Lafcadio Hearn's Japan

by Hearn, Lafcadio; Richie, Donald;

  “Twenty-two years ago,” said Heishichi, wiping his forehead—“no, twenty-three years ago,—I stood here, and saw the city burn.”

  “At night?” I queried.

  “No,” said the old man, “it was in the afternoon—a wet day. . . . They were fighting; and the city was on fire.”

  “Who were fighting?”

  “The soldiers in the castle were fighting with the Satsuma men. We dug holes in the ground and sat in them, to escape the balls. The Satsuma men had cannons on the hill; and the soldiers in the castle were shooting at them over our heads. The whole city was burned.”

  “But how did you happen to be here?”

  “I ran away. I ran as far as this bridge,—all by myself. I thought that I could get to my brother’s farm—about seven miles from here. But they stopped me.”

  “Who stopped you?”

  “Satsuma men,—I don’t know who they were. As I got to the bridge I saw three peasants—I thought they were peasants—leaning over the railing: men wearing big straw hats and straw rain-cloaks and straw sandals. I spoke to them politely; and one of them turned his head round, and said to me, ‘You stay here!’ That was all he said: the others did not say anything. Then I saw that they were not peasants; and I was afraid.”

  “How did you know that they were not peasants?”

  “They had long swords hidden under their rain-cloaks,—very long swords. They were very tall men. They leaned over the bridge, looking down into the river. I stood beside them,—just there, by the third post to the left, and did as they did. I knew that they would kill me if I moved from there. None of them spoke. And we four stood leaning over the railing for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I do not know exactly—it must have been a long time. I saw the city burning. All that while none of the men spoke to me or looked at me: they kept their eyes upon the water. Then I heard a horse; and I saw a cavalry officer coming at a trot,—looking all about him as he came. . . .”

  “From the city?”

  “Yes,—along that road behind you. . . . The three men watched him from under their big straw hats; but they did not turn their heads;—they pretended to be looking down into the river. But, the moment that the horse got on the bridge, the three men turned and leaped;—and one caught the horse’s bridle; and another gripped the officer’s arm; and the third cut off his head—all in a moment. . . .”

  “The officer’s head?”

  “Yes—he did not even have time to shout before his head was off. . . . I never saw anything done so quickly. Not one of the three men uttered a word.”

  “And then?”

  “Then they pitched the body over the railing into the river; and one of them struck the horse,—hard; and the horse ran away. . . .”

  “Back to the town?”

  “No—the horse was driven straight out over the bridge, into the country. . . . The head was not thrown into the river: one of the Satsuma men kept it—under his straw cloak. . . . Then all of us leaned over the railing, as before,—looking down. My knees were shaking. The three samurai did not speak a single word. I could not even hear them breathing. I was afraid to look at their faces;—I kept looking down into the river. . . . After a little while I heard another horse,—and my heart jumped so that I felt sick;—and I looked up, and saw a cavalry-soldier coming along the road, riding very fast. No one stirred till he was on the bridge: then—in one second—his head was off! The body was thrown into the river, and the horse driven away—exactly as before. Three men were killed like that. Then the samurai left the bridge.”

  “Did you go with them?”

  “No: they left immediately after having killed the third man,— taking the heads with them;—and they paid no attention to me. I stayed on the bridge, afraid to move, until they were very far away. Then I ran back to the burning town;—I ran quick, quick! There I was told that the Satsuma troops were retreating. Soon afterwards, the army came from Tōkyō; and I was given some work: I carried straw sandals for the soldiers.”

  “Who were the men that you saw killed on the bridge?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you never try to find out?”

  “No,” said Heishichi, again mopping his forehead: “I said nothing about the matter until many years after the war.”

  “But why?” I persisted.

  Heishichi gave me one astonished look, smiled in a pitying way, and answered,—

  “Because it would have been wrong;—it would have been ungrateful.”

  I felt properly rebuked.

  And we resumed our journey.

