Part 18

The _O hachi_ was quite empty, O Matsu had eaten the last grain yesterday; she knew that quite well, but the trembling old fingers went on feeling round and round the bare sides of the saucepan, for she was very hungry. All through the long months of the rice famine O Matsu had managed somehow. To-day the empty _O hachi_ lay on the ground while O Matsu sat staring slowly into it. Then Death stared back at her, and she knew it.

With a trembling little movement she got on to her feet and moved across the matted floor into the _zashki_. The sun was shining on the rice-paper panes of the _shōji_, and she pushed them back and stood out on the little platform of polished wood, trying to warm herself; but the piercing winter wind made her blackened teeth chatter, and she came in again. In the _hibachi_ the grey ashes were dead and cold, the last stick of charcoal had boiled the water for her tea last night. There was neither fire nor food. O Matsu stood still watching, while Death and his Shadow grew, as a ghost in the twilight.

Slowly the familiar walls, the matted floor, the half-opened _shōji_ insisted that the house was yet unswept, the first duty of a housewife still undone; and with a painful effort O Matsu went and fetched the bamboo broom that swept the matting, and the damp cloth to polish the platform. The broom felt heavy to the weak old hands, and the task of polishing the platform almost beyond her strength; so she worked on slowly, stopping often, for hunger made her faint, but always going on again. At last, _zashki_ and platform finished, she crept back into the kitchen, longing to rest. The empty _O hachi_ lay on the floor. She made a great effort, and, picking it up, carried it outside to scrub, for cleanliness is a supreme duty in Japan.

When she came back she put the freshly scrubbed _O hachi_ in its place. Then she sat down. There was nothing more to do. The house was as clean as a house could be. O Matsu was inexpressibly weary, and the desire for food was almost beyond control. Instinctively she wandered back to the empty _O hachi_ and took off the lid. The copper bands, dim and splashed with the washing, caught her eye. It seemed to her the hardest thing of all her life to go and fetch her little cloth and sit down to polish them, but she did it. And Death and his Shadow sat down at her side.

Somehow as she rubbed, two tears gathered in the dim old eyes, and rolled down the withered cheeks. O Matsu dropped the cloth, and holding the long sleeve of her _kimono_ before her face, sat still and wept.

There is nothing in all the world so lonely as a Japanese woman without husband or children. She has no claim on her own family, and little on her husband’s; and in a land where the children, once grown up, provide for their parents, what can a childless widowed old woman do?

* * * * *

The sun moved round the house, and O Matsu still sat in her kitchen rubbing softly at the copper bands of the saucepan. And death, in infinite pity, laid his hand upon her head, and his Shadow vanished.

“_O meshi wa skoshi mo arimasen_,” she said. And the shaven old eyebrows puckered themselves together. “_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the bent little figure went on rubbing.

When the policeman came in the grey dawn of the morning, surprised that the _amado_ were not drawn, he found O Matsu, the polished copper bands of the _O hachi_ glittering in her lap--quite dead.

VII

KYOTO’S SOIRÉE

Midnight and yet as hot as mid-day. Over our heads the velvet darkness lay as a visible lid above the streets, warm and still. Not a breath of air was stirring from one end of Kyoto to the other; the city seemed a vast dark house with all its windows shut. Only the rapid running of the _kurumaya_ produced the slightest breeze, and that was but the fanning of a heated ballroom; and when it stopped the hot still air settled down hotter, stiller, than before.

We had reached the bank of the river, the bridge and Theatre Street lay beyond; and, as suddenly as one opens a door in a dark passage, we were there, inside, in the press and the noise, the lights and the crowd of Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_.

