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Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan

L >> Lafcadio Hearn >> Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan




º17

The grim castle has its legend.

It is related that, in accordance with some primitive and barbarous
custom, precisely like that of which so terrible a souvenir has been
preserved for us in the most pathetic of Servian ballads, 'The
Foundation of Skadra,' a maiden of Matsue was interred alive under the
walls of the castle at the time of its erection, as a sacrifice to some
forgotten gods. Her name has never been recorded; nothing concerning her
is remembered except that she was beautiful and very fond of dancing.

Now after the castle had been built, it is said that a law had to be
passed forbidding that any girl should dance in the streets of Matsue.
For whenever any maiden danced the hill Oshiroyama would shudder, and
the great castle quiver from basement to summit.

º18

One may still sometimes hear in the streets a very humorous song, which
every one in town formerly knew by heart, celebrating the Seven Wonders
of Matsue. For Matsue was formerly divided into seven quarters, in each
of which some extraordinary object or person was to be seen. It is now
divided into five religious districts, each containing a temple of the
State religion. People living within those districts are called ujiko,
and the temple the ujigami, or dwelling-place of the tutelary god. The
ujiko must support the ujigami. (Every village and town has at least one
ujigami.)

There is probably not one of the multitudinous temples of Matsue which
has not some marvellous tradition attached to it; each of the districts
has many legends; and I think that each of the thirty-three streets has
its own special ghost story. Of these ghost stories I cite two
specimens: they are quite representative of one variety of Japanese
folk-lore.

Near to the Fu-mon-in temple, which is in the north-eastern quarter,
there is a bridge called Adzuki-togi-bashi, or The Bridge of the Washing
of Peas. For it was said in other years that nightly a phantom woman sat
beneath that bridge washing phantom peas. There is an exquisite Japanese
iris-flower, of rainbow-violet colour, which flower is named kaki-
tsubata; and there is a song about that flower called kaki-tsubata-no-
uta. Now this song must never be sung near the Adzuki-togi-bashi,
because, for some strange reason which seems to have been forgotten, the
ghosts haunting that place become so angry upon hearing it that to sing
it there is to expose one's self to the most frightful calamities. There
was once a samurai who feared nothing, who one night went to that bridge
and loudly sang the song. No ghost appearing, he laughed and went home.
At the gate of his house he met a beautiful tall woman whom he had never
seen before, and who, bowing, presented him with a lacquered box-fumi-
bako--such as women keep their letters in. He bowed to her in his
knightly way; but she said, 'I am only the servant--this is my
mistress's gift,' and vanished out of his sight. Opening the box, he saw
the bleeding head of a young child. Entering his house, he found upon
the floor of the guest-room the dead body of his own infant son with the
head torn off.

Of the cemetery Dai-Oji, which is in the street called Nakabaramachi,
this story is told-

In Nakabaramachi there is an ameya, or little shop in which midzu-ame is
sold--the amber-tinted syrup, made of malt, which is given to children
when milk cannot be obtained for them. Every night at a late hour there
came to that shop a very pale woman, all in white, to buy one rin [8]
worth of midzu-ame. The ame-seller wondered that she was so thin and
pale, and often questioned her kindly; but she answered nothing. At last
one night he followed her, out of curiosity. She went to the cemetery;
and he became afraid and returned.

The next night the woman came again, but bought no midzu-ame, and only
beckoned to the man to go with her. He followed her, with friends, into
the cemetery. She walked to a certain tomb, and there disappeared; and
they heard, under the ground, the crying of a child. Opening the tomb,
they saw within it the corpse of the woman who nightly visited the
ameya, with a living infant, laughing to see the lantern light, and
beside the infant a little cup of midzu-ame. For the mother had been
prematurely buried; the child was born in the tomb, and the ghost of the
mother had thus provided for it--love being stronger than death.

º19

Over the Tenjin-bashi, or Bridge of Tenjin, and through small streets
and narrow of densely populated districts, and past many a tenantless
and mouldering feudal homestead, I make my way to the extreme south-
western end of the city, to watch the sunset from a little sobaya [9]
facing the lake. For to see the sun sink from this sobaya is one of the
delights of Matsue.

There are no such sunsets in Japan as in the tropics: the light is
gentle as a light of dreams; there are no furies of colour; there are no
chromatic violences in nature in this Orient. All in sea or sky is tint
rather than colour, and tint vapour-toned. I think that the exquisite
taste of the race in the matter of colours and of tints, as exemplified
in the dyes of their wonderful textures, is largely attributable to the
sober and delicate beauty of nature's tones in this all-temperate world
where nothing is garish.

