Lafcadio Hearn's Japan (23 page)

V

The family kamiyui, O-Koto-San, the most skillful of her craft in Izumo, is a little woman of about thirty, still quite attractive. About her neck there are three soft-pretty lines, forming what connoisseurs of beauty term “the necklace of Venus.” This is a rare charm; but it once nearly proved the ruin of Koto. The story is a curious one.

Koto had a rival at the beginning of her professional career,—a woman of considerable skill as a
coiffeuse,
but of malignant disposition, named Jin. Jin gradually lost all her respectable custom, and little Koto became the fashionable hairdresser. But her old rival, filled with jealous hate, invented a wicked story about Koto, and the story found root in the rich soil of old Izumo superstition, and grew fantastically. The idea of it had been suggested to Jin's cunning mind by those three soft lines about Koto's neck. She declared that Koto had a “N
UKE
-
KUBI
.”

What is a nuke-kubi? “Kubi” signifies either the neck or head. “Nukeru” means to creep, to skulk, to prowl, to slip away stealthily. To have a nuke-kubi is to have a head that detaches itself from the body, and prowls about at night—by itself.

Koto has been twice married, and her second match was a happy one. But her first husband caused her much trouble, and ran away from her at last, in company with some worthless woman. Nothing was ever heard of him afterward,—so that Jin thought it quite safe to invent a nightmare-story to account for his disappearance. She said that he abandoned Koto because, on awaking one night, he saw his young wife's head rise from the pillow, and her neck lengthen like a great white serpent, while the rest of her body remained motionless. He saw the head, supported by the ever lengthening neck, enter the farther apartment and drink all the oil in the lamps, and then return to the pillow slowly,—the neck simultaneously contracting. “Then he rose up and fled away from the house in great fear,” said Jin.

As one story begets another, all sorts of queer rumors soon began to circulate about poor Koto. There was a tale that some police-officer, late at night saw a woman's head without a body, nibbling fruit from a tree overhanging some garden-wall; and that, knowing it to be a nuke-kubi, he struck it with the flat of his sword. It shrank away as swiftly as a bat flies but not before he had been able to recognize the face of the kamiyui. “Oh! it is quite true!” declared Jin, the morning after the alleged occurrence; “and if you don't believe it, send word to Koto that you want to see her. She can't go out: her face is all swelled up.” Now the last statement was fact,—for Koto had a very severe toothache at that time,—and the fact helped the falsehood. And the story found its way to the local newspaper, which published it—only as a strange example of popular credulity; and Jin said, “Am I a teller of the truth? See, the paper has printed it!”

Wherefore crowds of curious people gathered before Koto's little house, and made her life such a burden to her that her husband had to watch her constantly to keep her from killing herself. Fortunately
she had good friends in the family of the Governor, where she had been employed for years a
coiffeuse;
and the Governor, hearing of the wickedness, wrote a public denunciation of it, and set his name to it, and printed it. Now the people of Matsue reverenced their old samurai Governor as if he were a god, and believed his least word; and seeing what he had written, they became ashamed, and also denounced the lie and the liar; and the little hairdresser soon became more prosperous than before through popular sympathy.

Some of the most extraordinary beliefs of old days are kept alive in Izumo and elsewhere by what are called in America “traveling sideshows”; and the inexperienced foreigner could never imagine the possibilities of a Japanese side-show. On certain great holidays the show-men make their appearance, put up their ephemeral theaters of rush-matting and bamboos in some temple court, surfeit expectation by the most incredible surprises, and then vanish as suddenly as they came. The Skeleton of a Devil, the Claws of Goblin, and “a Rat as large as a sheep,” were some of the least extraordinary displays which I saw. The Goblin's Claws were remarkably fine shark's teeth; the Devil's Skeleton had belonged to an orangoutang,—all except the horns ingeniously attached to the skull; and the wondrous Rat I discovered to be a tame kangaroo. What I could not fully understand was the exhibition of a nuke-kubi, in which a young woman stretched her neck, apparently, to a length of about two feet, making ghastly faces during the performance.

VI

There are also some strange old superstitions about women's hair. The myth of Medusa has many a counterpart in Japanese folk-lore: the subject of such tales being always some wondrously beautiful girl, whose hair turns to snakes only at night, and who is discovered at last to be either a dragon or a dragon's daughter. But in ancient times it was believed that the hair of any young woman might, under certain trying circumstances, change into serpents. For instance: under the influence of long-suppressed jealousy.

There were many men of wealth who, in the days of Old Japan, kept their concubines (
mekaké
or
aish
ō
) under the same roof with their legitimate wives
(okusama).
And it is told that, although the severest patriarchal discipline might compel the mekaké and the okusama to live together in perfect seeming harmony by day, their secret hate would reveal itself by night in the transformation of their hair. The long black tresses of each would uncoil and hiss and strive to devour those of the other;—and even the mirrors of the sleepers would dash themselves together;—for, saith an ancient proverb,
kagami onna-no tamashii,
—“a Mirror is the Soul of a Woman.”
⁷
And there is a famous tradition of one Kato Sayemon Shigenji, who beheld in the night the hair of his wife and the hair of his concubine changed into vipers, writhing together and hissing and biting. Then Kato Sayemon grieved much for that secret bitterness of hatred which thus existed through his fault; and he shaved his head and became a priest in the great Buddhist monastery of Koya-San, where he dwelt until the day of his death under the name of Karukaya.

