The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 8

Hearn says:--

"I have had two years' experience in large j.a.panese schools; and I have never had personal knowledge of any serious quarrel between students....

A teacher is a teacher only: he stands to his pupils in the relation of an elder brother. He never tries to impose his will upon them ...

severity would scarcely be tolerated by the students.... Strangely pleasant is the first sensation of a j.a.panese cla.s.s, as you look over the ranges of young faces.... Those traits have nothing incisive, nothing forcible: compared with Occidental faces they seem but 'half-sketched,' so soft their outlines are.... Some have a childish freshness and frankness indescribable ... all are equally characterized by a singular placidity--expressing neither love nor hate nor anything save perfect repose and gentleness.... I find among the students a healthy tone of skepticism in regard to certain forms of popular belief.

Scientific education is rapidly destroying credulity in old superst.i.tions.... But the deeper religious sense remains with him; and the Monistic Idea in Buddhism is being strengthened ... by the new education.... Shinto the students all sincerely are ... what the higher Shinto signifies,--loyalty, filial piety, obedience to parents, and respect for ancestors.... The demeanour of a cla.s.s during study hours is if anything too faultless. Never a whisper is heard; never is a head raised from the book without permission.... My favourite students often visit me of afternoons.... Their conversation and thoughts are of the simplest and frankest.... Often they bring me gifts of flowers, and sometimes they bring books and pictures to show me--delightfully queer things,--family heirlooms. Never by any possible chance are they troublesome, impolite, curious, or even talkative.

Courtesy in its utmost possible exquisiteness seems as natural to the Izumo boy as the colour of his hair or the tint of his skin."

Of the teacher one of his pupils, Teizaburo Inomata, now a student at Yale College, says:--

"We liked him for his appearance and for his gentle manners. He seemed more pleasing in his looks than most foreigners do to the j.a.panese."

Masan.o.bu Otani, his favourite pupil in Matsue, says: "He was a very kind and industrious teacher, incomparable to the common foreigners engaged in the Middle Schools of those days. No wonder therefore that he won at once the admiration of all the teachers and students of the school." He sends a copy of one of his own compositions corrected and annotated by Hearn, and observes:--

"How he was kind and earnest in his teaching can well be seen by the above specimen. It seems that themes for our composition were such as he could infer our artless, genuine thoughts and feelings.... He attentively listened to our reading, corrected each misp.r.o.nunciation whenever we did.... We j.a.panese feel much pain to p.r.o.nounce 'l' and 'th.' He kindly and scrupulously taught the p.r.o.nunciation of these sounds. He was not tired to correct misp.r.o.nunciation.... He was always exact, but never severe."

Hearn's first residence in Matsue was at an inn in the quarter called Zaimoku-cho, "but," says his wife in the reminiscences which she set down to a.s.sist his biographer, "circ.u.mstances made him resolve to leave it very soon. The chief cause was as follows: The daughter of the innkeeper was suffering from a disease of the eyes. This aroused his sympathy (as did all such troubles in a special manner); he asked the landlord to send her to a hospital for treatment, but the landlord did not care much about her, and refused, to Hearn's great mortification.

'Unmerciful fellow! without a father's heart,' he said to himself, and removed to a house of his own on the sh.o.r.e of the lake."

This house was near the bridge Ohashi which crossed the largest of the three outlets from the lake to the bay, and commanded the beautiful scenery described in "The Chief City of the Province of the G.o.ds":--

"I slide open my little j.a.panese paper window to look out upon the morning over a soft green cloud of foliage rising from the river-bounded garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its farther side, glimmers the broad gla.s.sy mouth of the Ohashi-gawa, opening into the Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a dim grey frame of peaks.... But oh, the charm of the vision,--those first ghostly love-colours of a morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself!... Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake verge.... All the bases of the mountains are veiled by them ... so that the lake appears incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume--an exquisite chaos, ever changing aspect as the delicate fogs rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun's yellow rim comes into sight, fine thin lines of warmer tone--violets and opalines--shoot across the flood, tree-tops take tender fire.... Looking sunward, up the long Ohashi-gawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden bridge, one high-p.o.o.ped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw,--a dream of Orient seas, so idealized by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost that catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly semi-diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light."

