Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 22

There are two short chapters devoted to the j.a.panese Songs. The first songs, "Out of the Street," are, as Manyemon, who would not have the Western people deceived, tells us, the vulgar songs, or those sung by the washermen, carpenters, and bamboo-weavers, etc. The theme always holds some glint of love. Hearn has arranged certain ones in three groups forming a little shadow romance.

To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going; Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.

Things never changed since the Time of the G.o.ds: The flowing of water, the Way of Love.

The second chapter is devoted to Folk-Songs with Buddhist allusions.

Nearly all the arts and the greater number of the industries show the influence of Buddhism. A typical song is:--

Even the knot of the rope tying our boats together Knotted was long ago by some love in a former birth.

Another:--

Even while praying together in front of the tablets ancestral, Lovers find chance to murmur prayers never meant for the dead.

On the "Trip to Kyoto" there is more to be learned about poor little Yuko, who gave her life for her nation. To the j.a.panese all the small details of her story are of the greatest importance, and are carefully treasured. Hearn thinks that the Western "refined feeling" might not care for the poor little blood-stained trifles; if so it is to be regretted.

In "Dust," with a dainty touch, he teaches again that we are but millions upon billions of dead people; that the cells and the souls are themselves recombinations of old welding of forces--forces of which we know nothing save that they belong "to the Shadow-Makers of universes."

You are an individual--but also you are a population! This leads on to the end that

In whatsoever time all human minds accord in thought and will with the mind of the Teacher, there shall not remain even one particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood.

The last chapter, "Within the Circle," is of a philosophy so impermanent that it seems but Shadow-play, and one may not behold a visible form, for--like all that which it symbolizes--it is but an illusion.

EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES[34] (11) faithfully followed the ensuing year. The effort to write is manifest; even to himself Hearn is admitting that the _frisson_ which j.a.pan gave him is pa.s.sing. He is beginning to make copy; and the subjects are becoming more vague, vapoury, and ghostly.

[34] Copyright, 1898, by Little, Brown and Company.

I must eat some humble pie. My work during the past ten months has been rather poor. Why, I cannot quite understand--because it costs me more effort. Anyhow, I have had to rewrite ten essays: they greatly improved under the process. I am trying now to get a Buddhist commentary for them--mostly to be composed of texts dealing with pre-existence and memory of former lives. I took for subjects the following:--Beauty is Memory--why beautiful things bring sadness;--the Riddle of Touch--_i. e._ the thrill that a touch gives;--the Perfume of Youth;--the Reason of the Pleasure of the Feeling Evoked by Bright Blue;--the Pain Caused by Certain Kinds of Red;--Mystery of Certain Musical Effects;--Fear of Darkness and the Feeling of Dreams. Queer subjects, are they not? I think of calling the collection "Retrospectives.

The _Athenaeum_, that wise critic, feels that in this book Hearn "shows himself at his best. He is more subdued," it says, "than is his wont, and indulges less freely in excessive laudation and needless disparagement. The chapters on 'Insect Musicians,' on the 'Literature of the Dead,' and--oddly as it may sound to us--on 'Frogs,' are among the most delightful of all his writings. The keynote of all is struck in the pretty stanza that heads the first of the three:--

_Mus.h.i.+, yo mus.h.i.+, Nate ingwa ga Tsukuru nara?_ (Insect, O insect!

Singing fulfil you Your fire-life and all life!)

"The translation is ours. The fondness of the j.a.panese for many kinds of chirping insects, which they keep in little bamboo-cages, is one of the prettiest of the surviving echoes of the past. The plaintive little cry satisfies the curious melancholy that characterizes the reflective moods of the lieges of Mutsu. In the long series of changes that is to end in perfect Buddha-forms, there is hope always, but always tinged with the sadness of vague memories of past pains, and the resigned dread of sorrows to come, one knows not how oft to be repeated ere in 'Nirvana'

all earthly moods are lost. There is a regular trade in these tiny songsters, of the history of which Mr. Hearn tells the pleasant story."

(299.)

Hearn leads us to a cemetery in a quaint lonesome garden, and teaches us something about the wonderful texts and inscriptions that are chiselled into the stone of the tombs, or painted on the wooden _sotoba_, and go to form the important literature of the dead. A suggestive _sotoba_-text is:--

The Amida-Kyo says: "All who enter into that country enter likewise into that state of virtue from which there can be no turning back."

From the Kaimyo which is engraved on the tomb, we may select:--

_Koji_-- (Bright-Sun-on-the-Way-of-the-Wise, in the Mansion of Luminous Mind.)

_Koji_-- (Effective-Benevolence-Hearing-with-Pure-Heart-the-Supplications -of-the-Poor,--dwelling in the Mansion of the Virtue of Pity.)

