The other day I discovered that the pipe-stem seller had abandoned his bamboo pole and suspended boxes. He was coming up the street with a little hand-cart just big enough to hold his wares and his baby, and evidently built for that purpose in two compartments. Perhaps the baby had become too heavy for the more primitive method of conveyance. Above the cart fluttered a small white flag, bearing in cursive characters the legend Ki-seru-rao kae (pipe-stems exchanged), and a brief petition for ‘honorable help’, O-tasuké wo negaimasu. The child seemed well and happy; and I again saw the tablet-shaped object which had so often attracted my notice before. It was now fastened upright to a high box in the cart facing the infant’s bed. As I watched the cart approaching, I suddenly felt convinced that the tablet was really an ihai: the sun shone full upon it, and there was no mistaking the conventional Buddhist text. This aroused my curiosity; and I asked Manyemon4 to tell the pipe-stem seller that we had a number of pipes needing fresh stems – which was true. Presently the cartlet drew up at our gate, and I went to look at it.
The child was not afraid, even of a foreign face – a pretty boy. He lisped and laughed and held out his arms, being evidently used to petting; and while playing with him I looked closely at the tablet. It was a Shinshū ihai, bearing a woman’s kaimyō, or posthumous name; and Manyemon translated the Chinese characters for me: Revered and of good rank in the Mansion of Excellence, the thirty-first day of the third month of the twenty-eighth year of Meiji.5 Meantime a servant had fetched the pipes which needed new stems; and I glanced at the face of the artisan as he worked. It was the face of a man past middle age, with those worn, sympathetic lines about the mouth, dry beds of old smiles, which give to so many Japanese faces an indescribable expression of resigned gentleness. Presently Manyemon began to ask questions; and when Manyemon asks questions, not to reply is possible for the wicked only. Sometimes behind that dear innocent old head I think I see the dawning of an aureole – the aureole of the Bosatsu.6
The pipe-stem seller answered by telling his story. Two months after the birth of their little boy, his wife had died. In the last hour of her illness she had said: ‘From what time I die till three full years be past I pray you to leave the child always united with the Shadow of me: never let him be separated from my ihai, so that I may continue to care for him and to nurse him – since thou knowest that he should have the breast for three years. This, my last asking, I entreat thee, do not forget.’ But the mother being dead, the father could not labor as he had been wont to do, and also take care of so young a child, requiring continual attention both night and day; and he was too poor to hire a nurse. So he took to selling pipe-stems, as he could thus make a little money without leaving the child even for a minute alone. He could not afford to buy milk; but he had fed the boy for more than a year with rice gruel and amé syrup.7
I said that the child looked very strong, and none the worse for lack of milk.
‘That,’ declared Manyemon, in a tone of conviction bordering on reproof, ‘is because the dead mother nurses him. How should he want for milk?’
And the boy laughed softly, as if conscious of a ghostly caress.
Ningyō-No-Haka
Manyemon had coaxed the child indoors, and made her eat. She appeared to be about eleven years old, intelligent, and pathetically docile. Her name was Iné, which means ‘springing rice’; and her frail slimness made the name seem appropriate.
When she began, under Manyemon’s gentle persuasion, to tell her story, I anticipated something queer from the accompanying change in her voice. She spoke in a high thin sweet tone, perfectly even – a tone changeless and unemotional as the chanting of the little kettle over its charcoal bed. Not unfrequently in Japan one may hear a girl or a woman utter something touching or cruel or terrible in just such a steady, level, penetrating tone, but never anything indifferent. It always means that feeling is being kept under control.
‘There were six of us at home,’ said Iné – ‘mother and father and father’s mother, who was very old, and my brother and myself, and a little sister. Father was a hyōguya, a paper-hanger: he papered sliding-screens and also mounted kakémono.1 Mother was a hairdresser. My brother was apprenticed to a seal-cutter.
‘Father and mother did well: mother made even more money than father. We had good clothes and good food; and we never had any real sorrow until father fell sick.
‘It was the middle of the hot season. Father had always been healthy: we did not think that his sickness was dangerous, and he did not think so himself. But the very next day he died. We were very much surprised. Mother tried to hide her heart, and to wait upon her customers as before. But she was not very strong, and the pain of father’s death came too quickly. Eight days after father’s funeral mother also died. It was so sudden that everybody wondered. Then the neighbors told us that we must make a ningyō-no-haka at once – or else there would be another death in our house. My brother said they were right; but he put off doing what they told him. Perhaps he did not have money enough, I do not know; but the haka was not made.’ …
‘What is a ningyō-no-haka?’ I interrupted.
‘I think,’ Manyemon made answer, ‘that you have seen many ningyō-no-haka without knowing what they were; they look just like graves of children. It is believed that when two of a family die in the same year, a third also must soon die. There is a saying, Always three graves. So when two out of one family have been buried in the same year, a third grave is made next to the graves of those two, and in it is put a coffin containing only a little figure of straw – wara-ningyō; and over that grave a small tombstone is set up, bearing a kaimyō.fn1 The priests of the temple to which the graveyard belongs write the kaimyō for these little gravestones. By making a ningyō-no-haka it is thought that a death may be prevented … We listen for the rest, Iné.’