Restaurants and hairpin stalls, _geisha_ booths and theatres, the interesting show of the two-headed fish, or the tragic story of the _Forty-seven Rōnin_, embroideries, and _bīru_, jugglers and phonographs, cheap stalls for the sale of shaved ice and sugar syrup, elegant restaurants with fish dinners; dancing-booths at two _sen_ a head, where white-painted _geisha_ girls continually sang four notes and assumed four postures, and sang the same four notes and repeated the same four postures to a tightly packed audience sitting on its heels, silent but appreciative; and all, restaurants, booths, theatres, stalls, blazed with lights and posters, deafened with the banging of big drums and the invitations of the proprietors, reeked with the smell of burning tallow, the fragrance of boiling tea, the scent of crushed geranium, the odour of an eastern summer’s night and of the press of clean-washed, hot humanity.

Along the street, inside the stalls and out, the crowd was dense, cheerful, polite and contented. There was no pushing, no ill-humour, no fights, no drunkenness, nor one policeman. The people of Kyoto were enjoying themselves like well-bred guests in a ballroom, with the courtesy of self-control, and the self-abandoned pleasure of a child. The road with its shifting crowd, and the two long lines of brightly lighted buildings, covered with paper lanterns and cotton banners on bamboo poles, looked more like a “set” in a theatre than real houses in an out-of-doors street. Not a candle-flame quivered, not a banner stirred, and the long perspective of the arched bridge was still as a painted background.

Down in the river, in the actual bed of the stream, were more lights, whole crowded restaurants afloat. Sitting on the tops of tables, whose four legs driven down into the sand brought them within six inches of the water, supper parties innumerable ate and talked; while the children, slipping off their _gheta_, paddled their feet in the stream. Even the little waitresses, as they ran from customer to customer, would leave the long polished gangways that led from tea-house to table, and take the shorter way through the water. Every one was eating, and every one was happy--shaved ice with sugar syrup, at two _sen_ a glass, or dishes of brown eels and rice at two _yen_, gratuitous tea or _bīru_ in thirty-_sen_ bottles. And with the summer night above, the water all around, the hundreds and hundreds of little tables floated on the water bright with _kimono_ and lanterns. The broad shallow backwater either side the bridge was full of them, and the gentle rushing of the actual river beyond the circle of bright light lent a sense of freshness to the shadows that they did not in themselves possess.

Up on the bridge the crowd grew thicker, Theatre Street more full; the hairpin stalls were surrounded with women and little girls, buying long hairpins carved at the end, or ornamented with silk lanterns or flowers, or ingenious designs of tortoises made of shells, with legs that quivered realistically. And the velvet blackness lying above the streets and beyond the river was warm to feel.

Suddenly, as when one throws a stone into the water, the crowd surged forwards, then rippled slowly back; half a dozen white-uniformed policemen, with the distinctive, distinguished face of the _samurai_, were coming over the bridge, driving the people before them, back and back. The confused noise of indistinct shouting filled the air. Suddenly on to the bridge came running in a sort of jog-trot a crowd of bareheaded men, their short white tunics hardly reaching to the thigh and their brown legs naked beneath, all tugging and straining at a huge unwieldy car, which moved in jerks on its wheels of solid wood. On each side ran bands of men brandishing flaming torches in their hands, while priests in gorgeous apparel came behind. And priests and people, torch-bearers and car-pullers, were chanting as they ran, a fierce, wild cry, which went on and on. The car-pullers swayed from side to side, tossing their hands above their heads, the torch-bearers rocked, sending great flaming fragments among the crowd, and we all stood pressed together, shrinking back from the burning torches, and the feet of the car-pullers, singed here, trampled there, in one sweating mass of hot humanity.

In the middle of the bridge the car stood still. The men in white tunics moved restlessly on their feet, straining at the cords; the torch-bearers chanted louder, tossing their torches in the air; the priests hurried to the front, and stood gesticulating while the wild, monotonous cry, gathering fierceness and frenzy from its very monotony, thundered and roared. Then with a sudden swirl the car turned round, and torch-bearers, car-pullers and priests were rushing back again to the same fierce wild cry, the same frenzied swaying of the bodies, and the same mad tossing of the arms. The sacred procession had come, was gone.