Before me the fair vast lake sleeps, softly luminous, far-ringed with
chains of blue volcanic hills shaped like a sierra. On my right, at its
eastern end, the most ancient quarter of the city spreads its roofs of
blue-grey tile; the houses crowd thickly down to the shore, to dip their
wooden feet into the flood. With a glass I can see my own windows and
the far-spreading of the roofs beyond, and above all else the green
citadel with its grim castle, grotesquely peaked. The sun begins to set,
and exquisite astonishments of tinting appear in water and sky.

Dead rich purples cloud broadly behind and above the indigo blackness of
the serrated hills--mist purples, fading upward smokily into faint
vermilions and dim gold, which again melt up through ghostliest greens
into the blue. The deeper waters of the lake, far away, take a tender
violet indescribable, and the silhouette of the pine-shadowed island
seems to float in that sea of soft sweet colour. But the shallower and
nearer is cut from the deeper water by the current as sharply as by a
line drawn, and all the surface on this side of that line is a
shimmering bronze--old rich ruddy gold-bronze.

All the fainter colours change every five minutes,--wondrously change
and shift like tones and shades of fine shot-silks.

º20

Often in the streets at night, especially on the nights of sacred
festivals (matsuri), one's attention will be attracted to some small
booth by the spectacle of an admiring and perfectly silent crowd
pressing before it. As soon as one can get a chance to look one finds
there is nothing to look at but a few vases containing sprays of
flowers, or perhaps some light gracious branches freshly cut from a
blossoming tree. It is simply a little flower-show, or, more correctly,
a free exhibition of master skill in the arrangement of flowers. For the
Japanese do not brutally chop off flower-heads to work them up into
meaningless masses of colour, as we barbarians do: they love nature too
well for that; they know how much the natural charm of the flower
depends upon its setting and mounting, its relation to leaf and stem,
and they select a single graceful branch or spray just as nature made
it. At first you will not, as a Western stranger, comprehend such an
exhibition at all: you are yet a savage in such matters compared with
the commonest coolies about you. But even while you are still wondering
at popular interest in this simple little show, the charm of it will
begin to grow upon you, will become a revelation to you; and, despite
your Occidental idea of self-superiority, you will feel humbled by the
discovery that all flower displays you have ever seen abroad were only
monstrosities in comparison with the natural beauty of those few simple
sprays. You will also observe how much the white or pale blue screen
behind the flowers enhances the effect by lamp or lantern light. For the
screen has been arranged with the special purpose of showing the
exquisiteness of plant shadows; and the sharp silhouettes of sprays and
blossoms cast thereon are beautiful beyond the imagining of any Western
decorative artist.

º21

It is still the season of mists in this land whose most ancient name
signifies the Place of the Issuing of Clouds. With the passing of
twilight a faint ghostly brume rises over lake and landscape, spectrally
veiling surfaces, slowly obliterating distances. As I lean over the
parapet of the Tenjin-bashi, on my homeward way, to take one last look
eastward, I find that the mountains have already been effaced. Before me
there is only a shadowy flood far vanishing into vagueness without a
horizon--the phantom of a sea. And I become suddenly aware that little
white things are fluttering slowly down into it from the fingers of a
woman standing upon the bridge beside me, and murmuring something in a
low sweet voice. She is praying for her dead child. Each of those little
papers she is dropping into the current bears a tiny picture of Jizo and
perhaps a little inscription. For when a child dies the mother buys a
small woodcut (hanko) of Jizo, and with it prints the image of the
divinity upon one hundred little papers. And she sometimes also writes
upon the papers words signifying 'For the sake of . .'--inscribing
never the living, but the kaimyo or soul-name only, which the Buddhist
priest has given to the dead, and which is written also upon the little
commemorative tablet kept within the Buddhist household shrine, or
butsuma. Then, upon a fixed day (most commonly the forty-ninth day after
the burial), she goes to some place of running water and drops the
little papers therein one by one; repeating, as each slips through her
fingers, the holy invocation, 'Namu Jizo, Dai Bosatsu!'

Doubtless this pious little woman, praying beside me in the dusk, is
very poor. Were she not, she would hire a boat and scatter her tiny
papers far away upon the bosom of the lake. (It is now only after dark
that this may be done; for the police-I know not why--have been
instructed to prevent the pretty rite, just as in the open ports they
have been instructed to prohibit the launching of the little straw boats
of the dead, the shoryobune.)