The child resumed:
‘There were still four of us – grandmother, brother, myself, and my little sister. My brother was nineteen years old. He had finished his apprenticeship just before father died: we thought that was like the pity of the gods for us. He had become the head of the house. He was very skillful in his business, and had many friends: therefore he could maintain us. He made thirteen yen the first month; that is very good for a seal-cutter. One evening he came home sick: he said that his head hurt him. Mother had then been dead forty-seven days. That evening he could not eat. Next morning he was not able to get up; he had a very hot fever: we nursed him as well as we could, and sat up at night to watch by him; but he did not get better. On the morning of the third day of his sickness we became frightened – because he began to talk to mother. It was the forty-ninth day after mother’s death – the day the Soul leaves the house; and brother spoke as if mother was calling him: “Yes, mother, yes! – in a little while I shall come!” Then he told us that mother was pulling him by the sleeve. He would point with his hand and call to us: “There she is! – there! – do you not see her?” We would tell him that we could not see anything. Then he would say, “Ah! you did not look quick enough: she is hiding now; she has gone down under the floor-mats.” All the morning he talked like that. At last grandmother stood up, and stamped her foot on the floor, and reproached mother – speaking very loud. “Taka!” she said, “Taka, what you do is very wrong. When you were alive we all loved you. None of us ever spoke unkind words to you. Why do you now want to take the boy? You know that he is the only pillar of our house. You know that if you take him there will not be any one to care for the ancestors. You know that if you take him, you will destroy the family name! O Taka, it is cruel! it is shameful! it is wicked!” Grandmother was so angry that all her body trembled. Then she sat down and cried; and I and my little sister cried. But our brother said that mother was still pulling him by the sleeve. When the sun went down, he died.
‘Grandmother wept, and stroked us, and sang a little song that she made herself. I can remember it still:
Oya no nai ko to
Hamabé no chidori:
Higuré-higuré ni
Sodé shiboru.fn2
So the third grave was made – but it was not a ningyō-no-haka; and that was the end of our house. We lived with kindred until winter, when grandmother died. She died in the night – when, nobody knew: in the morning she seemed to be sleeping, but she was dead. Then I and my little sister were separated. My sister was adopted by a tatamiya, a mat-maker – one of father’s friends. She is kindly treated: she even goes to school!’
‘Aa fushigi na koto da! – aa komatta ne?’2 murmured Manyemon. Then there was a moment or two of sympathetic silence. Iné prostrated herself in thanks, and rose to depart. As she slipped her feet under the thongs of her sandals, I moved toward the spot where she had been sitting, to ask the old man a question. She perceived my intention, and immediately made an indescribable sign to Manyemon, who responded by checking me just as I was going to sit down beside him.
‘She wishes,’ he said, ‘that the master will honorably strike the matting first.’
‘But why?’ I asked in surprise – noticing only that under my unshod feet, the spot where the child had been kneeling felt comfortably warm.
Manyemon answered:
‘She believes that to sit down upon the place made warm by the body of another is to take into one’s own life all the sorrow of that other person – unless the place be stricken first.’
Whereat I sat down without performing the rite; and we both laughed.
‘Iné,’ said Manyemon, ‘the master takes your sorrows upon him. He wants – (I cannot venture to render Manyemon’s honorifics) – ‘to understand the pain of other people. You need not fear for him, Iné.’
The Eternal Haunter
This year the Tōkyō color-prints – Nishiki-é – seem to me of unusual interest. They reproduce, or almost reproduce, the color-charm of the early broadsides; and they show a marked improvement in line-drawing. Certainly one could not wish for anything prettier than the best prints of the present season.
My latest purchase has been a set of weird studies – spectres of all kinds known to the Far East, including many varieties not yet discovered in the West. Some are extremely unpleasant; but a few are really charming. Here, for example, is a delicious thing by ‘Chikanobu’,1 just published, and for sale at the remarkable price of three sen!
Can you guess what it represents? … Yes, a girl, but what kind of a girl? Study it a little … Very lovely, is she not, with that shy sweetness in her downcast gaze – that light and dainty grace, as of a resting butterfly? … No, she is not some Psyche2 of the most Eastern East, in the sense that you mean – but she is a soul. Observe that the cherry-flowers falling from the branch above, are passing through her form. See also the folds of her robe, below, melting into blue faint mist. How delicate and vapory the whole thing is! It gives you the feeling of spring; and all those fairy colors are the colors of a Japanese spring-morning … No, she is not the personification of any season. Rather she is a dream – such a dream as might haunt the slumbers of Far-Eastern youth; but the artist did not intend her to represent a dream … You cannot guess? Well, she is a tree-spirit – the Spirit of the Cherry-tree. Only in the twilight of morning or of evening she appears, gliding about her tree; and whoever sees her must love her. But, if approached, she vanishes back into the trunk, like a vapor absorbed. There is a legend of one tree-spirit who loved a man, and even gave him a son; but such conduct was quite at variance with the shy habits of her race …
You ask what is the use of drawing the Impossible? Your asking proves that you do not feel the charm of this vision of youth – this dream of spring. I hold that the Impossible bears a much closer relation to fact than does most of what we call the real and the commonplace. The Impossible may not be naked truth; but I think that it is usually truth – masked and veiled, perhaps, but eternal. Now to me this Japanese dream is true – true, at least, as human love is. Considered even as a ghost it is true. Whoever pretends not to believe in ghosts of any sort, lies to his own heart. Every man is haunted by ghosts. And this color-print reminds me of a ghost whom we all know – though most of us (poets excepted) are unwilling to confess the acquaintance.
