminated. The road had for some time lain bare to the sea and sky, but at the supreme point some fine beeches made a natural screen masking the naked face of the precipice.

On the cutting above, four huge Chinese characters stood graved in the rock.

"Ya no gotoku, to no gotoshi."

"Smooth as a whetstone, straight as an arrow," meaning the cliff.

Perhaps because of their pictorial descent, the characters did not shock one. Unlike the usual branding of nature, they seemed not out of keeping with the spot. Not far beyond, the b.u.t.ts of the winter's neve, buried in dirt, banked the path.

For miles along the raod the view off was superb. Nothing bordered one side of the way and the mountain bordered the other. Far below lay the sea, stretching away into blue infinity, a vast semicircle of ultramarine domed by a hemisphere of azure; and it was noticeable how much vaster the sea looked than the sky. We were so high above it that the heavings of its longer swells were leveled to imperceptibility, while the waves only graved the motionless surface. Here and there the rufflings of a breeze showed in darker markings, like the changes on watered silk. The most ephemeral disturbance made the most show.

Dotted over the blue expanse were black spots, fishing boats; and a steamer with a long trail of smoke showed in the offing, stationary to the eye, yet shifting its place like the shadow of a style when you forgot to look. And in long perspective on either hand stretched the battlement of cliff. Visual immensity lay there before us, in each of its three manifestations; of line, of surface, and of s.p.a.ce.

We stood still, the better to try to take it in--this grandeur tempered by sunshine and warmth. Do what he will, man is very much the creature of his surroundings yet. In some instant sense, the eyes fashion the feelings, and we ourselves grow broader with our horizon's breadth. The Chaldean shepherds alone with the night had grander thoughts for the companionship, and I venture to believe that the heart of the mountaineer owes quite as much to what he is forced to visage as to what he is compelled to do.

We tucked ourselves into our jinrikisha and started down. By virtue of going, the speed increased, till the way we rolled round the curves was intoxicating. The panorama below swung to match, and we leaned in or out mechanically to trim the balance. Occasionally, as it hit some stone, the vehicle gave a lurch that startled us for a moment into sobriety, from which we straightway relapsed into exhilaration. Curious this, how the body brings about its own forgetting. For I was conscious only of mind, and yet mind was the one part of me not in motion. I suppose much oxygen made me tipsy.

If so, it is a recommendable tipple. Spirits were not unhappily named after the natural article.

It was late afternoon when we issued at last from our two days Thermopylae upon the Etchiu plain. As we drew out into its expanse, the giant peaks of the Tateyama range came into view from behind their foothills, draped still in their winter ermine. It was last year yet in those upper regions of the world, but all about us below throbbed with the heartbeats of the spring. At each mile, amid the ever lengthening shadows, nature seemed to grow more sentient.

Through the thick air the peaks stood out against the eastern sky, in saffron that flushed to rose and then paled to gray. The ricefields, already flooded for their first working, mirrored the glow overhead so gla.s.sily that their d.y.k.es seemed to float, in sunset illusion, a mere bar tracery of earth between the sky above and a sky beneath.

Upon such lattice of a world we journeyed in mid-heaven. Stealthily the shadows gathered; and as the hour for confidences drew on, nature took us into hers. The trees in the twilight, just breaking into leaf, stood in groups among the fields and whispered low to one another, nodding their heads; and then from out the shadow of the May evening came the croaking of the frogs. Strangely the sound fitted the hour, with its like touch of mysterious suggestion. As the twilight indefinite, it pervaded everything, yet was never anywhere.

Deafening at a distance, it hushed at our approach only to begin again behind us. Will-o'-the-wisp of the ear, infatuating because forever illusive! And the distance and the numbers blended what had perhaps been harsh into a mellow whole that filled the gloaming with a sort of voice. I began to understand why the j.a.panese are so fond of it that they deem it not unworthy a place in nature's vocal pantheon but little lower than the song of the nightingale, and echo its sentiment in verse. And indeed it seems to me that his soul must be conventionally tuned in whom this even-song of the ricefields stirs no responsive chord.

VIII.

Across the Etchiu Delta.