But why should the papers be cast into running water? A good old Tendai
priest tells me that originally the rite was only for the souls of the
drowned. But now these gentle hearts believe that all waters flow
downward to the Shadow-world and through the Sai-no-Kawara, where Jizo
is.

º 22

At home again, I slide open once more my little paper window, and look
out upon the night. I see the paper lanterns flitting over the bridge,
like a long shimmering of fireflies. I see the spectres of a hundred
lights trembling upon the black flood. I see the broad shoji of
dwellings beyond the river suffused with the soft yellow radiance of
invisible lamps; and upon those lighted spaces I can discern slender
moving shadows, silhouettes of graceful women. Devoutly do I pray that
glass may never become universally adopted in Japan--there would be no
more delicious shadows.

I listen to the voices of the city awhile. I hear the great bell of
Tokoji rolling its soft Buddhist thunder across the dark, and the songs
of the night-walkers whose hearts have been made merry with wine, and
the long sonorous chanting of the night-peddlers.

'U-mu-don-yai-soba-yai!' It is the seller of hot soba, Japanese
buckwheat, making his last round.

'Umai handan, machibito endan, usemono ninso kaso kichikyo no urainai!'
The cry of the itinerant fortune-teller.

'Ame-yu!' The musical cry of the seller of midzu-ame, the sweet amber
syrup which children love.

'Amail' The shrilling call of the seller of amazake, sweet rice wine.

'Kawachi-no-kuni-hiotan-yama-koi-no-tsuji-ura!' The peddler of love-
papers, of divining-papers, pretty tinted things with little shadowy
pictures upon them. When held near a fire or a lamp, words written upon
them with invisible ink begin to appear. These are always about
sweethearts, and sometimes tell one what he does not wish to know. The
fortunate ones who read them believe themselves still more fortunate;
the unlucky abandon all hope; the jealous become even more jealous than
they were before.

From all over the city there rises into the night a sound like the
bubbling and booming of great frogs in a march--the echoing of the tiny
drums of the dancing-girls, of the charming geisha. Like the rolling of
a waterfall continually reverberates the multitudinous pattering of geta
upon the bridge. A new light rises in the east; the moon is wheeling up
from behind the peaks, very large and weird and wan through the white
vapours. Again I hear the sounds of the clapping of many hands. For the
wayfarers are paying obeisance to O-Tsuki-San: from the long bridge they
are saluting the coming of the White Moon-Lady.[10]

I sleep, to dream of little children, in some mouldering mossy temple
court, playing at the game of Shadows and of Demons.



Chapter Eight Kitzuki: The Most Ancient Shrine of Japan


SHINKOKU is the sacred name of Japan--Shinkoku, 'The Country of the
Gods'; and of all Shinkoku the most holy ground is the land of Izumo.
Hither from the blue Plain of High Heaven first came to dwell awhile the
Earth-makers, Izanagi and Izanami, the parents of gods and of men;
somewhere upon the border of this land was Izanami buried; and out of
this land into the black realm of the dead did Izanagi follow after her,
and seek in vain to bring her back again. And the tale of his descent
into that strange nether world, and of what there befell him, is it not
written in the Kojiki? [1] And of all legends primeval concerning the
Underworld this story is one of the weirdest--more weird than even the
Assyrian legend of the Descent of Ishtar.

Even as Izumo is especially the province of the gods, and the place of
the childhood of the race by whom Izanagi and Izanami are yet worshiped,
so is Kitzuki of Izumo especially the city of the gods, and its
immemorial temple the earliest home of the ancient faith, the great
religion of Shinto.

Now to visit Kitzuki has been my most earnest ambition since I learned
the legends of the Kojiki concerning it; and this ambition has been
stimulated by the discovery that very few Europeans have visited
Kitzuki, and that none have been admitted into the great temple itself.
Some, indeed, were not allowed even to approach the temple court. But I
trust that I shall be somewhat more fortunate; for I have a letter of
introduction from my dear friend Nishida Sentaro, who is also a personal
friend of the high pontiff of Kitzuki. I am thus assured that even
should I not be permitted to enter the temple--a privilege accorded to
but few among the Japanese themselves--I shall at least have the honour
of an interview with the Guji, or Spiritual Governor of Kitzuki, Senke
Takanori, whose princely family trace back their descent to the Goddess
of the Sun. [2]

º1

I leave Matsue for Kitzuki early in the afternoon of a beautiful
September day; taking passage upon a tiny steamer in which everything,
from engines to awnings, is Lilliputian. In the cabin one must kneel.
Under the awnings one cannot possibly stand upright. But the miniature
craft is neat and pretty as a toy model, and moves with surprising
swiftness and steadiness. A handsome naked boy is busy serving the
passengers with cups of tea and with cakes, and setting little charcoal
furnaces before those who desire to smoke: for all of which a payment of
about three-quarters of a cent is expected.