  The Case of O-Dai

  I

  O-Dai pushed aside the lamplet and the incense-cup and the water vessel on the Buddha-shelf, and opened the little shrine before which they had been placed. Within were the ihai, the mortuary tablets of her people,—five in all; and a gilded figure of the Bodhisattva Kwannon stood smiling behind them. The ihai of the grandparents occupied the left side; those of the parents the right; and between them was a smaller tablet, bearing the kaimyo of a child-brother with whom she used to play and quarrel, to laugh and cry, in other and happier years. Also the shrine contained a makémono, or scroll, inscribed with the spirit-names of many ancestors. Before that shrine, from her infancy, O-Dai had been wont to pray.

  The tablets and the scroll signified more to her faith in former time—very much more—than remembrance of a father’s affection and a mother’s caress;—more than any remembrance of the ever-loving, ever-patient, ever-smiling elders who had fostered her babyhood, carried her pickaback to every temple-festival, invented her pleasures, consoled her small sorrows, and soothed her fretfulness with song;—more than the memory of the laughter and the tears, the cooing and the calling and the running of the dear and mischievous little brother;—more than all the traditions of the ancestors.

  For those objects signified the actual viewless presence of the lost,—the haunting of invisible sympathy and tenderness,—the gladness and the grief of the dead in the joy and the sorrow of the living. When, in other time, at evening dusk, she was wont to kindle the lamplet before them, how often had she seen the tiny flame astir with a motion not its own!

  Yet the ihai is even more than a token to pious fancy. Strange possibilities of transmutation, transubstantiation, belong to it. It serves as temporary body for the spirit between death and birth: each fiber of its incense-penetrated wood lives with a viewless life-potential. The will of the ghost may quicken it. Sometimes, through power of love, it changes to flesh and blood. By help of the ihai the buried mother returns to suckle her babe in the dark. By help of the ihai, the maid consumed upon the funeral pyre may return to wed her betrothed,—even to bless him with a son. By power of the ihai, the dead servant may come back from the dust of his rest to save his lord from ruin. Then, after love or loyalty has wrought its will, the personality vanishes;—the body again becomes, to outward seeming, only a tablet.

  All this O-Dai ought to have known and remembered. Maybe she did; for she wept as she took the tablets and the scroll out of the shrine, and dropped them from a window into the river below. She did not dare to look after them, as the current whirled them away.

  II

  O-Dai had done this by order of two English missionary-women who, by various acts of seeming kindness, had persuaded her to become a Christian. (Converts are always commanded to bury or to cast away their ancestral tablets.) These missionary-women—the first ever seen in the province—had promised O-Dai, their only convert, an allowance of three yen a month, as assistant,—because she could read and write. By the toil of her hands she had never been able to earn more than two yen a month; and out of that sum she had to pay a rent of twenty five sen for the use of the upper floor of a little house, belonging to a dealer in second-hand goods. Thither, after the death of her parents, she had taken her loom, and the ancestral tablets. She had been obliged to work very hard indeed in order to live. But with three yen a month she could l
ive very well; and the missionary-women had a room for her. She did not think that the people would mind her change of religion.

  As a matter of fact they did not much care. They did not know anything about Christianity, and did not want to know: they only laughed at the girl for being so foolish as to follow the ways of the foreign women. They regarded her as a dupe, and mocked her without malice. And they continued to laugh at her, good-humoredly enough, until the day when she was seen to throw the tablets into the river. Then they stopped laughing. They judged the act in itself, without discussing its motives. Their judgment was instantaneous, unanimous, and voiceless. They said no word of reproach to O-Dai. They merely ignored her existence.