Here, constantly absorbed when off duty in the study of the sights and sounds of the city,--the mult.i.tudinous soft clapping of hands that greeted the rising sun, the thin ringing of thousands of wooden _geta_ across the bridge, the fantastic craft of the water traffic, the trades of the street merchants, the plays and songs of the children,--he began to register his first impressions, to make his first studies for his first book. Of its two volumes he afterwards spoke slightingly as full of misconceptions and errors, but it at once, upon its appearance in print, attracted the serious consideration of literary critics, and is the work which, with "j.a.pan: an Interpretation," remains most popular with his j.a.panese friends. It records his many expeditions to the islands and ports of the three provinces included in the Ken of Shimane, and his study of the manners, customs, and religion of the people. Of special value was his visit to the famous temple at Kizuki, to whose shrine he was the first Westerner ever admitted. Lord Senke Takamori, priest of this temple, was a friend of the family of the lady who became Hearn's wife, and prince of a house which had pa.s.sed its office by direct male line through eighty-two generations; as old a house as that of the Mikado himself. From him Hearn received the unusual courtesy of having ordered for his special benefit a religious dance by the temple attendants.

It was while Lafcadio was living in the house by the Ohashi bridge that he married, in January, 1891, Setsu Koizumi, a lady of high samurai rank. The revolution in j.a.pan which overthrew the power of the Shoguns and restored the Mikado to temporal power had broken the whole feudal structure of j.a.panese society, and with the downfall of the daimyos, whose position was similar to that of the dukes of feudal England, fell the lesser n.o.bility, the samurai, or "two-sworded" men. Many of these sank into as great poverty as that which befel the _emigres_ after the French Revolution, and among those whose fortunes were entirely ruined were the Koizumis. Sentaro Nishida, who appears to have been a sort of head master of the Jinjo-chugakko, in special charge of the English department, was of one of the lesser samurai families, his mother having been an inmate of the Koizumi household before the decline of their fortunes. Because of his fluency in English, as well as because of what seems to have been a peculiar sweetness and dignity of character, he soon became the interpreter and special friend of the new English teacher. It was through his mediation that the marriage was arranged.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances a j.a.panese woman of rank would consider an alliance with a foreigner an inexpugnable disgrace; but the circ.u.mstances of the Koizumis were not ordinary, and whatever may have been the secret feelings of the girl of twenty-two, it is certain that she immediately became pa.s.sionately attached to her husband, and the marriage continued to the end to be a very happy one. It was celebrated by the local rites, as to have married according to English laws, under the then existing treaties, would have deprived her of her j.a.panese citizenship and obliged them to remove to one of the open ports; but the question of the legality of the marriage and of her future troubled Hearn from the beginning, and finally obliged him to renounce his English allegiance and become a subject of the Mikado in order that she and her children might never suffer from any complications or doubts as to their position. This could only be achieved by his adoption into his wife's family. He took their name, Koizumi, which signifies "Little Spring," and for personal t.i.tle chose the cla.s.sical term for Izumo province, Yak.u.mo, meaning "Eight Clouds"--or "the place of the issuing of clouds"--and also being the first word of the oldest known j.a.panese poem.

Mrs. Hearn says: "We afterwards removed to a samurai house where we could have a home of our own conveniently equipped with numbers of rooms,--our household consisting of us two, maids, and a small cat. Now about this cat: while we lived near the lake, when the spring was yet cold, as I was watching from the veranda the evening shadow falling upon the lake one day, I found a group of boys trying to drown a small cat near our house. I asked the boys and took it home. 'O pity! cruel boys!' Hearn said, and took that all-wet, shivering creature into his own bosom (underneath the cloth) and kindly warmed it. This strongly impressed me with his deep sincerity, which I ever after witnessed at various occasions. Such conduct would be very extreme, but he had such an intensity in his character." This cat seems to have been an important member of the household. Professor Otani in referring to it says: "It was a purely black cat. It was given the name of _Hinoko_ (a spark) by him, because of its glaring eyes like live coals. It became his pet. It was often held in his hat."

Later another pet was added to the establishment--an _uguisu_, sent to him by "the sweetest lady in j.a.pan, daughter of the Governor of Izumo, who, thinking the foreign teacher might feel lonesome during a brief illness, made him the gift of this dainty creature."

