Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (19 page)

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.

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
[37]
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.

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
[38]
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.

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.

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.

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.
[39]

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

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?
[40]
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.