At last the mother of Ai became too weak and ill to work at the loom; and the gold of the dead had been spent. Ai said:—“Mother, I know there is but one thing now to do. Let me be sold to the dancing-girls.” The mother wept, and made no reply. Ai did not weep, but went out alone.
She remembered that in other days, when banquets were given in her father’s house, and dancers served the wine, a free geisha named Kimika had often caressed her. She went straight to the house of Kimika. “I want you to buy me,” said Ai;—“and I want a great deal of money.” Kimika laughed, and petted her, and made her eat, and heard her story,—which was bravely told, without one tear. “My child,” said Kimika, “I cannot give you a great deal of money; for I have very little. But this I can do:—I can promise to support your mother. That will be better than to give her much money for you,— because your mother, my child, has been a great lady, and therefore cannot know how to use money cunningly. Ask your honored mother to sign the bond,—promising that you will stay with me till you are twenty-four years old, or until such time as you can pay me back. And what money I can now spare, take home with you as a free gift.”
Thus Ai became a geisha; and Kimika renamed her Kimiko, and kept the pledge to maintain the mother and the child-sister. The mother died before Kimiko became famous; the little sister was put to school. Afterwards those things already told came to pass.
The young man who had wanted to die for love of a dancing-girl was worthy of better things. He was an only son; and his parents, wealthy and titled people, were willing to make any sacrifice for him,—even that of accepting a geisha for daughter-in-law. Moreover they were not altogether displeased with Kimiko, because of her sympathy for their boy.
Before going away, Kimiko attended the wedding of her young sister, Umé, who had just finished school. She was good and pretty. Kimiko had made the match, and used her wicked knowledge of men in making it. She chose a very plain, honest, old-fashioned merchant,—a man who could not have been bad, even if he tried. Umé did not question the wisdom of her sister’s choice, which time proved fortunate.
IV
It was in the period of the fourth moon that Kimiko was carried away to the home prepared for her,—a place in which to forget all the unpleasant realities of life,—a sort of fairy-palace lost in the charmed repose of great shadowy silent high-walled gardens. Therein she might have felt as one reborn, by reason of good deeds, into the realm of Hōrai, But the spring passed, and the summer came,—and Kimiko remained simply Kimiko. Three times she had contrived, for reasons unspoken, to put off the wedding-day.
In the period of the eighth moon, Kimiko ceased to be playful, and told her reasons very gently but very firmly:—“It is time that I should say what I have long delayed saying. For the sake of the mother who gave me life, and for the sake of my little sister, I have lived in hell. All that is past; but the scorch of the fire is upon me, and there is no power that can take it away. It is not for such as I to enter into an honored family,—nor to bear you a son,—nor to build up your house. . . . Suffer me to speak; for in the knowing of wrong I am very, very much wiser than you. . . . Never shall I be your wife to become your shame. I am your companion only, your play-fellow, your guest of an hour,—and this not for any gifts. When I shall be no longer with you—nay! certainly that day must come!—you will have clearer sight. I shall still be dear to you, but not in the same way as now—which is foolishness. You will remember these words out of my heart. Some true sweet lady will be chosen for you, to become the mother of your children. I shall see them; but the place of a wife I shall never take, and the joy of a mother I must never know. I am only your folly, my beloved,—an illusion, a dream, a shadow flitting across your life. Somewhat more in later time I may become, but a wife to you never,—neither in this existence nor in the next. Ask me again—and I go.”
In the period of the tenth moon, and without any reason imaginable, Kimiko disappeared,—vanished,—utterly ceased to exist.
V
Nobody knew when or how or whither she had gone. Even in the neighborhood of the home she had left, none had seen her pass. At first it seemed that she must soon return. Of all her beautiful and precious things—her robes, her ornaments, her presents: a fortune in themselves—she had taken nothing. But weeks passed without word or sign; and it was feared that something terrible had befallen her. Rivers were dragged, and wells were searched. Inquiries were made by telegraph and by letter. Trusted servants were sent to look for her. Rewards were offered for any news—especially a reward to Kimika, who was really attached to the girl, and would have been only too happy to find her without any reward at all. But the mystery remained a mystery. Application to the authorities would have been useless: the fugitive had done no wrong, broken no law; and the vast machinery of the imperial police-system was not to be set in motion by the passionate whim of a boy. Months grew into years; but neither Kimika, nor the little sister in Kyōto, nor any one of the thousands who had known and admired the beautiful dancer, ever saw Kimiko again.