Slowly the crowd rippled back, on over the bridge, back down the street, the policemen disappeared, the drums of the _geisha_ booths and the invitations of the stall-owners rang out again. Down on the surface of the river the floating tables grew fuller and fuller.

Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_ was at its height.

VIII

NŌ

A room whose sloping floor is cut into chess-board squares; each square flat and matted, so that the back is twelve inches high and level with the front of the square above; a bare still wooden room long and crowded. Each matted square thick with kneeling men and women, the long-headed aquiline faces of the nobles and the _samurai_. At the end a platform with an opening vaguely leading from it. No scenery, no footlights, no curtain. It is the theatre for the performance of the _Nō_. Those sacred old world plays written many hundred years ago, acted by _samurai_ for _samurai_, the religious mysteries and moralities of Japan.

In the West the theatre long ago shook off, escaped, forgot the Church. Here the elder child, the mother rather, still lives by the side of her offspring, and lives unchanged. The _Nō_ to-day is as the _Nō_ of five hundred years ago, the _Nō_ which grew out of the sacred dances of an immemorable antiquity. Like the drama of the Greeks it has its choruses, its chants, its unities, its one or two actors masked, richly dressed, impressive, who move with a religious solemnity, and speak as voices, not as men. Its plays, too, are drawn from sacred legend, from the mythology of Shintō deities, from the mysteries of the Buddhist faith, and from the fairy tales of the race. Over it all there is a glamour as of a stolen glimpse into the buried past. To-day its language is archaic, but preserved by constant repetition, handed down from father to son in the families of nobles who, since _Nō_ first began, have played in _Nō_, it remains the language and the speech of those dead Japanese, who towards the fourteenth century organised the _Nō_.

The chant is strange and piercing, its very notes and phrases are outside of all that we consider music, as unfamiliar as the speech of insects, or the song of the remotest fathers of mankind. It echoes like a voice from out the long dead worlds, piercing yet remote, and the _tink_ of pipes dies out. There falls a stillness in the room.

It is the afternoon of the last day of the Iidamachi _Nō_. As in the theatres of Greece the plays, each of which lasts about two hours, are given one after another throughout the whole day, while between them comes the _Kiogen_ (mad words), or _folies dramatiques_, farce-like, Greek-like comedies, shorter even than the _Nō_. Many of the spectators have been here since the morning, and on the matting of the shallow square boxes are lacquered trays of food, on all teapots and tobacco-stands; others come to see a special play or so and go away again; but to one and all it is not an amusement, it is a study, a homage paid to the past, a rite.

As the first notes of the strange piercing chant wail down the room, the pipes and cigarettes go out, the tiny tea-bowls are set down, and a silence falls.

The actors, in their rich brocaded robes of a make and texture of a long dead past, come slowly through the passage-way on to the platform. Their masks are made of lacquer, and they speak in a slow nasal deep voice that seems to come from the very back of their throats. They speak with every muscle strained and taut. It sounds almost as outside of speech as the chant is outside of music, and they move in strange long strides. Such movements are not merely for artistic effect, nor to mark agitation, or to reproduce nature; they are often used to mark the passing of a period of time.

For all its stiffness and its rigour, its archaic make-believes, its unnatural realities, there is an intensity and a thrill in it as of a living thing that matters. The strange music of the tambourine-like instruments, the thin wailing of the bamboo flute, the beating of the one small drum, shaped like an hour-glass with three supporting pillars, breaks in again and again upon the intoned speech of the actors with its repeated irregular cadences in notes outside of speech. And the long-robed figures, masked and rigid, stalk slowly across the stage; and the chant of the chorus, as in the plays of Greece, explains, comments, describes the action.

It is the story of the fisherman who found an angel’s robe of feathers on a tree, and would not give it back though the angel begged and begged. Without it she cannot reach her home in the blue of the heavens above, and for a heavenly spirit to stay for long on earth means death. Already the chorus is chanting her dirge when the fisherman, seeing her beauty fading and her life ebbing fast, relents. He will give back the robe if she will dance for him. She promises, but implores first her robe that the dance may be more perfect. The fisherman fears she will deceive him and fly back to heaven at once. But the spirit turns upon him.

