The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 5

The pipe, I regret to say, is in vulgar circles used as a domestic rod.

The wife or child who is very naughty may receive a severe blow with the _kiseru_, or even many. However, it is not so bad as the instruments of punishment in vogue elsewhere.

I am not sure if I have been able to say anything worth your while to read about the pipe, but I think the j.a.panese pipe is really worth more consideration than is usually given it.

NOTE. Women's pipes have a special, delicate form--and are made very small and dainty--also their _tabako-ire_.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

YURA, August, 1891.

DEAR PROFESSOR CHAMBERLAIN,--If you are not frightfully busy, which I suppose n.o.body is at this time of the year, perhaps some of my adventures will interest you.

I found that the Bon-odori is different, not only in every village, but even in every commune. So I was very anxious to see all the varieties of this curious dance that I could. I heard that at Otsuka, near Yabase, there was a very remarkable kind of dance danced; and I went, in j.a.panese costume, with a dozen citizens of Yabase, to see it. It turned out to be not worth seeing at all: the people had no more knowledge of dancing--or rather, much less, than Sioux or Comanches.

Otsuka is a stony, large, primitive-looking village,--full of rude energy and, I am sorry to say, of bad manners,--a terrible thing to say about any j.a.panese town. But I have been in about 50 j.a.panese villages, where I loved all the people, and always made a few of them love me, and Otsuka is the first exception I found to the general rule about the relation between foreigners and _hyakusho-no-jin_. At Otsuka the people left their dance to pelt the foreigner with little pellets of sand and mud,--crying out: "Bikki!--bikki!" What that means I do not know. So both I and the whole of the Yabase people turned back.

The pelting was not very savage--it was just like the work of naughty children: a foreign mob would have thrown stones, which these folk were very careful not to do--in spite of the fact that there were no police.

I pa.s.sed through this village twice since, and found the att.i.tude of its people peculiarly rough--bordering upon hostility. Compared with the roughness of--say a Barbadoes mob--it was a very gentle thing, but it gave me the first decidedly unpleasant sense of being an alien that I have ever had in j.a.pan.

I have just returned from Togo-ike,--a place described in your Guide.

Frankly, I detest Togo-ike. But it is extremely popular with travelling j.a.panese--especially the _shobai_. Imagine a valley of rice-fields, ringed in by low jagged wooded hills, with a lakelet in the middle of it about a mile and a quarter long (at most) by half a mile broad, and hotels built out into the water. The coldest place I have yet been in j.a.pan. The hotels are supplied with hot water from the volcanic springs through bamboo pipes, but the baths do not compare with those of the much humbler Izumo resort--Tama-tsukuri. The cold air to me was penetrating, sickly, but this may be idiosyncrasy. To one who has lived in the tropics the chill of rice-fields means fever and death; and some of my old tropical fears came up. Then the hotel has only _mishido_, no _karakami_,--so that one is never alone. One hour of Yabase is worth a season at Togo-ike--free of expense--to one who loves quiet and simple ways. So I shall spend a couple more days there before going to Mionoseki.

I have given up Oki, until winter. The health and strength I get from seawater bathing have made me delay too long. But I will get to Oki later.

Ever yours, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO SENTARO NISHIDA

YABASE, August, 1891.

DEAR MR. NISHIDA,--I have had a pleasant time in different little drowsy sea-villages,--sleeping, eating, drinking sake, and bathing. Yabase is about the most pleasant place I ever stopped at here.

But, alas!--_I saw no Bon-odori_ at all at Shimo-ichi. I seemed to have gone too soon;--at Yabase, there is no Bon-odori; and at Otsuka, where I next travelled, on foot, to see the Bon-odori, I had an adventure of a peculiar kind.

Otsuka seems to be a rough sort of place. Its folk are big hustling noisy countrymen; and when they are full of sake inclined to be mischievous. They stopped dancing to see the foreigner. The foreigner took refuge from the pressure of the crowd in a house, where he sat upon the floor, and smoked. The crowd came into the house and round the house, and uttered curious observations and threw sand and water at the foreigner. Therefore the people of Yabase, who had accompanied the foreigner to Otsuka, arose and made vigorous protests; and we all returned to Yabase together. At Yabase, the police and some of the princ.i.p.al people more than made up to me for the rudeness of the Otsuka folk,--they apologized for the Otsuka folk until I was really ashamed of being so kindly looked after; and I was entertained very generously; and the police told me that anything in the world I wished their advice or help about, only to send them word. (The hostility of the Otsuka folk was really a very childish sort of thing, not worth making a fuss about;--a Western crowd would have thrown stones or rotten eggs. Indeed I am not sure whether the crowd was really hostile at all. I rather think that they wanted to see the foreigner move,--so they tried to make him stir about,--like a _kedamono_ in a cage.)

