Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (4 page)

Beyond this loveliness are flower-plots surrounding tiny shrines; and
marvellous grotto-work, full of monsters—dragons and mythologic beings
chiselled in the rock; and miniature landscape work with tiny groves of
dwarf trees, and Lilliputian lakes, and microscopic brooks and bridges
and cascades. Here, also, are swings for children. And here are
belvederes, perched on the verge of the hill, wherefrom the whole fair
city, and the whole smooth bay speckled with fishing-sails no bigger
than pin-heads, and the far, faint, high promontories reaching into the
sea, are all visible in one delicious view—blue-pencilled in a beauty
of ghostly haze indescribable.

Why should the trees be so lovely in Japan? With us, a plum or cherry
tree in flower is not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of
beauty so bewildering that, however much you may have previously read
about it, the real spectacle strikes you dumb. You see no leaves—only
one great filmy mist of petals. Is it that the trees have been so long
domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the Gods, that they
have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women
loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake? Assuredly
they have mastered men's hearts by their loveliness, like beautiful
slaves. That is to say, Japanese hearts. Apparently there have been some
foreign tourists of the brutal class in this place, since it has been
deemed necessary to set up inscriptions in English announcing that 'IT
IS FORBIDDEN TO INJURE THE TREES.'

'Tera?'

'Yes, Cha, tera.'

But only for a brief while do I traverse Japanese streets. The houses
separate, become scattered along the feet of the hills: the city thins
away through little valleys, and vanishes at last behind. And we follow
a curving road overlooking the sea. Green hills slope steeply down to
the edge of the way on the right; on the left, far below, spreads a vast
stretch of dun sand and salty pools to a line of surf so distant that it
is discernible only as a moving white thread. The tide is out; and
thousands of cockle-gatherers are scattered over the sands, at such
distances that their stooping figures, dotting the glimmering sea-bed,
appear no larger than gnats. And some are coming along the road before
us, returning from their search with well-filled baskets—girls with
faces almost as rosy as the faces of English girls.

As the jinricksha rattles on, the hills dominating the road grow higher.
All at once Cha halts again before the steepest and loftiest flight of
temple steps I have yet seen.

I climb and climb and climb, halting perforce betimes, to ease the
violent aching of my quadriceps muscles; reach the top completely out of
breath; and find myself between two lions of stone; one showing his
fangs, the other with jaws closed. Before me stands the temple, at the
farther end of a small bare plateau surrounded on three sides by low
cliffs,-a small temple, looking very old and grey. From a rocky height
to the left of the building, a little cataract rumbles down into a pool,
ringed in by a palisade. The voice of the water drowns all other sounds.
A sharp wind is blowing from the ocean: the place is chill even in the
sun, and bleak, and desolate, as if no prayer had been uttered in it for
a hundred years.

Cha taps and calls, while I take off my shoes upon the worn wooden steps
of the temple; and after a minute of waiting, we bear a muffled step
approaching and a hollow cough behind the paper screens. They slide
open; and an old white-robed priest appears, and motions me, with a low
bow, to enter. He has a kindly face; and his smile of welcome seems to
me one of the most exquisite I have ever been greeted 'with Then he
coughs again, so badly that I think if I ever come here another time, I
shall ask for him in vain.

I go in, feeling that soft, spotless, cushioned matting beneath my feet
with which the floors of all Japanese buildings are covered. I pass the
indispensable bell and lacquered reading-desk; and before me I see other
screens only, stretching from floor to ceiling. The old man, still
coughing, slides back one of these upon the right, and waves me into the
dimness of an inner sanctuary, haunted by faint odours of incense. A
colossal bronze lamp, with snarling gilded dragons coiled about its
columnar stem, is the first object I discern; and, in passing it, my
shoulder sets ringing a festoon of little bells suspended from the
lotus-shaped summit of it. Then I reach the altar, gropingly, unable yet
to distinguish forms clearly. But the priest, sliding back screen after
screen, pours in light upon the gilded brasses and the inscriptions; and
I look for the image of the Deity or presiding Spirit between the altar-
groups of convoluted candelabra. And I see—only a mirror, a round,
pale disk of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this
mockery of me a phantom of the far sea.

Only a mirror! Symbolising what? Illusion? or that the Universe exists
for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? or the old Chinese
teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our own hearts? Perhaps
some day I shall be able to find out all these things.