I escape from the awnings to climb upon the cabin roof for a view; and
the view is indescribably lovely. Over the lucent level of the lake we
are steaming toward a far-away heaping of beautiful shapes, coloured
with that strangely delicate blue which tints all distances in the
Japanese atmosphere--shapes of peaks and headlands looming up from the
lake verge against a porcelain-white horizon. They show no details,
whatever. Silhouettes only they are--masses of absolutely pure colour.
To left and right, framing in the Shinjiko, are superb green surgings of
wooded hills. Great Yakuno-San is the loftiest mountain before us,
north-west. South-east, behind us, the city has vanished; but proudly
towering beyond looms Daisen--enormous, ghostly blue and ghostly white,
lifting the cusps of its dead crater into the region of eternal snow.
Over all arches a sky of colour faint as a dream.

There seems to be a sense of divine magic in the very atmosphere,
through all the luminous day, brooding over the vapoury land, over the
ghostly blue of the flood--a sense of Shinto. With my fancy full of the
legends of the Kojiki, the rhythmic chant of the engines comes to my
ears as the rhythm of a Shinto ritual mingled with the names of gods:

Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami.

º2

The great range on the right grows loftier as we steam on; and its
hills, always slowly advancing toward us, begin to reveal all the rich
details of their foliage. And lo! on the tip of one grand wood-clad peak
is visible against the pure sky the many-angled roof of a great Buddhist
temple. That is the temple of Ichibata, upon the mountain Ichibata-yama,
the temple of Yakushi-Nyorai, the Physician of Souls. But at Ichibata he
reveals himself more specially as the healer of bodies, the Buddha who
giveth sight unto the blind. It is believed that whosoever has an
affection of the eyes will be made well by praying earnestly at that
great shrine; and thither from many distant provinces do afflicted
thousands make pilgrimage, ascending the long weary mountain path and
the six hundred and forty steps of stone leading to the windy temple
court upon the summit, whence may be seen one of the loveliest
landscapes in Japan. There the pilgrims wash their eyes with the water
of the sacred spring, and kneel before the shrine and murmur the holy
formula of Ichibata: 'On-koro-koro-sendai-matoki-sowaka'--words of
which the meaning has long been forgotten, like that of many a Buddhist
invocation; Sanscrit words transliterated into Chinese, and thence into
Japanese, which are understood by learned priests alone, yet are known
by heart throughout the land, and uttered with the utmost fervour of
devotion.

I descend from the cabin roof, and squat upon the deck, under the
awnings, to have a smoke with Akira. And I ask:

'How many Buddhas are there, O Akira? Is the number of the Enlightened
known?'

'Countless the Buddhas are,' makes answer Akira; 'yet there is truly but
one Buddha; the many are forms only. Each of us contains a future
Buddha. Alike we all are except in that we are more or less unconscious
of the truth. But the vulgar may not understand these things, and so
seek refuge in symbols and in forms.'

'And the Kami,--the deities of Shinto?'

'Of Shinto I know little. But there are eight hundred myriads of Kami in
the Plain of High Heaven--so says the Ancient Book. Of these, three
thousand one hundred and thirty and two dwell in the various provinces
of the land; being enshrined in two thousand eight hundred and sixty-one
temples. And the tenth month of our year is called the "No-God-month,"
because in that month all the deities leave their temples to assemble in
the province of Izumo, at the great temple of Kitzuki; and for the same
reason that month is called in Izumo, and only in Izumo, the "God-is-
month." But educated persons sometimes call it the "God-present-
festival," using Chinese words. Then it is believed the serpents come
from the sea to the land, and coil upon the sambo, which is the table of
the gods, for the serpents announce the coming; and the Dragon-King
sends messengers to the temples of Izanagi and Izanami, the parents of
gods and men.'

'O Akira, many millions of Kami there must be of whom I shall always
remain ignorant, for there is a limit to the power of memory; but tell
me something of the gods whose names are most seldom uttered, the
deities of strange places and of strange things, the most extraordinary
gods.'