The twilight lingered, and the road threaded its tortuous course for miles through the rice plain, bordered on either hand by the d.y.k.es of the paddyfields. Every few hundred feet, we pa.s.sed a farmhouse screened by clipped hedgerows and bosomed in trees; and at longer intervals we rolled through some village, the country pike becoming for the time the village street. The land was an archipelago of homestead in a sea of rice. But the trees about the dwellings so cut up the view, that for the moments of pa.s.sing the mind forgot it was all so flat and came back to its ocean in surprise, when the next vista opened on the sides.

Things had already become silhouettes when we dashed into lantern-lighted Mikkaichi. We took the place in form, and a fine sensation we made. What between the shouts of the runners and the clatter of the chaises men, women and children made haste to clear a track, s.n.a.t.c.hing their little ones back and then staring at us as we swept past. Indeed, the teams put their best feet foremost for local effect, and more than once came within an ace of running over some urchin who either would not or could not get out of the way.

Fortunately no casualties occurred. For it would have been ignominious to have been arrested by the police during our first ten minutes in the town, not to speak of the sad dampening to our feelings an accident would have caused.

In this mad manner we dashed up the long main street. We were forced to take the side, for the village aqueduct or gutter--it served both purposes--monopolized the middle. At short intervals, it was spanned by causeways made of slabs of stone. Over one of these we made a final swirl and drew up before the inn. Then our shafts made their obeisance to the ground.

A warm welcome greeted the appeal. A crowd of servants came rushing to the front of the house with an eye to business, and a crowd of village folk with an eye to pleasure closed in behind. Between the two fires we stepped out and entered the side court, to the satisfaction of the one audience and the chagrin of the other.

But it is impossible to please everybody.

Fortunately it was not so hard to please us, and certainly the inn people did their best; for they led the way to what formerly were the state apartments, that part of the house where the daimyo of Kaga had been wont to lodge when he stopped here over night on his journey north. Though it had fallen somewhat into disrepair, it was still the place of honor in the inn, and therefore politely put at the service of one from beyond sea. There I supped in solitary state, and there I slept right royally amid the relics of former splendor, doubting a little whether some unlaid ghost of bygone times might not come to claim his own, and oust me at black midnight by the rats, his retinue.

But nothing short of the sun called me back to consciousness and bade me open to the tiny garden, where a pair of ducks were preening their feathers after an early bath in their own little lake. On the veranda my lake already stood prepared; a bra.s.s basin upon a wooden stand, according to the custom of the country. So ducks and I dabbled and prinked in all innocence in the garden, which might well have been the garden of Eden for any hint it gave of a world beyond.

It was my fate, too, to leave it after the same manner.

For breakfast over we were once more of the road.

We had a long day of it before us, for I purposed to cross the Etchiu delta and sleep that night on the threshold of my hopes. The day, like all days that look long on the map, proved still longer on the march. Its itinerary diversified discomfort. First seventeen miles in kuruma, then a ferry, then a tramp of twelve miles along the beach through a series of sand dunes; then another ferry, and finally a second walk of seven miles and a half over some foothills to top off with. The inexpensiveness of the transport was the sole relieving feature of the day. Not, I mean, because the greater and worse half of the journey was done on our own feet, but because of the cheap charges of the chaises and even of the porters. To run at a dogtrot, trundling another in a baby carriage, seventeen miles for twenty cents is not, I hold, an extortionate price. Certain details of the tariff, however, are peculiar. For instance, if two men share the work by running tandem, the fare is more than doubled; a ratio in the art of proportion surprising at first. Each man would seem to charge for being helped. The fact is, the greater speed expected of the pair more than offsets the decreased draft.

Otherwise, as I say, the day was depressing. It was not merely the tramp through the sand dunes that was regrettable, though heaven knows I would not willingly take it again. The sand had far too hospitable a trick of holding on to you at every step to be to my liking. Besides, the sun, which had come out with summer insistence, chose that particular spot for its midday siesta, and lay there at full length, while the air was preternaturally still. It was a stupidly drowsy heat that gave no fillip to the feet.

But such discomfort was merely by the way. The real trouble began at Fushiki, the town on the farther side of the second ferry. In the first place the spot had, what is most uncommon in j.a.pan, a very sorry look, which was depressing in itself. Secondly, its inhabitants were much too busy or much too unemployed, or both, to be able to attend to strangers at that hour of the afternoon. Consequently it was almost impossible to get any one to carry the baggage.