“Fie on thee, fisherman,” she cries, “deception was born of man; the high heavens know not of it.”

And, touched, he gives back the robe. She dances, while the chorus sings the beauties of the landscape, of Japan. How

“Heaven has its joys, but there is beauty here,

Here

Where the moon in bright unclouded glory Shines on Kigomi’s lea. And where on Fujiyama’s summit hoary The snows look on the sea.”

Even the angel would stay awhile in a land so beautiful.

“Blow, blow ye winds that the white cloud-belt driven Around my path may bar my homeward way, Not yet would I return to Heaven.”

And still the angel dances, and the vision of Heaven descends upon earth. She sings,

“And from the cloudy spheres, Chiming in unison the angels’ lutes, Tabrets and cymbals, and sweet silv’ry flutes Ring through the heav’n that glows with purple hues.”

Then the voices fall away. And to the strange, tuneless music, whose notes are not our notes, the spirit dances on, round and round in gliding circles, with the slow, smooth movements of the sacred _Kagura_.

“Fragrant and fair--too fair for mortal eyes.”

The chorus sings again. And gliding round and round in circles ever smoother, ever slower, the spirit passes from the platform and up the vague passage-way that leads to the green-room beyond.

The fisherman starts. The play is ended. In long, stiff strides, so slow, so slow, that an appreciable space of time seems set around the movement of each muscle, the actor goes across the stage, up the vague passage-way, into the room beyond.

It is five minutes before the last slow solemn stride takes him beyond our sight. Then hour-glass drum, the flute, the two tambourine-like instruments that wail, shake out their last weird tuneless tune. The chant of the chorus ends on a note that to us is a middle--and stops.

My ears still wait the end of the phrase when the hush of intense silence dissolves. There is a rustle in each square shallow box, a lighting of tiny bronze pipes and cigarettes, a filling of tea-cups, a tapping of chopsticks.

The _Nō_ is over.

NOTE.--In quoting from this _Nō_, “The Robe of Feathers,” I have followed Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s translation in “The Classical Poetry of the Japanese.”

IX

A JAPANESE BANK-HOLIDAY

The bulletins grew longer, and all the world waited and watched.

The Japanese papers were full of minute descriptions and hopeful prognostications. The cherry-trees were doing well; they were expected to bloom next week.

Then came a cold wind and rain; “for flowers,” as the proverb says, “bring showers.” And the bulletins became paragraphs.

But the sky grew blue again, and even the foreign papers broke through their Western disdain, and announced that “Marquis Itō had gone to Kyoto to see the cherry-trees.” Imagine the _Times_ gravely recording amongst its official intelligence that “Mr. Balfour had gone to Devonshire (not a third of the journey) to see the apple-blossoms”! But the Japanese are, of course, uncivilised!

On Easter Monday the trees were out, and all the world with them. The two long miles of river-bank at Mukojima were crowded. The river itself was thick with _sampan_. And still all Tokyo pours itself out over the bridges, across the canals, out under the long double line of cherry-trees.

The chrysanthemum may well be the Imperial crest; the cherry-tree is the national emblem, and its flowering a national _fête_--a Japanese Bank Holiday, with Mukojima for its Hampstead Heath.

The two long miles of raised bank is a sea of heads, a second black river set between pale pink banks; and it washes slowly, undisturbedly onwards. Nobody pushes, nobody shouts, nobody calls rude remarks. And the blue-tuniced coolies, like Florentine noblemen out at elbows, with the work-a-day blue towel round their heads replaced by a pink one, the very shade of the cherry-blossoms above, say polite “_Go men nasai_” (“I beg your honourable pardon”) if in looking upwards they stumble against each other.