"You do not know what an _uguisu_ is?" he says. "An _uguisu_ is a holy little bird that professes Buddhism ... very brief indeed is my feathered Buddhist's confession of faith,--only the sacred name of the _sutras_ reiterated over and over again, like a litany--'_Ho-ke-kyo!_'--a single word only. But also it is written: 'He who shall joyfully accept but a single word from this _sutra_, incalculably greater shall be his merit than the merit of one who should supply all the beings in the four hundred thousand worlds with all the necessaries for happiness.' ... Always he makes a reverent little pause after uttering it. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds; then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name in a tone as of meditative wonder; then another pause; then another wild, rich, pa.s.sionate warble. Could you see him you would marvel how so powerful and penetrating a soprano could ripple from so minute a throat, yet his chant can be heard a whole _cho_ away ... a neutral-tinted mite almost lost in his box-cage darkened with paper screens, for he loves the gloom. Delicate he is, and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at precisely the same hour each day."

In this house, surrounded with beautiful gardens, and lying under the very shadow of the ruined Daimyo castle, Hearn and his wife pa.s.sed a very happy year. The rent was about four dollars a month; his salaries from the middle and normal schools, added to what he earned with his pen, made him for the first time in his life easy about money matters.

He was extremely popular with all cla.s.ses, from the governor to the barber; the charm and wonder of the life about him was still unstaled by usage, and he found himself at last able to achieve some of that beauty and force of style for which he had so long laboured. He even found pleasure in the fact that most of his friends were of no greater stature than himself. It seems to have been in every way the happiest portion of his life. Mrs. Hearn's notes concerning it are so delightful as to deserve literal reproduction.

"The governor of the prefecture at that time was Viscount Yasusada Koteda, an earnest advocate of preserving old, genuine j.a.panese essentials, a conservatist. He was very much skilful in fencing; was much respected by the people in general.

"Mr. Koteda was also very kind to Lafcadio.

"Thus all Izumo proved favourable to him. The place welcomed him and treated him as a member of its family, a guest, a good friend, and not as a stranger or a foreigner. To him all things were full of novel interest; and the hospitality and good-naturedness of the city-people were the great pleasure for him. Matsue was, as it were, a paradise for him; and he became enthusiastically fond of Matsue. The newspapers of the city often published his anecdotes for his praise. The students were very pleased that they had a good teacher. In the meantime, the wonderful thread of marriage happened to unite me with Lafcadio....

"When I first saw Lafcadio, his property was a very scanty one,--only a table, a chair, a few number of books, a suit of both foreign and j.a.panese cloth [clothes], etc.

"When he came home from school, he put on j.a.panese cloth and sat on cushion and smoked.

"By this time he began to be fond of living in all ways like j.a.panese.

He took j.a.panese food with chopsticks.

"In his Izumo days, he was pleased to be present on all banquets held by the teachers; he also invited some teachers very often and was very glad to listen to the popular songs.

"On the New Year's day of 1891, he went round for a formal call with j.a.panese _haori_ and _hakama_....

"But on those days I had to suffer from the inconvenience of conversation between us. We could not understand each other very well.

Nor was Hearn familiar with complicated j.a.panese customs. He was a man with a rare sensibility of feeling; also he had a peculiar taste. Having been teased by the hard world, and being still in the vigour of his life, he often seemed to be indignant with the world. (This turned in his later years into a melancholic temperament.) When we travelled through the province of Hoki, we had to rest for a while at a tea-house of some hot-spring, where many people were making merry. Hearn pulled my dress, saying: 'Stop to enter this house! No good to rest here. It is an h.e.l.l. Even a moment we should not stay here.' He was often offended in such a way. I was younger than now I am and unexperienced with the affairs of the world; and it was no easy task for me then to reconcile him with the occasions.

"We visited Kukedo, which is a cave on a rocky sh.o.r.e in the sea of j.a.pan. Hearn went out from the sh.o.r.e and swam for about two miles, showing great dexterity in various feats of swimming. Our boat entered the dark, hollow cave, and it was very fearful to hear the sounds of waves dashing against the wall. There are many fearful legends concerning this cave. To keep our boat from the evil-spirit, we had to continue tapping our boat with a stone. The deep water below was horribly blue. After hearing my story about the cave, Hearn began to put off his clothes. The sailor said that there would be a great danger if any one swam here, on account of the devil's curse. I dissuaded him from swimming. Hearn was very displeased and hardly spoke with me till the next day....

"In the summer of 1891 he visited Kizuki with Mr. Nishida. The next day he sent for me to come. When I arrived at his hotel I found the two had gone to sea for swimming, and Hearn's money, packed in his stocking, was left on the floor. He was very indifferent in regard to money until in later years he became anxious for the future of family, as he felt he would not live very long on account of his failing health....

"He was extremely fond of freedom, and hated mere forms and restraint.