To-morrow I return to Matsue, by way of Mionoseki;--I really regret leaving Yabase: the people are the kindest, most honest, straightforward folk imaginable. And I have made several friends;--at the temple of Nichiren here, I got some beautiful _o fuda_.

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

MATSUE, August, 1891.

DEAR PROFESSOR CHAMBERLAIN,--Having reached a spot where I can write upon something better than a matted floor, I find three most pleasant letters from you. The whole of the questions in them I cannot answer to-night, but will do so presently, when I obtain the full information.

However, as to cats' tails I can answer at once. Izumo cats--(and I was under the impression until recently that all j.a.panese cats were alike)--are generally born with long tails. But there is a belief that any cat whose tail is not cut off in kittenhood, will become an _obake_ or a _nekomata_, and there are weird stories about cats with long tails dancing at night, with towels tied round their heads. There are stories about petted cats eating their mistress and then a.s.suming the form, features, and voice of the victim. Of course you know the Buddhist tradition that no cat can enter paradise. The cat and the snake alone wept not for the death of Buddha. Cats are unpopular in Izumo, but in Hoki I saw that they seemed to exist under more favourable conditions. The real reason for the unpopularity of the cat is its powers of mischief in a j.a.panese house;--it tears the _tatami_, the _karakami_, the _shoji_, scratches the woodwork, and insists upon carrying its food into the best room to eat it upon the floor. I am a great lover of cats, having "raised," as the Americans say, more than fifty;--but I could not gratify my desire to have a cat here. The creature proved too mischievous, and wanted always to eat my uguisu.

The oscillation of one's thoughts concerning the j.a.panese--the swaying you describe--is and has for some time been mine also.

There are times when they seem so small! And then again, although they never seem large, there is a vastness behind them,--a past of indefinite complexity and marvel,--an amazing power of absorbing and a.s.similating,--which forces one to suspect some power in the race so different from our own that one cannot understand that power. And as you say, whatever doubts or vexations one has in j.a.pan, it is only necessary to ask one's self:--"Well, who are the best people to live with?" For it is a question whether the intellectual pleasures of social life abroad are not more than dearly bought at the cost of social pettinesses which do not seem to exist in j.a.pan at all.

Would you be horrified to learn that I have become pa.s.sionately fond of _daikon_,--not the fresh but the strong ancient pickled _daikon_?

But then the European Stilton cheese, or Limburger, is surely quite as queer. I have become what they call here a _jogo_,--and find that a love of sake creates a total change in all one's eating habits and tastes. All the sweet things the _geko_ likes, I cannot bear when taking sake. By the way, what a huge world of etiquette, art, taste, custom, has been developed by sake. An article upon sake,--its social rules,--its vessels,--its physiological effects,--in short the whole romance and charm of a j.a.panese banquet, ought to be written by somebody. I hope to write one some day, but I am still learning.

As to Dr. Tylor and the anthropological inst.i.tute. If he should want any paper that I could furnish, I would be glad and consider myself honoured to please him. As for your question about the _o fuda_, why, I should think it no small pleasure to be mentioned merely as one of your workers and friends. Though the little I have been able to send does not seem to me to deserve your kindest words, it is making me very happy to have been able to please you at all. Whatever I can write or send, make always any use of you please.

About "seeing j.a.pan from a distance,"--I envy you your coming chance.

I could not finish my book on the West Indies until I saw the magical island again through regret, as through a summer haze,--and under circ.u.mstances which left me perfectly free to think, which the soporific air of the tropics makes difficult. (Still the book is not what it ought to be, for I was refused all reasonable help, and wrote most of it upon a half-empty stomach, or with my blood full of fever.) But to think of j.a.pan in an English atmosphere will be a delicious experience for you after so long an absence. I should not be surprised should the experience result in the creation of something which would please your own feelings as an author better than any other work you have made. Of course it is at the time one is best pleased that one does one's real best in the artistic line.