But what she had foretold came true;—for time dries all tears and quiets all longing; and even in Japan one does not really try to die twice for the same despair. The lover of Kimiko became wiser; and there was found for him a very sweet person for wife, who gave him a son. And other years passed; and there was happiness in the fairy-home where Kimiko had once been.
There came to that home one morning, as if seeking alms, a traveling nun; and the child, hearing her Buddhist cry of “Ha-ï! ha-ï!” ran to the gate. And presently a house-servant, bringing out the customary gift of rice, wondered to see the nun caressing the child, and whispering to him. Then the little one cried to the servant, “Let me give!”—and the nun pleaded from under the veiling shadow of her great straw hat: “Honorably allow the child to give me.” So the boy put the rice into the mendicant’s bowl. Then she thanked him, and asked:—“Now will you say again for me the little word which I prayed you to tell your honored father?” And the child lisped:— “Father, one whom you will never see again in this world, says that her heart is glad because she has seen your son.”
The nun laughed softly, and caressed him again, and passed away swiftly; and the servant wondered more than ever, while the child ran to tell his father the words of the mendicant.
But the father’s eyes dimmed as he heard the words, and he wept over his boy. For he, and only he, knew who had been at the gate,— and the sacrificial meaning of all that had been hidden.
Now he thinks much, but tells his thought to no one.
He knows that the space between sun and sun is less than the space between himself and the woman who loved him.
He knows it were vain to ask in what remote city, in what fantastic riddle of narrow nameless streets, in what obscure little temple known only to the poorest poor, she waits for the darkness before the Dawn of the Immeasurable Light,—when the Face of the Teacher will smile upon her,—when the Voice of the Teacher will say to her, in tones of sweetness deeper than ever came from human lover’s lips:— “O my daughter in the Law, thou hast practiced the perfect way; thou hast believed and understood the highest truth;—therefore come I now to meet and to welcome thee!”
Yuko: A Reminiscence
MEIJI, XXIV , 5. May, 1891
Who shall find a valiant woman?—far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of her.— Vulgate .
“Tenshi-Sama go-shimpai.” The Son of Heaven augustly sorrows.
Strange stillness in the city, a solemnity as of public mourning. Even itinerant venders utter their street cries in a lower tone than is their wont. The theaters, usually thronged from early morning until late into the night, are all closed. Closed also every pleasure-resort, every show—even the flower-displays. Closed likewise all the banquet-halls. Not even the tinkle of a samisen can be heard in the silent quarters of the geisha. There are no revelers in the great inns; the guests talk in subdued voices. Even the faces one sees upon the street have ceased to wear the habitual sm
ile; and placards announce the indefinite postponement of banquets and entertainments.
Such public depression might follow the news of some great calamity or national peril,—a terrible earthquake, the destruction of the capital, a declaration of war. Yet there has been actually nothing of all this,—only the announcement that the Emperor sorrows; and in all the thousand cities of the land, the signs and tokens of public mourning are the same, expressing the deep sympathy of the nation with its sovereign.
And following at once upon this immense sympathy comes the universal spontaneous desire to repair the wrong, to make all possible compensation for the injury done. This manifests itself in countless ways mostly straight from the heart, and touching in their simplicity. From almost everywhere and everybody, letters and telegrams of condolence, and curious gifts, are forwarded to the Imperial guest. Rich and poor strip themselves of their most valued heirlooms, their most precious household treasures, to offer them to the wounded Prince. Innumerable messages also are being prepared to send to the Czar,—and all this by private individuals, spontaneously. A nice old merchant calls upon me to request that I should compose for him a telegram in French, expressing the profound grief of all the citizens for the attack upon the Czarevitch,—a telegram to the Emperor of all the Russias. I do the best I can for him, but protest my total inexperience in the wording of telegrams to high and mighty personages. “Oh! that will not matter,” he makes answer; “we shall send it to the Japanese Minister at St. Petersburg: he will correct any mistakes as to form.” I ask him if he is aware of the cost of such a message. He has correctly estimated it as something over one hundred yen, a very large sum for a small Matsue merchant to disburse.