We dispatched emissaries, however. By good luck we secured some beer, and then argued ourselves dry again on the luggage question.

The emissaries were at work, we were a.s.sured, and at last some one who had been sent for was said to be coming. Still time dragged on, until finally the burden bearers turned up, and turned out to be--women.

At this I rebelled. The situation was not new, but it was none the less impossible. In out-of-the-way districts I had refused offers of the kind before. For j.a.panese beasts of burden run in a decreasing scale as follows, according to the poverty of the place: jinrikisha, horses, bulls, men, women. I draw my line at the last. I am well aware how absurd the objects themselves regard such a protective policy, but I cling to my prejudices. To the present proffer I was adamant. To step jauntily along in airy unenc.u.mberedness myself, while a string of women trudged wearily after, loaded with my heavy personal effects, was more than an Anglo-Saxon att.i.tude towards the s.e.x could stand. I would none of them, to the surprise and dismay of the inn landlord, and to the no slight wonder of the women.

The discarding was not an easy piece of work. The fair ones were present at it, and I have no doubt misinterpreted the motive.

For women have a weakness for a touch of the slave-master in a man.

Beside, "h.e.l.l hath no fury like a woman scorned," though it be only in the capacity of a porter. There was nothing for it, however, but to let it go at that. For to have explained with more insistence would infallibly have deepened their suspicions of wounded vanity.

But it did seem hard to be obliged to feel a brute for refusing to be one.

The landlord, thanks to my importunities, managed after some further delay to secure a couple of l.u.s.ty lads, relatives, I suspect, of the discarded fair ones, and with them we eventually set out. We had not gone far, when I came to consider, unjustly, no doubt, that they journeyed too slow. I might have thought differently had I carried the chattels and they the purse. I shuddered to think what the situation would have been with women, for then even the poor solace of remonstrance would have been denied. As it was, I spent much breath in trying to hurry them, and it is pleasanter now than it was then to reflect how futilely. For I rated them roundly, while they accepted my verbal goadings with the trained stolidity of folk who were used to it.

When at last we approached the village of our destination, which bore the name of Himi, it was already dusk, and this with the long May twilight meant a late hour before we should be comfortably housed.

Indeed, I had been quartered in antic.i.p.ation for the last few miles, and was only awaiting arrival to enter into instant possession of my fancied estate. Not content even with pure insubstantiality, I had interviewed various people through Yejiro on the subject. First, the porters had been exhaustively catechized, and then what wayfarers we chanced to meet had been b.u.t.tonholed beside; with the result of much contradictory information. There seemed to be an inn which was, I will not say good, but the best, but no two informants could agree in calling it by name. One thought he remembered that the North Inn was the place to go to; another that he had heard the Wistaria House specially commended.

All doubts, however, were set at rest when we reached the town.

For without the slightest hesitation, every one of the houses in question refused to take us in. The unanimity was wonderful considering the lack of collusion. Yejiro and I made as many unsuccessful applications together as I could stand. Then I went and sat down on the sill of the first teahouse for a base of operations--I cannot say for my headquarters, because that is just what we could not get--and gave myself up to melancholy. Meanwhile Yejiro ransacked the town, from which excursions he returned every few minutes with a fresh refusal, but the same excuse. It got so at last I could antic.i.p.ate the excuse. The inn was full already--of a.s.sessors and their victims. The a.s.sessors had descended on the spot, it seemed, and the whole country-side had come to town to lie about the value of its land. I only wished the inhabitants might have chosen some other time for false swearing. For it was a sad tax on my credulity.

We did indeed get one offer which I duly went to inspect, but the outside of the house satisfied me. At last I adopted extreme measures. I sent Yejiro off to the police station. This move produced its effect.

Even at home, from having contrived to keep on the sunny side of the law and order, my feelings toward the police are friendly enough for all practical purposes; but in no land have I such an affectionate regard for the constabulary as in j.a.pan. Members of the force there, if the term be applicable to a set of students spectacled from over-study, whose strength is entirely moral, never get you into trouble, and usually get you out of it. One of their chief charms to the traveler lies in their open-sesame effect upon obdurate landlords. In this trick they are wonderfully successful.

Having given ourselves up to the police, therefore, we were already by way of being lodged, and that quickly. So indeed it proved.