By the way, since you like those Shinto prints,--and I might get you others,--what about a possible edition of your "Kojiki" ill.u.s.trated by j.a.panese conceptions of this kind, colours and all? Such work can be so cheaply done in j.a.pan! And an index! How often I wished for an index. I have made an imperfect one of my own. It is believed here that Hahaki is the ancient name of the modern Hoki. I was told this when I wanted to go to the legendary burial-place of Izanami.

As usual, I find I have been too presumptuous in writing offhand about cats' tails. On enquiring, I learn that there are often, born of the same mother, Izumo kittens with short tails, and kittens with long tails. This would show that two distinct species of cats exist here. The long-tailed kittens are always deprived when possible of the larger part of their caudal appendage. The short tails are spared. If an old cat be seen with a short tail, people say,--"this cat is old, but she has a short tail: therefore she is a good cat." (For the _obake_ cat gets two tails when old, and every wicked cat has a long tail.) I am told that at the recent _bon_, in Matsue, cats of the evil sort were seen to dance upon the roofs of the houses.

What you tell me about those Shinto rituals and their suspicious origin seems to me quite certainly true. So the _kara-shishi_ and the _mon_ and the dragon-carvings and the _toros_,--all stare me in the face as pillage of Buddhism. But the funeral rite which I saw and took part in, on the anniversary of the death of Prince Sanjo, struck me as immemorially primitive. The weird simplicity of it--the banquet to the ghost, the covering of the faces with white paper, the moaning song, the barbarian music, all seemed to me traditions and echoes of the very childhood of the race. I shall try to discover the genesis of the book you speak of as dubious in character. The Shinto christening ceremony is strictly observed here, and there are curious facts about the funeral ceremonies--totally at variance with and hostile to Buddhism.

By the way, when I visited a _tera_ in Mionoseki after having bought _o fuda_ at the Miojinja, I was told I must not carry the _o fuda_ into the court of the _tera_. The Kami would be displeased.

For the moment, good-bye.

Ever faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

MATSUE, 1891.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... My household relations have turned out to be extremely happy, and to bind me very fast here at the very time that I was beginning to feel like going away. It does not now seem possible for me ever to go away. To take the little woman to another country would be to make her extremely unhappy; for no kindness or comfort could compensate for the loss of her own social atmosphere--in which all thoughts and feelings are so totally different from our own.

I find literary work extremely difficult here. The mental air about one has a totally disintegrating effect upon Western habits of thinking;--no strong emotion, no thrills or inspirations ever come to me, so I am still in doubt how to work. Whether I shall ever be able to make a really good book on j.a.pan is still a question; but if I do, it will require years of steady dry work, without one real flash in it. The least fact in this Oriental life is so different from ours, and so complex in its relationship to other facts, that to explain it requires enormous time and patience.

I was made a little homesick by your letter about New Orleans, mentioning so many familiar names. It brought back many pleasant memories.

Ah! you are in a dangerous world now. You will meet some charming, unsophisticated Southern girl, so much nicer than most Northern girls, that the South may fascinate you too much.

My correspondents have all dropped off except you. Sometimes a letter wanders to me--six months old--announcing my nomination as vice-president of some small literary society; but the outer world is slowly and surely pa.s.sing away. At the same time the harder side of j.a.panese character is beginning to appear--in spots. The women are certainly the sweetest beings I have ever seen, as a general rule: all the good things of the race have been put into them. They are just loving, joyous, simple-hearted children with infinite surprises of pretty ways. About the men,--one never gets very close to them. One's best friends have a certain far-offness about them, even when breaking their necks to please you. There is no such thing as clapping a man on the back and saying, "h.e.l.lo! old boy!" There is no such thing as clapping a fellow on the knee, or chucking a fellow under the ribs.

All such familiarities are terribly vulgar in j.a.pan. So each one has to tickle his own soul and clap it on the back, and say "h.e.l.lo" to it.

And the soul, being Western, says: "Do you expect me always to stay in this extraordinary country? I want to go home, or get back to the West Indies, at least. Hurry up and save some money." As it is, I have two hundred dollars saved up, even after dressing my little wife like a queen.

And now I am about to journey to outrageous places, among very strange G.o.ds. Good-bye for a while.

Ever most affectionately, LAFCADIO HEARN.