Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 23

j.a.pan is rich in proverbs. Hearn has translated one hundred examples of Buddhist proverbs.

_Karu-toki no Jizo-gao; nasu-toki no Emma-gao._

(Borrowing-time, the face of Jizo; repaying-time, the face of Emma.)

_Sode no furi-awase mo tasho no en._

(Even the touching of sleeves in pa.s.sing is caused by some relation in a former life.)

A powerful relic of the old clinging love of the gruesome is the story of _Ingwa-banas.h.i.+_. The _daimyo's_ wife knew that she was dying; and she thought of many things, especially of her husband's favourite, the Lady Yukiko, who was nineteen years old. She begged her husband to send for the Lady Yukiko, whom, she said, she loved as a sister. After the dying wife had told Lady Yukiko it was her wish that she should become the wife of their dear lord, she begged that Yukiko would carry her on her back to see the cherry-bloom.

As a nurse turns her back to a child, that the child may cling to it, Yukiko offered her shoulders to the wife, and said:--

"Lady, I am ready: please tell me how I best can help you."

"Why, this way!" responded the dying woman, lifting herself with an almost superhuman effort by clinging to Yukiko's shoulders.

But as she stood erect, she quickly slipped her thin hands down over the shoulders, under the robe, and clutched the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the girl, and burst into a wicked laugh.

"I have my wis.h.!.+" she cried--"I have my wish for the cherry-bloom, but not the cherry-bloom of the garden!... I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it!--oh, what a delight!"

And with these words she fell forward upon the crouching girl, and died.

When the attendants tried to lift the body from Yukiko's shoulders, they found that the hands of the dead had grown into the quick flesh of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the girl. And they could not be removed. A skilful physician was called, and he decided that the hands could be amputated only at the wrists, and so this was done. But the hands still clung to the b.r.e.a.s.t.s;

and there they soon darkened and dried up like the hands of a person long dead.

Yet this was only the beginning of the horror.

Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir--stealthily, like great grey spiders. And nightly thereafter,--beginning always at the Hour of the Ox,--they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease.

Yukiko cut off her hair, and became a mendicant-nun.

Every day she prayed to the dead for pardon, and every night the torture was renewed. This continued for more than seventeen years until Yukiko was heard of no more.

SHADOWINGS[36] (13) appeared the next year, 1900. Of this volume the _Bookman_ says:--

[36] Copyright, 1900, by Little, Brown and Company.

"He gives us several essays upon matters j.a.panesque, which obviously involve no small amount of erudition and patient research. Such are his papers upon the various species of _Semi_, or j.a.panese singing-locusts, and on the complicated etiquette of j.a.panese female names. But the distinctive feature of this volume is the first half, which is given up to a collection of curious tales by native writers, weird, uncanny, little stories, most of them, of ghouls and wraiths, and vampires, or at least the nearest j.a.panese equivalents for such Occidental spectres."

(316.)

The _Athenaeum_ does not find "Shadowings" equal to the volume "Exotics."

It thinks that Hearn is "perilously near exhausting his repertory of _Kokin_ [one-stringed fiddle] themes."

"The stories with which the present volume opens have no particular merit: they have lost their chief and real advantage--their local colour--in Hearnesque translation, and seem to be little more than suggestions or drafts of 'nouvelles,' out of which skilful hands might perhaps have made something much better. A good example is the story of the Screen Maiden, which is a most lame presentment of a charming motif.

The chapters on female names, on _semi_, couplets and 'Old j.a.panese Songs' are more interesting, but only to those who possess a considerable knowledge of old j.a.panese life and literature.... Of the 'Old j.a.panese Songs'--where is the proof of their antiquity?--much the best is the dance-ballad of the dragon-maid, who bewitched a _yamabus.h.i.+_, and chased him over moor and hill and river, until the temple of Dojo was reached, under the great bell of which the trembling hill-warrior or outlaw (_yamabus.h.i.+_ were such originally in all probability) hid himself, whereupon the dragon-maid wrapped her body round the bell once and again and the third time the bell melted and flowed away like boiling water. And with it, according to the legend, flowed away the ashes of the unwilling object of the dragon-maid's affections, consumed not through love, but through disdain." (300.)

Strange things happen in the group of tales, and not the least is the tale of the maiden in the screen whose loveliness so bewitches a youth that he becomes sick unto death. Then an old scholar tells him that the person whom the picture represents is dead, but since the painter painted her mind as well as her form, her spirit lives in the picture and he may yet win her.

So every day, Tokkei, following out the old scholar's injunctions, sits before the portrait calling softly the maiden's name. And finally after many days the maiden answered, "_Hai!_" And stepping down from out the screen, she kneels to take the cup of wine (which was to be so), whispering charmingly, "How could you love me so much?"