Some grim old samurai show their feelings about the occurrence in a less gentle manner. The high official intrusted with the safety of the Czarevitch at Otsu receives, by express, a fine sword and a stern letter bidding him prove his manhood and his regret like a samurai, by performing harakiri immediately.
For this people, like its own Shintō gods, has various souls: it has its Nigi-mi-tama and its Ara-mi-tama, its Gentle and its Rough Spirit. The Gentle Spirit seeks only to make reparation; but the Rough Spirit demands expiation. And now through the darkening atmosphere of the popular life, everywhere is felt the strange thrilling of these opposing impulses, as of two electricities.
Far away in Kanagawa, in the dwelling of a wealthy family, there is a young girl, a serving-maid, named Yuko, a samurai name of other days, signifying “valiant.”
Forty millions are sorrowing, but she more than all the rest. How and why no Western mind could fully know. Her being is ruled by emotions and by impulses of which we can guess the nature only in the vaguest possible way. Something of the soul of a good Japanese girl we can know. Love is there—potentially, very deep and still. Innocence also, insusceptible of taint—that whose Buddhist symbol is the lotus-flower. Sensitiveness likewise, delicate as the earliest snow of plum-blossoms. Fine scorn of death is there—her samurai inheritance—hidden under a gentleness soft as music. Religion is there, very real and very simple,—a faith of the heart, holding the Buddhas and the Gods for friends, and unafraid to ask them for anything of which Japanese courtesy allows the asking. But these, and many other feelings, are supremely dominated by one emotion impossible to express in any Western tongue—something for which the word “loyalty” were an utterly dead rendering, something akin rather to that which we call mystical exaltation: a sense of uttermost reverence and devotion to the Tenshi-Sama. Now this is much more than any individual feeling. It is the moral power and will undying of a ghostly multitude whose procession stretches back out of her life into the absolute night of forgotten time. She herself is but a spirit-chamber, haunted by a past utterly unlike our own,—a past in which, through centuries uncounted, all lived and felt and thought as one, in ways which never were as our ways.
“Tenshi-Sama go-shimpai.” A burning shock of desire to give was the instant response of the girl’s heart—desire overpowering, yet hopeless, since she owned nothing, unless the veriest trifle saved from her wages. But the longing remains, leaves her no rest. In the night she thinks; asks herself questions which the dead answer for her. “What can I give that the sorrow of the August may cease?” “Thyself,” respond voices without sound. “But can I?” she queries wonderingly. “Thou hast no living parent,” they reply; “neither does it belong to thee to make the offerings. Be thou our sacrifice. To give life for the August One is the highest duty, the highest joy.” “And in what place?” she asks. “Saikyō,” answer the silent voices; “in the gateway of those who by ancient custom should have died.”
Dawn breaks; and Yuko rises to make obeisance to the sun. She fulfills her first morning duties; she requests and obtains leave of absence. Then she puts on her prettiest robe, her brightest girdle, her whitest tabi, that she may look worthy to give her life for the Tenshi-Sama. And in another hour she is journeying to Kyōto. From the train window she watches the gliding of the landscapes. Very sweet the day is;—all distances, blue-toned with drowsy vapors of spring, are good to look upon. She sees the loveliness of the land as her fathers saw it, but as no Western eyes can see it, save in the weird, queer charm of the old Japanese picture-books. She feels the delight of life, but dreams not at all of the possible future preciousness of that life for herself. No sorrow follows the thought that after her passing the world will remain as beautiful as before. No Buddhist melancholy weighs upon her: she trusts herself utterly to the ancient gods. They smile upon her from the dusk of their holy groves, from their immemorial shrines upon the backward fleeing hills. And one, perhaps, is with her: he who makes the grave seem fairer than the palace to those who fear not; he whom the people call Shinigami, the lord of death-desire. For her the future holds no blackness. Always she will see the rising of the holy Sun above the peaks, the smile of the Lady-Moon upon the waters, the eternal magic of the Seasons. She will haunt the places of beauty, beyond the folding of the mists, in the sleep of the cedar-shadows, through circling of innumerable years. She will know a subtler life, in the faint winds that stir the snow of the flowers of the cherry, in the laughter of playing waters, in every happy whisper of the vast green silences. But first she will greet her kindred, somewhere in shadowy halls awaiting her coming to say to her: “Thou hast done well,—like a daughter of samurai. Enter, child! because of thee tonight we sup with the Gods!”