Perhaps – for it happens to some of us – you may have seen this haunter, in dreams of the night, even during childhood. Then, of course, you could not know the beautiful shape bending above your rest: possibly you thought her to be an angel, or the soul of a dead sister. But in waking life we first become aware of her presence about the time when boyhood begins to ripen into youth.
This first of her apparitions is a shock of ecstasy, a breathless delight; but the wonder and the pleasure are quickly followed by a sense of sadness inexpressible – totally unlike any sadness ever felt before – though in her gaze there is only caress, and on her lips the most exquisite of smiles. And you cannot imagine the reason of that feeling until you have learned who she is – which is not an easy thing to learn.
Only a moment she remains; but during that luminous moment all the tides of your being set and surge to her with a longing for which there is not any word. And then – suddenly! – she is not; and you find that the sun has gloomed, the colors of the world turned grey.
Thereafter enchantment remains between you and all that you loved before – persons or things or places. None of them will ever seem again so near and dear as in other days.
Often she will return. Once that you have seen her she will never cease to visit you. And this haunting – ineffably sweet, inexplicably sad – may fill you with rash desire to wander over the world in search of somebody like her. But however long and far you wander, never will you find that somebody.
Later you may learn to fear her visits because of the pain they bring – the strange pain that you cannot understand. But the breadth of zones and seas cannot divide you from her; walls of iron cannot exclude her. Soundless and subtle as a shudder of ether is the motion of her.
Ancient her beauty as the heart of man – yet ever waxing fairer, forever remaining young. Mortals wither in Time as leaves in the frost of autumn; but Time only brightens the glow and the bloom of her endless youth.
All men have loved her; all must continue to love her. But none shall touch with his lips even the hem of her garment.
All men adore her; yet all she deceives, and many are the ways of her deception. Most often she lures her lover into the presence of some earthly maid, and blends herself incomprehensibly with the body of that maid, and works such sudden glamour that the human gaze becomes divine – that the human limbs shine through their raiment. But presently the luminous haunter detaches herself from the mortal, and leaves her dupe to wonder at the mockery of sense.
No man can describe her, though nearly all men have some time tried to do so. Pictured she cannot be – since her beauty itself is a ceaseless becoming, multiple to infinitude, and tremulous with perpetual quickening, as with flowing of light.
There is a story, indeed, that thousands of years ago some marvellous sculptor was able to fix in stone a single remembrance of her. But this doing became for many the cause of sorrow supreme; and the Gods decreed, out of compassion, that to no other mortal should ever be given power to work the like wonder. In these years we can worship only; we cannot portray.
But who is she? – what is she? … Ah! that is what I wanted you to ask. Well, she has never had a name; but I shall call her a tree-spirit.
The Japanese say that you can exorcise a tree-spirit – if you are cruel enough to do it – simply by cutting down her tree.
But you cannot exorcise the Spirit of whom I speak – nor ever cut down her tree.
For her tree is the measureless, timeless, billion-branching Tree of Life – even the World-Tree, Yggdrasil,3 whose roots are in Night and Death, whose head is above the Gods.
Seek to woo her – she is Echo.4 Seek to clasp her – she is Shadow. But her smile will haunt you into the hour of dissolution and beyond – through numberless lives to come.
And never will you return her smile �
� never, because of that which it awakens within you – the pain that you cannot understand.
And never, never shall you win to her – because she is the phantom light of long-expired suns – because she was shaped by the beating of infinite millions of hearts that are dust – because her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the visions and hopes of youth, through countless forgotten cycles of your own incalculable past.
Fragment
And it was at the hour of sunset that they came to the foot of the mountain. There was in that place no sign of life – neither token of water, nor trace of plant, nor shadow of flying bird – nothing but desolation rising to desolation. And the summit was lost in heaven.
Then the Bodhisattva said to his young companion: ‘What you have asked to see will be shown to you. But the place of the Vision is far; and the way is rude. Follow after me, and do not fear: strength will be given you.’
Twilight gloomed about them as they climbed. There was no beaten path, nor any mark of former human visitation; and the way was over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments that rolled or turned beneath the foot. Sometimes a mass dislodged would clatter down with hollow echoings; sometimes the substance trodden would burst like an empty shell … Stars pointed and thrilled; and the darkness deepened.
Japanese Ghost Stories Page 7