As a middle school teacher and as a professor in the University he was always democratic and simple in his life. He ordered to make flock-coat when he became University professor, and it was after my eager advice.

He at first insisted that he would not appear on public ceremony where polite garments are required, according to the promise with Dr. Toyama, and it was after my eager entreaties that at last he consented to have flock-coat made for him. But it was only some four or five times that he put on that during his life. So whenever he puts on that, he felt the task of putting on very troublesome, and said: 'Please attend to-day's meeting instead of me. I do not like to wear this troublesome thing; daily cloth is sufficient, etc.' He disliked silk-hat. Some day I said in joke: 'You have written about j.a.pan very well. His Majesty the Emperor is calling you to praise. So please put on the flock-coat and silk-hat.' He answered: 'Therefore I will not attend the meeting; flock-coat and silk-hat are the thing I dislike.'

"Our conversation was through j.a.panese language. Hearn would not teach me English, saying: 'It is far lovelier for the j.a.panese women that they talk in j.a.panese. I am glad that you do not know English.'

"Some time (when at k.u.mamoto) I told him of various inconveniences on account of my ignorance of English. He said that if I were able to write my name in English it would be sufficient; and instead he wanted me to teach him j.a.panese alphabet. He made progress in this and were able to write letters in j.a.panese alphabet with a few Chinese characters intermixed.

"Our _mutual_ j.a.panese language made great progress on account of necessity. This special j.a.panese of mine proved much more intelligible to him than any skilful English of j.a.panese friend. Hearn was always delighted with my j.a.panese. By and by he was able to teach Kazuo in j.a.panese. He also taught j.a.panese stories to other children in j.a.panese.

"But on Matsue days we suffered in regard to conversations. Sometimes we had to refer to the dictionary. Being fond from my girlhood of old tales, I began from these Matsue days telling him long j.a.panese old stories, which were not easy for him to understand, but to which he listened with much interest and attention. He called our mutual j.a.panese language 'Hearn san Kotoba' (Hearn's language). So in later years when he met some difficult words he would say in joke to explain them in our familiar 'Hearn san Kotoba.'"

Unfortunately this idyllic interval was cut short by ill health. The cold Siberian winds that pa.s.s across Izumo in winter seriously affected his lungs, and the little _hibachi_, or box of burning charcoal, which was the only means in use of warming j.a.panese houses, could not protect sufficiently one who had lived so long in warm climates. Oddly too, cold always affected his eyesight injuriously, and very reluctantly, but under the urgent advice of his doctor, he sought employment in a warmer region and was transferred to the Dai Go Koto Gakko, the great Government College, at k.u.mamoto, situated near the southern end of the Inland Sea. In "Sayonara"--the last chapter of the "Glimpses"--there is a description of his parting:--

"The quaint old city has become so endeared to me that the thought of never seeing it again is one I do not venture to dwell upon.... These days of farewells have been full of charming surprises. To have the revelation of grat.i.tude where you had no right to expect more than plain satisfaction with your performance of duty; to find affection where you supposed only good will to exist: these are a.s.suredly delicious experiences.... I cannot but ask myself the question: Could I have lived in the exercise of the same profession for the same length of time in any other country, and have enjoyed a similar unbroken experience of human goodness? From each and all I have received only kindness and courtesy. Not one has addressed to me a single ungenerous word. As a teacher of more than five hundred boys and men I have never even had my patience tried."

There were presents from the teachers, of splendid old porcelains, of an ancient and valuable sword from the students, of mementos from every one. A banquet was given, addresses made, the Government officials and hundreds of friends came to bid him good-bye at the docks, and thus closed the most beautiful episode of his life.

Matsue was old j.a.pan. k.u.mamoto represented the far less pleasing j.a.pan in the stage of transition. Here Hearn remained for three years, and at the expiration of his engagement abandoned the Government service and returned to journalism for a while. Living was far more expensive, the official and social atmosphere of k.u.mamoto was repugnant to him, and he fell back into the old solitary, retiring habits of earlier days--finding his friends among children and folk of the humbler cla.s.ses, excepting only the old teacher of Chinese, whose name signified "Moon-of-Autumn," and to whom he makes reference in several of his letters. In "Out of the East"--the book written in k.u.mamoto--he says of this friend: "He was once a samurai of high rank belonging to the great clan of Aizu. He had been a leader of armies, a negotiator between princes, a statesman, a ruler of provinces--all that any knight could be in the feudal era. But in the intervals of military or political duty he seems always to have been a teacher. Yet to see him now you would scarcely believe how much he was once feared--though loved--by the turbulent swordsmen under his rule. Perhaps there is no gentleness so full of charm as that of the man of war noted for sternness in his youth."