The frog is another favourite of the j.a.panese. There is one special variety called the Kajika, or true singing-frog of j.a.pan, which is kept as a pet in a little cage. For over a hundred years the frog has been the subject of numerous poems. Many of these little verses are love-poems, for the lovers' trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is at its height. Here is a quotation from the Anthology called "Kokinshu," compiled A.D. 905, by the poet Ki-no-Tsurayuki:--

The poetry of j.a.pan has its roots in the human heart, and thence has grown into a multiform utterance. Man in this world, having a thousand million of things to undertake and to complete, has been moved to express his thoughts and his feelings concerning all that he sees and hears. When we hear the _uguisu_ singing among flowers, and the voice of the _kawazu_ which inhabits the waters, what mortal (_lit. "who among the living that lives"_) does not compose poems?

A charming frog poem is:--

_Te wo tsuite Uta mos.h.i.+-aguru, Kawazu kana!_

(With hand resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!)

And another:--

_Tamagawa no Hito wo mo yogizu Naku kawazu, Kono yu kikeba Os.h.i.+ku ya wa aranu?_

(Hearing to-night the frogs of the Jewel River--or Tamagawa, that sing without fear of man, how can I help loving the pa.s.sing moment?)

A vivid chapter is Hearn's description of his ascent of Fuji-no-Yama.

Here he may once again use his palette of many colours, but certainly not with the old _abandon_.

Brighter and brighter glows the gold. Shadows come from the west,--shadows flung by cloud-pile over cloud-pile; and these, like evening shadows upon snow, are violaceous blue.... Then orange-tones appear in the horizon; then smouldering crimson.

And now the greater part of the Fleece of Gold has changed to cotton again,--white cotton mixed with pink.... Stars thrill out. The cloud-waste uniformly whitens;--thickening and packing to the horizon. The west glooms. Night rises; and all things darken except that wondrous unbroken world-round of white,--the Sea of Cotton.

A lurking of the gruesome flashes out when the snow-patches against the miles of black soot and ashes on the mountain make him think "of a gleam of white teeth I once saw in a skull,--a woman's skull,--otherwise burnt to a sooty crisp."

"Retrospectives" is a group of gentle reveries, where we may muse with Hearn on such elusive themes as the "Sadness in Beauty," for beauty has no real existence, it is the emotion of the dead within us. Or there is the a.n.a.lysis of that favourite word _frisson_, "the touch that makes a thrill within you is a touch that you have felt before,--sense-echo of forgotten intimacies in many unremembered lives." "Azure Psychology" and "A Red Sunset" recall Hearn's earlier criticisms on colour.

IN GHOSTLY j.a.pAN[35] (12) followed. The t.i.tle is revelatory of the j.a.pan that is to people this book and those which are to come. In the opening chapter Hearn crystallizes in a powerful sketch the sum of Buddhist lore. Of this the _Academy_ writes:--

[35] Copyright, 1899, by Little, Brown and Company.

"Of Nirvana one carries away this one picture, painted in words curiously colourless and intangible--the picture of a mountain up whose steep side toil two creatures--the soul and his guide--toiling, stumbling upwards over a brittle and friable chaos of skulls. Skulls crumbled into powder and skulls crumbling mark out the road; 'and every skull,' says the guide, 'is yours, and has been yours in some past incarnation; and the dust that rises round your present body is the dust of your past and deserted bodies that have served you well or ill as may be in your past lives.' In the fine and bewildering haze of this thought we lose our poet, and henceforward he is not a face nor a voice, but an echo of a living man's voice. We hear the echo, but the voice we do not hear. And we grudge the voice, even to Nirvana where all silences are merged in one." (286.)

In a beautiful chapter Hearn outlines all that might be written about the important subject of incense. He tells a good deal about its religious, luxurious, and ghostly uses. There is also a charming custom of giving parties where dainty games are played with it.

Sometimes there can be love between the living and the dead, or so it appears in the ghostly story of "A Pa.s.sional Karma," or O-Tsuyu, who died of love of s.h.i.+nzaburo and returns to be his bride. Every night, by the light of their Peony Lanterns, she, accompanied by her maid, comes to keep the ghostly tryst. s.h.i.+nzaburo does not know that O-Tsuyu is dead, but his servant Tomozo, overhearing voices, gazes through a c.h.i.n.k, and sees--

the face of a woman long dead,--and the fingers caressing were fingers of naked bone,--and of the body below the waist there was not anything: it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow.

Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the eyes of the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death.

Now he whose bride is a ghost cannot live. No matter what force flows in his blood he must certainly perish. s.h.i.+nzaburo is warned and an amulet to protect him from the dead is given to him, but treachery is played, and the amulet is stolen; so one morning Tomozo finds his master

hideously dead;--and the face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear;--and lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast about his neck.

The gentle heart of the j.a.panese s.h.i.+nes in the chapter on "Bits of Poetry." You might find yourself, Hearn says, in a community so poor that you could not even buy a cup of real tea, but no place could you discover "where there is n.o.body capable of making a poem." Poems are written on all occasions and for all occasions.

Poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil;--for example, upon braziers, iron-kettles, vases, wooden-trays, lacquer-ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,--even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women's crepe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags.

Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches.

A j.a.panese artist would not think of elaborating a sketch, and a poem to be perfect must also only stir one's fancy. _Ittakkiri_, meaning "entirely vanished" in the sense of "all told," is a term applied contemptuously to him who expresses all his thought.