VII

The hair of dead women is arranged in the manner called tabanegami, somewhat resembling the shimada extremely simplified, and without ornaments of any kind. The name tabanegami signifies hair tied into a bunch, like a sheaf of rice. This style must also be worn by women during the period of mourning.

Ghosts, nevertheless, are represented with hair loose and long, falling weirdly over the face. And no doubt because of the melancholy suggestiveness of its drooping branches, the willow is believed to be the favorite tree of ghosts. Thereunder, it is said, they mourn in the night, mingling their shadowy hair with the long disheveled tresses of the tree.

Tradition says that
Ō
kyo Maruyama was the first Japanese artist who drew a ghost. The Shogun, having invited him to his palace, said: “Make a picture of a ghost for me.”
Ō
kyo promised to do so; but he was puzzled how to execute the order satisfactorily. A few days later, hearing that one of his aunts was very ill, he visited her. She was so emaciated that she looked like one already long dead. As he watched by her bedside, a ghastly inspiration came to him: he drew the fleshless face and long disheveled hair, and created from that hasty sketch a ghost that surpassed all the Shogun's expectations. Afterwards
Ō
kyo became very famous as a painter of ghosts.

Japanese ghosts are always represented as diaphanous, and preter-naturally tall,—only the upper part of the figure being distinctly outlined, and the lower part fading utterly away. As the Japanese say, “a ghost has no feet:” its appearance is like an exhalation, which becomes visible only at a certain distance above the ground; and it wavers and lengthens and undulates in the conceptions of artists, like vapor moved by the wind. Occasionally phantom women figure in picture-books in the likeness of living women but these are not true ghosts. They are fox-women or other goblins; and their supernatural character is suggested by a peculiar expression of the eyes and a certain impossible elfish grace.

Little children in Japan, like little children in all countries, keenly enjoy the pleasure of fear; and they have many games in which such pleasure forms the chief attraction. Among these is O-bake-goto, or Ghost-play. Some nurse-girl or elder sister loosens her hair in front, so as to let it fall over her face, and pursue the little folk with moans and weird gestures, miming all the attitudes of the ghosts of the picture-books.

VIII

As the hair of the Japanese woman is her richest ornament, it is of all her possessions that which she would most suffer to lose; and in other days the man too manly to kill an erring wife deemed it vengeance enough to turn her away with all her hair shorn off. Only
the greatest faith or the deepest love can prompt a woman to the voluntary sacrifice of her entire
chevelure,
though partial sacrifice, offerings of one or two long thick cuttings, may be seen suspended before many an Izumo shrine.

What faith can do in the way of such sacrifice, he best knows who has seen the great cables, woven of women's hair, that hang in the vast Hongwanji temple at Ky
ō
to. And love is stronger than faith, though much less demonstrative. According to ancient custom a wife bereaved sacrifices a portion of her hair to be placed in the coffin of her husband, and buried with him. The quantity is not fixed: in the majority of cases it is very small, so that the appearance of the coiffure is thereby nowise affected. But she who resolves to remain forever loyal to the memory of the lost yields up all. With her own hand she cuts off her hair, and lays the whole glossy sacrifice—emblem of her youth and beauty—upon the knees of the dead.

It is never suffered to grow again.

A Street Singer

A woman carrying a samisen, and accompanied by a little boy seven or eight years old, came to my house to sing. She wore the dress of a peasant, and a blue towel tied round her head. She was ugly; and her natural ugliness had been increased by a cruel attack of smallpox. The child carried a bundle of printed ballads.

Neighbors then began to crowd into my front yard,—mostly young mothers and nurse girls with babies on their backs, but old women and men likewise—the
inky
ō
of the vicinity. Also the jinrikisha-men came from their stand at the next street-corner; and presently there was no more room within the gate.

The woman sat down on my doorstep, tuned her samisen, played a bar of accompaniment,—and a spell descended upon the people; and they stared at each other in smiling amazement.

For out of those ugly disfigured lips there gushed and rippled a miracle of a voice—young, deep, unutterably touching in its penetrating sweetness. “Woman or wood-fairy?” queried a bystander. Woman only,—but a very, very great artist. The way she handled her instrument might have astounded the most skillful geisha; but no such voice had ever been heard from any geisha, and no such song. She sang as only a peasant can sing,—with vocal rhythms learned, perhaps, from the cicadæ and the wild nightingales,—and with fractions and semi-fractions and demi-semi-fractions of tones never written down in the musical language of the West.

And as she sang, those who listened began to weep silently. I did not distinguish the words; but I felt the sorrow and the sweetness and the patience of the life of Japan pass with her voice into my heart,— plaintively seeking for something never there. A tenderness invisible seemed to gather and quiver about us; and sensations of places and of times forgotten came softly back, mingled with feelings ghost-lier,—feelings not of any place or time in living memory.

Then I saw that the singer was blind.

When the song was finished, we coaxed the woman into the house, and questioned her. Once she had been fairly well to do, and had learned the samisen when a girl. The little boy was her son. Her husband was paralyzed. Her eyes had been destroyed by smallpox. But she was strong, and able to walk great distances. When the child became tired, she would carry him on her back. She could support the little one, as well as the bed-ridden husband, because whenever she sang the people cried and gave her coppers and food. . . . Such was her story. We gave her some money and a meal; and she went away, guided by her boy.