As I sit on the temple steps, putting on my shoes preparatory to going,
the kind old priest approaches me again, and, bowing, presents a bowl. I
hastily drop some coins in it, imagining it to be a Buddhist alms-bowl,
before discovering it to be full of hot water. But the old man's
beautiful courtesy saves me from feeling all the grossness of my
mistake. Without a word, and still preserving his kindly smile, he takes
the bowl away, and, returning presently with another bowl, empty, fills
it with hot water from a little kettle, and makes a sign to me to drink.

Tea is most usually offered to visitors at temples; but this little
shrine is very, very poor; and I have a suspicion that the old priest
suffers betimes for want of what no fellow-creature should be permitted
to need. As I descend the windy steps to the roadway I see him still
looking after me, and I hear once more his hollow cough.

Then the mockery of the mirror recurs to me. I am beginning to wonder
whether I shall ever be able to discover that which I seek—outside of
myself! That is, outside of my own imagination.

'Tera?' once more queries Cha.

'Tera, no—it is getting late. Hotel, Cha.'

But Cha, turning the corner of a narrow street, on our homeward route,
halts the jinricksha before a shrine or tiny temple scarcely larger than
the smallest of Japanese shops, yet more of a surprise to me than any of
the larger sacred edifices already visited. For, on either side of the
entrance, stand two monster-figures, nude, blood-red, demoniac,
fearfully muscled, with feet like lions, and hands brandishing gilded
thunderbolts, and eyes of delirious fury; the guardians of holy things,
the Ni-O, or "Two Kings."
[6]
And right between these crimson monsters
a young girl stands looking at us; her slight figure, in robe of silver
grey and girdle of iris-violet, relieved deliciously against the
twilight darkness of the interior. Her face, impassive and curiously
delicate, would charm wherever seen; but here, by strange contrast with
the frightful grotesqueries on either side of her, it produces an effect
unimaginable. Then I find myself wondering whether my feeling of
repulsion toward those twin monstrosities be altogether lust, seeing
that so charming a maiden deems them worthy of veneration. And they even
cease to seem ugly as I watch her standing there between them, dainty
and slender as some splendid moth, and always naively gazing at the
foreigner, utterly unconscious that they might have seemed to him both
unholy and uncomely.

What are they? Artistically they are Buddhist transformations of Brahma
and of Indra. Enveloped by the absorbing, all-transforming magical
atmosphere of Buddhism, Indra can now wield his thunderbolts only in
defence of the faith which has dethroned him: he has become a keeper of
the temple gates; nay, has even become a servant of Bosatsu
(Bodhisattvas), for this is only a shrine of Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy,
not yet a Buddha.

'Hotel, Cha, hotel!' I cry out again, for the way is long, and the sun
sinking,—sinking in the softest imaginable glow of topazine light. I
have not seen Shaka (so the Japanese have transformed the name Sakya-
Muni); I have not looked upon the face of the Buddha. Perhaps I may be
able to find his image to-morrow, somewhere in this wilderness of wooden
streets, or upon the summit of some yet unvisited hill.

The sun is gone; the topaz-light is gone; and Cha stops to light his
lantern of paper; and we hurry on again, between two long lines of
painted paper lanterns suspended before the shops: so closely set, so
level those lines are, that they seem two interminable strings of pearls
of fire. And suddenly a sound—solemn, profound, mighty—peals to my
ears over the roofs of the town, the voice of the tsurigane, the great
temple-bell of Nogiyama.

All too short the day seemed. Yet my eyes have been so long dazzled by
the great white light, and so confused by the sorcery of that
interminable maze of mysterious signs which made each street vista seem
a glimpse into some enormous grimoire, that they are now weary even of
the soft glowing of all these paper lanterns, likewise covered with
characters that look like texts from a Book of Magic. And I feel at last
the coming of that drowsiness which always follows enchantment.

'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'

A woman's voice ringing through the night, chanting in a tone of
singular sweetness words of which each syllable comes through my open
window like a wavelet of flute-sound. My Japanese servant, who speaks a
little English, has told me what they mean, those words:

'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'

And always between these long, sweet calls I hear a plaintive whistle,
one long note first, then two short ones in another key. It is the
whistle of the amma, the poor blind woman who earns her living by
shampooing the sick or the weary, and whose whistle warns pedestrians
and drivers of vehicles to take heed for her sake, as she cannot see.
And she sings also that the weary and the sick may call her in.