'You cannot learn much about them from me,' replies Akira. 'You will
have to ask others more learned than I. But there are gods with whom it
is not desirable to become acquainted. Such are the God of Poverty, and
the God of Hunger, and the God of Penuriousness, and the God of
Hindrances and Obstacles. These are of dark colour, like the clouds of
gloomy days, and their faces are like the faces of gaki.' [3]

'With the God of Hindrances and Obstacles, O Akira I have had more than
a passing acquaintance. Tell me of the others.'

'I know little about any of them,' answers Akira, 'excepting Bimbogami.
It is said there are two gods who always go together,--Fuku-no-Kami,
who is the God of Luck, and Bimbogami, who is the God of Poverty. The
first is white, and the second is black.'

'Because the last,' I venture to interrupt, 'is only the shadow of the
first. Fuku-no-Kami is the Shadow-caster, and Bimbogami the Shadow; and
I have observed, in wandering about this world, that wherever the one
goeth, eternally followeth after him the other.'

Akira refuses his assent to this interpretation, and resumes:

'When Bimbogami once begins to follow anyone it is extremely difficult
to be free from him again. In the village of Umitsu, which is in the
province of Omi, and not far from Kyoto, there once lived a Buddhist
priest who during many years was grievously tormented by Bimbogami. He
tried oftentimes without avail to drive him away; then he strove to
deceive him by proclaiming aloud to all the people that he was going to
Kyoto. But instead of going to Kyoto he went to Tsuruga, in the province
of Echizen; and when he reached the inn at Tsuruga there came forth to
meet him a boy lean and wan like a gaki. The boy said to him, "I have
been waiting for you"--and the boy was Bimbogami.

'There was another priest who for sixty years had tried in vain to get
rid of Bimbogami, and who resolved at last to go to a distant province.
On the night after he had formed this resolve he had a strange dream, in
which he saw a very much emaciated boy, naked and dirty, weaving sandals
of straw (waraji), such as pilgrims and runners wear; and he made so
many that the priest wondered, and asked him, "For what purpose are you
making so many sandals?" And the boy answered, "I am going to travel
with you. I am Bimbogami."'

'Then is there no way, Akira, by which Bimbogami may be driven away?'

'It is written,' replies Akira, 'in the book called Jizo-Kyo-Kosui that
the aged Enjobo, a priest dwelling in the province of Owari, was able to
get rid of Bimbogami by means of a charm. On the last day of the last
month of the year he and his disciples and other priests of the Shingon
sect took branches of peach-trees and recited a formula, and then, with
the branches, imitated the action of driving a person out of the temple,
after which they shut all the gates and recited other formulas. The same
night Enjobo dreamed of a skeleton priest in a broken temple weeping
alone, and the skeleton priest said to him, "After I had been with you
for so many years, how could you drive me away?" But always thereafter
until the day of his death, Enjobo lived in prosperity.'

º3

For an hour and a half the ranges to left and right alternately recede
and approach. Beautiful blue shapes glide toward us, change to green,
and then, slowly drifting behind us, are all blue again. But the far
mountains immediately before us--immovable, unchanging--always remain
ghosts. Suddenly the little steamer turns straight into the land--a
land so low that it came into sight quite unexpectedly--and we puff up
a narrow stream between rice-fields to a queer, quaint, pretty village
on the canal bank--Shobara. Here I must hire jinricksha to take us to
Kitzuki.

There is not time to see much of Shobara if I hope to reach Kitzuki
before bedtime, and I have only a flying vision of one long wide street
(so picturesque that I wish I could pass a day in it), as our kuruma
rush through the little town into the open country, into a vast plain
covered with rice-fields. The road itself is only a broad dike, barely
wide enough for two jinricksha to pass each other upon it. On each side
the superb plain is bounded by a mountain range shutting off the white
horizon. There is a vast silence, an immense sense of dreamy peace, and
a glorious soft vapoury light over everything, as we roll into the
country of Hyasugi to Kaminawoe. The jagged range on the left is Shusai-
yama, all sharply green, with the giant Daikoku-yama overtopping all;
and its peaks bear the names of gods. Much more remote, upon our right,
enormous, pansy-purple, tower the shapes of the Kita-yama, or northern
range; filing away in tremendous procession toward the sunset, fading
more and more as they stretch west, to vanish suddenly at last, after
the ghostliest conceivable manner, into the uttermost day.

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