Also there is the tale of the Corpse Rider, in which the husband had to ride for one whole night, so far that he could not know the distance, the dead body of his divorced wife; and this was to save him from her vengeance.

The gruesome gleams here, and again in the tale of "The Reconciliation,"

when the repentant husband found that the wife he was holding in his arms is "a corpse so wasted that little remained save the bones, and the long black tangled hair."

There is no small amount of etiquette in the prefixes and suffixes of the j.a.panese female names. The majority of the _Yobina_, or personal names, are not aesthetic. Some are called after the flowers, and there are also place names, as for instance _Mine_ (Peak) _Hama_ (Sh.o.r.e); but the large proportion express moral or mental attributes.

Tenderness, kindness, deftness, cleverness, are frequently represented by _yobina;_ but appellations implying physical charm, or suggesting aesthetic ideas only, are comparatively uncommon. One reason for the fact may be that very aesthetic names are given to _geisha_ and to _joro_, and consequently vulgarized. But the chief reason certainly is that the domestic virtues still occupy in the j.a.panese moral estimate a place not less important than that accorded to religious faith in the life of our own Middle Ages. Not in theory only, but in every-day practice, moral beauty is placed far above physical beauty; and girls are usually selected as wives, not for their good looks, but for their domestic qualities.

I give a few names gleaned from Hearn's lists:--_O-Jun_--"Faithful-to-death"; _O-Tame_--"For-the-sake-of,"--a name suggesting unselfishness; _O-Chika_--"Closely Dear"; _O-Suki_--"The Beloved"--_Aimee_; _O-Tae_--"The Exquisite"; _Tokiwa_--"Eternally Constant."

From the "Fantasies," we read of the Mystery of Crowds, and the horrors of Gothic Architecture, the joys of levitation while one is asleep--with a moral attached; of Noctilucae. Also, as we gaze with the adolescent youth into a pair of eyes we come to know that

The splendour of the eyes that we wors.h.i.+p belongs to them only as brightness to the morning-star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,--a ghost-light of vanished suns.

Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,--eyes otherwhere pa.s.sed into darkness and dust.

Thus, and only thus, the depth of that gaze is the depth of the Sea of Death and Birth, and its mystery is the World-Soul's vision, watching us out of the silent vast of the Abyss of Being.

Thus, and only thus, do truth and illusion mingle in the magic of eyes,--the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present;--and the sudden splendour in the soul of the Seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet-lightning of the Infinite Memory.

A j.a.pANESE MISCELLANY[37] (14) was the next book. What does the memory hold of these stories and sketches? Surely that picture of Old j.a.pan with its charming sentiment for Dragon-flies, to which such delicate poems were written.

[37] Copyright, 1901, by Little, Brown and Company.

_Tombo no Ha-ura ni sabis.h.i.+,-- Aki-s.h.i.+gure._

(Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under-side of the leaf--Ah! the autumn-rains!)

And that verse by the mother poet, who seeing many children playing their favourite pastime of chasing b.u.t.terflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:--

_Tombo-tsuri!-- Kyo wa doko made Itta yara!_

(Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where _he_ has gone to-day!)

Then there are the children's songs about Nature and her tiny creatures, and all their little songs for their plays; the songs which tell a story, and the sweet mother songs that lull the babies to sleep.

How we pity poor misguided O-Dai, who forgot loyalty to her ancestors to follow the teachings of the Western faith. At its bidding even the sacred tablets and the scroll were cast away. And when she had forsaken everything, and had become as an outcast with her own people, the good missionaries found they needed a more capable a.s.sistant. Poor little weak O-Dai, without the courage to fill her sleeves with stones and then slip into the river, longing for the sunlight, and so "flung into the furnace of a city's l.u.s.t."

We hear the gruesome tinkle of the dead wife's warning bell, and we certainly shudder before the vision of her robed in her grave-shroud:--

"Eyeless she came--because she had long been dead;--and her loosened hair streamed down about her face;--and she looked without eyes through the tangle of it; and spake without a tongue."

Then the hideous horror of the evil crime, as this dead wife in her jealousy tore off the head of the sleeping young wife. The terrified husband following the trail of blood found

a nightmare-thing that chippered like a bat: the figure of the long-buried woman erect before her tomb,--in one hand clutching a bell, in the other the dripping head.... For a minute the three stood numbed. Then one of the men-at-arms, uttering a Buddhist invocation, drew, and struck at the shape. Instantly it crumbled down upon the soil,--an empty scattering of grave-rags, bones, and hair;--and the bell rolled clanking out of the ruin.

But the fleshless right hand, though parted from the wrist, still writhed; and its fingers still gripped at the bleeding head--and tore, and mangled,--as the claws of the yellow crab fast to a fallen fruit.

Who but Hearn would have chosen this ghastly scene, and described it with such terrible reality?