It is daylight when the girl reaches Kyōto. She finds a lodging, and seeks the house of a skillful female hairdresser.
“Please to make it very sharp,” says Yuko, giving the kamiyui a very small razor (article indispensable of a lady’s toilet); “and I shall wait here till it is ready.” She unfolds a freshly bought newspaper and looks for the latest news from the capital; while the shop-folk gaze curiously, wondering at the serious pretty manner which forbids familiarity. Her face is placid like a child’s; but old ghosts stir restlessly in her heart, as she reads again of the Imperial sorrow. “I also wish it were the hour,” is her answering thought. “But we must wait.” At last she receives the tiny blade in faultless order, pays the trifle asked, and returns to her inn.
There she writes two letters: a farewell to her brother, an irreproachable appeal to the high officials of the City of Emperors, praying that the Tenshi-Sama may be petitioned to cease from sorrowing, seeing that a young life, even though unworthy, has been given in voluntary expiation of the wrong.
When she goes out again it is that hour of heaviest darkness which precedes the dawn; and there is a silence as of cemeteries. Few and faint are the lamps; strangely loud the sound of her little geta. Only the stars look upon her.
Soon the deep gate of the Government edifice is before her. Into the hollow shadow she slips, whispers a prayer, and kneels. Then, according to ancient rule, she takes off her long under-girdle of strong soft silk, and with it binds her robes tightly about her, making the knot just above her knees. For no matter what might happen in the instant of blind agony,
the daughter of a samurai must be found in death with limbs decently composed. And then, with steady precision, she makes in her throat a gash, out of which the blood leaps in a pulsing jet. A samurai girl does not blunder in these matters: she knows the place of the arteries and the veins.
At sunrise the police find her, quite cold, and the two letters, and a poor little purse containing five yen and a few sen (enough, she had hoped, for her burial); and they take her and all her small belongings away.
Then by lightning the story is told at once to a hundred cities. The great newspapers of the capital receive it; and cynical journalists imagine vain things, and try to discover common motives for that sacrifice: a secret shame, a family sorrow, some disappointed love. But no; in all her simple life there had been nothing hidden, nothing weak, nothing unworthy; the bud of the lotus unfolded were less virgin. So the cynics write about her only noble things, befitting the daughter of a samurai.
The Son of Heaven hears, and knows how his people love him, and augustly ceases to mourn.
The Ministers hear, and whisper to one another, within the shadow of the Throne: “All else will change; but the heart of the nation will not change.”
Nevertheless, for high reasons of State, the State pretends not to know.
On a Bridge
My old kurumaya, Heishichi, was taking me to a famous temple in the neighborhood of Kumamoto.
We came to a humped and venerable bridge over the Shirakawa; and I told Heishichi to halt on the bridge, so that I could enjoy the view for a moment. Under the summer sky, and steeped in a flood of sunshine electrically white, the colors of the land seemed almost unreally beautiful. Below us the shallow river laughed and gurgled over its bed of grey stones, overshadowed by verdure of a hundred tints. Before us the reddish white road alternately vanished and reappeared as it wound away, through grove or hamlet, toward the high blue ring of peaks encircling the vast Plain of Higo. Behind us lay Kumamoto,—a far bluish confusion of myriad roofs;—only the fine grey lines of its castle showing sharp against the green of further wooded hills. . . . Seen from within, Kumamoto is a shabby place; but seen as I beheld it that summer day, it is a fairy-city, built out of mist and dreams. . . .
Lafcadio Hearn's Japan Page 18