The _kurumaya_ has drawn his wife and children to Mukojima, and they wander slowly under the trees, the little ones in their gay-coloured _kimono_, covered with the largest of large flowers. Even the little tonsured babies blink up at the pink wonder overhead from the warm pouch on their mother’s backs. And the old grandmothers, with their cropped grey heads and shaven eyebrows, tell how the cherry-trees were much finer when they were young. The little girls, with their hair oiled into lengths of black ribbons and tied in loops on the top of their heads; the young wife, with the wonderful whorls of the married woman’s coiffure; the bare-legged, blue-knickerbockered _’ricksha_ man; the schoolboys, with their striped cotton _hakama_; the fathers, in their grey _kimono_--all the working world, all the people are here.

Below the level of the bank, raised high here, for the Sumidagawa, like all the rivers of Japan, is fierce in its floods, and set thick together, are the _chaya_. These range from the humblest little roofed shed, with its broad, low tables, like a series of large trays on dwarf legs, covered with coarse red blankets, to the superb tea-houses with their snow-white matted rooms, their painted _shōji_. And they are all full. The _kurumaya_ drinks his bowl of pale green tea, sitting on his heels on the red blanket. The little wife tries the immensely popular drink of _ramuné_ (lemonade) out of a doll’s tumbler. The coolie, with his festive pink towel, pours warm _saké_ from slim china vases into tiny china bowls, and the smile on his broad, bullet-headed face grows broader. For the _saké_ drinker, unlike Western drunkards, only becomes politer and politer, until the Japanese smile of courtesy broadens into a large, fixed, unending, amiable grin, and the _saké_ drunkard goes politely, though stumblingly, home to sleep. But of even _saké_ drunkenness there is little, for the most part _o cha_ (honourable tea) and _o kashi_ (honourable cakes) content these uncivilised Bank Holiday-makers, who have come out to see--just the pink cherry-blossoms against the blue sky. And will go home again--content.

On the river the red towels are perhaps more numerous, for all the fishermen, all the dock labourers, the whole riverside population of Tokyo have come in their _sampan_ to Mukojima. And they float past now, little and big, crowded with blue tunics or grey _kimono_. Some with an awning of paper lanterns, and all gay with flags and banners. And full as the river is with boats, and jammed together as they are under the bank, nobody shouts, nobody quarrels, nobody swears. A garden party at Windsor Castle might be better dressed, it could hardly be better behaved. Nor in the whole length of those two miles of crowded bank, with the line of _sampan_ on one side and the line of public-houses on the other--_sampan_, avenue, inns, all full to overflowing--are there three policemen. More, the trees, with their exquisite cloud of pink flowers, are within easy reach of a man’s arm, and nobody breaks them. The municipality of Tokyo has not even considered it necessary to affix a notice regarding the penalty for damaging trees. I should doubt if it had even thought to invent one.

And yet the blossoms are beautiful enough to make a man’s heart long to possess them.

“A little pink cloud of the sunset has caught in the bare branches of the cherry-tree.” And not all Western imagery can surpass the simile, for the pink is the pink of a cloud at sunset, and soft as the softest mist. When the wind stirs the trees, the blue sky seems scattering pink snowflakes to the ground.

“What is the soul of Japan?” asked the poet. “It is the mountain cherry-tree in the morning sun.”

But a soul so simple, the civilised nations, of course, disdain!

X

THE PALACE OF THE SON OF HEAVEN

Kyoto is a city of immense distances where the brown earth streets, set in between their rows of low brown houses, run on interminably. Even under the weltering summer sky the streets are full; for Kyoto, the once-time capital, is still the second city of the Empire, and the art centre of Japan. My _kurumaya_ scatters men and children as he runs; and the sounds of busy bargaining, the inevitable _takai_ (too much), following the _ikura des ka_ (how much?) pursue me as I ride.

At each corner two more streets stretch out, as straight as interminable, as full of life. And still my _kurumaya_ runs.

I am going to see the Emperor’s Palace. Through many hundred years, through most that is history in Japan, the Son of Heaven dwelt in the heart of this city, and these long interminable streets so full of life stretched all around him. The _Tenshisama_ lived in the midst of his people, and neither saw nor heard.