'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'

The saddest melody, but the sweetest voice. Her cry signifies that for
the sum of 'five hundred mon' she will come and rub your weary body
'above and below,' and make the weariness or the pain go away. Five
hundred mon are the equivalent of five sen (Japanese cents); there are
ten rin to a sen, and ten mon to one rin. The strange sweetness of the
voice is haunting,—makes me even wish to have some pains, that I might
pay five hundred mon to have them driven away.

I lie down to sleep, and I dream. I see Chinese texts—multitudinous,
weird, mysterious—fleeing by me, all in one direction; ideographs
white and dark, upon signboards, upon paper screens, upon backs of
sandalled men. They seem to live, these ideographs, with conscious life;
they are moving their parts, moving with a movement as of insects,
monstrously, like phasmidae. I am rolling always through low, narrow,
luminous streets in a phantom jinricksha, whose wheels make no sound.
And always, always, I see the huge white mushroom-shaped hat of Cha
dancing up and down before me as he runs.

KOBODAISHI, most holy of Buddhist priests, and founder of the Shingon-
sho—which is the sect of Akira—first taught the men of Japan to
write the writing called Hiragana and the syllabary I-ro-ha; and
Kobodaishi was himself the most wonderful of all writers, and the most
skilful wizard among scribes.

And in the book, Kobodaishi-ichi-dai-ki, it is related that when he was
in China, the name of a certain room in the palace of the Emperor having
become effaced by time, the Emperor sent for him and bade him write the
name anew. Thereupon Kobodaishi took a brush in his right hand, and a
brush in his left, and one brush between the toes of his left foot, and
another between the toes of his right, and one in his mouth also; and
with those five brushes, so holding them, he limned the characters upon
the wall. And the characters were beautiful beyond any that had ever
been seen in China—smooth-flowing as the ripples in the current of a
river. And Kobodaishi then took a brush, and with it from a distance
spattered drops of ink upon the wall; and the drops as they fell became
transformed and turned into beautiful characters. And the Emperor gave
to Kobodaishi the name Gohitsu Osho, signifying The Priest who writes
with Five Brushes.

At another time, while the saint was dwelling in Takawasan, near to
Kyoto, the Emperor, being desirous that Kobodaishi should write the
tablet for the great temple called Kongo-jo-ji, gave the tablet to a
messenger and bade him carry it to Kobodaishi, that Kobodaishi might
letter it. But when the Emperor's messenger, bearing the tablet, came
near to the place where Kobodaishi dwelt, he found a river before him so
much swollen by rain that no man might cross it. In a little while,
however, Kobodaishi appeared upon the farther bank, and, hearing from
the messenger what the Emperor desired, called to him to hold up the
tablet. And the messenger did so; and Kobodaishi, from his place upon
the farther bank, made the movements of the letters with his brush; and
as fast as he made them they appeared upon the tablet which the
messenger was holding up.

Now in that time Kobodaishi was wont to meditate alone by the river-
side; and one day, while so meditating, he was aware of a boy standing
before him, gazing at him curiously. The garments of the boy were as the
garments worn by the needy; but his face was beautiful. And while
Kobodaishi wondered, the boy asked him: 'Are you Kobodaishi, whom men
call "Gohitsu-Osho"—the priest who writes with five brushes at once?'
And Kobodaishi answered: 'I am he.' Then said the boy: 'If you be he,
write, I pray you, upon the sky.' And Kobodaishi, rising, took his
brush, and made with it movements toward the sky as if writing; and
presently upon the face of the sky the letters appeared, most
beautifully wrought. Then the boy said: 'Now I shall try;' and he wrote
also upon the sky as Kobodaishi had done. And he said again to
Kobodaishi: 'I pray you, write for me—write upon the surface of the
river.' Then Kobodaishi wrote upon the water a poem in praise of the
water; and for a moment the characters remained, all beautiful, upon the
face of the stream, as if they had fallen upon it like leaves; but
presently they moved with the current and floated away. 'Now I will
try,' said the boy; and he wrote upon the water the Dragon-character—
the character Ryu in the writing which is called Sosho, the 'Grass-
character;' and the character remained upon the flowing surface and
moved not. But Kobodaishi saw that the boy had not placed the ten, the
little dot belonging to the character, beside it. And he asked the boy:
'Why did you not put the ten?' 'Oh, I forgot!' answered the boy; 'please
put it there for me,' and Kobodaishi then made the dot. And lo! the
Dragon-character became a Dragon; and the Dragon moved terribly in the
waters; and the sky darkened with thunder-clouds, and blazed with
lightnings; and the Dragon ascended in a whirl of tempest to heaven.