Of his childish friends he relates a pretty story. They came upon one occasion to ask for a contribution of money to help in celebrating the festival of Jizo, whose shrine was opposite his house.

"I was glad to contribute to the fund, for I love the gentle G.o.d of children. Early the next morning I saw that a new bib had been put about Jizo's neck, a Buddhist repast set before him.... After dark I went out into a great glory of lantern-fires to see the children dance; and I found, perched before my gate, an enormous dragonfly more than three feet long. It was a token of the children's grat.i.tude for the help I had given them. I was startled for a moment by the realism of the thing, but upon close examination I discovered that the body was a pine branch wrapped with coloured paper, the four wings were four fire-shovels, and the gleaming head was a little teapot. The whole was lighted by a candle so placed as to make extraordinary shadows, which formed part of the design. It was a wonderful instance of art-sense working without a speck of artistic material, yet it was all the labour of a poor little child only eight years old!"

It was in k.u.mamoto that Hearn first began to perceive the fierceness and sternness of the j.a.panese character. "With Kyushu Students" and "Jiu-jutsu" contain some surprising foreshadowings of the then unsuspected future. Such characteristics, however he might respect or understand them, were always antipathetic to his nature, and his relations with the members of the school were for the most part formal.

He mentions that the students rarely called upon him, and that he saw his fellow teachers only in school hours. Between cla.s.ses he usually walked under the trees, smoking, or betook himself to an abandoned cemetery on the ridge of the hill behind the college, where an ancient stone Buddha sat upon a lotus--"his meditative gaze slanting down between half-closed eyelids"--and where he wrought out the chapter in "Out of the East" which is called "The Stone Buddha." It became a favourite resort. Mrs. Hearn says: "When at k.u.mamoto we two often went out for a walk in the night-time. On the first walk at k.u.mamoto I was led to a graveyard, for on the previous day he said: 'I have found a pleasant place. Let us go there to-morrow night.' Through a dark path I was led on, until we came up a hill, where were many tombs. Dreary place it was! He said: 'Listen and hear the voices of frogs.'"

He was still in k.u.mamoto when j.a.pan went to war with China, and his record of the emotion of the people is full of interest. The war spirit manifested itself in ways not less painful than extraordinary. Many killed themselves on being refused the chance of military service.

It was here in the previous year, November 17, 1893, that his first child was born, and was named Kazuo, which signifies "the first of the excellent, best of the peerless." The event caused him the profoundest emotion. Indeed, it seemed to work a great change in all his views of life, as perhaps it does in most parents, reconciling them to much against which they may have previously rebelled. Writing to me a few weeks after this event he declared with artless conviction that the boy was "strangely beautiful," and though three other children came in later years, Kazuo always remained his special interest and concern. Up to the time of his death he never allowed his eldest son to be taught by any one but himself, and his most painful preoccupation when his health began to decline was with the future of this child, who appeared to have inherited both his father's looks and disposition.

The constant change in the personnel of the teaching force of the college, and many annoyances to which he was subjected, caused his decision at the end of the three years' term to remove to Kobe and enter the service of the Kobe _Chronicle_. Explaining to Amenomori he says:--

"By the way, I am hoping to leave the Gov't service, and begin journalism at Kobe. I am not sure of success; but Gov't service is uncertain to the degree of terror,--a sword of Damocles; and Gov't doesn't employ men like you as teachers. If it did, and would give them what they should have, the position of a foreign teacher would be pleasant enough. He would be among thinkers, and find some kindliness,--instead of being made to feel that he is only the servant of petty political clerks. And I have been so isolated, that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be among Englishmen again--with all their prejudices and conventions."

Kobe was at that time, 1895, an open port, that is to say, one of the places in which foreigners were allowed to reside without special government permission, and under the extra-territorial rule of their own consuls. Of Hearn's external life here there seems to be but scant record. He worked as one of the staff of the _Chronicle_,--his editorials frequently bringing upon him the wrath of the missionaries,--he contributed some letters to the McClure Syndicate, and there was much talk of a projected expedition, in search of material for such work, to the Philippines or the Loo Choo Islands; a project never realized. The journalistic work seriously affected his eyes, and his health seems to have been poor at times. He made few acquaintances and had almost no companions outside of his own household, where in 1896 another son was born.