  The moral resentment of a Japanese community is not always a hot resentment,—not the kind that quickly burns itself out. It may be cold. In the case of O-Dai it was cold and silent and heavy like a thickening of ice. No one uttered it. It was altogether spontaneous, instinctive. But the universal feeling might have been thus translated into speech:—

  “Human society, in this most eastern East, has been held together from immemorial time by virtue of that cult which exacts the gratitude of the present to the past, the reverence of the living for the dead, the affection of the descendant for the ancestor. Far beyond the visible world extends the duty of the child to the parent, of the servant to the master, of the subject to the sovereign. Therefore do the dead preside in the family council, in the communal assembly, in the high seats of judgment, in the governing of cities, in the ruling of the land.

  “Against the Virtue Supreme of Filial Piety,—against the religion of the Ancestors,—against all faith and gratitude and reverence and duty,—against the total moral experience of her race,—O-Dai has sinned the sin that cannot be forgiven. Therefore shall the people account her a creature impure,—less deserving of fellowship than the Éta,—less worthy of kindness than the dog in the street or the cat upon the roof; since even these, according to their feebler light, observe the common law of duty and affection.

  “O-Dai has refused to her dead the word of thankfulness, the whisper of love, the reverence of a daughter. Therefore, now and forever, the living shall refuse to her the word of greeting, the common salutation, the kindly answer.

  “O-Dai has mocked the memory of the father who begot her, the memory of the mother whose breasts she sucked, the memory of the elders who cherished her childhood, the memory of the little one who called her Sister. She has mocked at love: therefore all love shall be denied her, all offices of affection.

  “To the spirit of the father who begot her, to the spirit of the mother who bore her, O-Dai has refused the shadow of a roof, and the vapor of food, and the offering of water. Even so to her shall be denied the shelter of a roof, and the gift of food, and the cup of refreshment.

  “And even as she cast out the dead, the living shall cast her out. As a carcass shall she be in the way,—as the small carrion that none will turn to look upon, that none will bury, that none will pity, that none will speak for in prayer to the Gods and the Buddhas. As a Gaki 1 she shall be,—as a Shōjiki-Gaki, —seeking sustenance in refuse-heaps. Alive into hell shall she enter;—yet shall her hell remain the single hell, the solitary hell, the hell Kodoku, that spheres the spirit accurst in solitude of fire. . . .”

  III

  Unexpectedly the missionary-women informed O-Dai that she would have to take care of herself. Perhaps she had done her best; but she certainly had not been to them of any use whatever, and they required a capable assistant. Moreover they were going away for some time, and could not take her with them. Surely she could not have been so foolish as to think that they were going to give her three yen per month merely for being a Christian! . . .

  O-Dai cried; and they advised her to be brave, and to walk in the paths of virtue. She said that she could not find employment: they told her that no industrious and honest person need ever want for work in this busy world. Then, in desperate terror, she told them truths which they could not understand, and energetically refused to believe. She spoke of a danger imminent; and they answered her with all the harshness of which they were capable,—believing that she had confessed herself utterly depraved. In this they were wrong. There was no atom of vice in the girl: an amiable weakness and a childish trustfulness were the worst of her faults. Really she needed help,—needed it quickly,—needed it terribly. But they could understand only that she wanted money; and that she had threatened to commit sin if she did not get it. They owed her nothing, as she had always been paid in advance; and they imagined excellent reasons for denying her further aid of any sort.

  So they put her into the street. Already she had sold her loom. She had nothing more to sell except the single robe upon her back, and a few pair of useless tabi, or cleft stockings, which the missionary-women had obliged her to buy, because they thought that it was immodest for a young girl to be seen with naked feet. (They had also obliged her to twist her hair into a hideous back-knot, because the Japanese style of wearing the hair seemed to them un-godly.)

  What becomes of the Japanese girl publicly convicted of offending against filial piety? What becomes of the English girl publicly convicted of unchastity? . . .

  Of course, had she been strong, O-Dai might have filled her sleeves with stones, and thrown herself into the river,—which would have been an excellent thing to do under the circumstances. Or she might have cut her throat,—which is more respectable, as the act requires both nerve and skill. But, like most converts of her class, O-Dai was weak: the courage of the race had failed in her. She wanted still to see the sun; and she was not of the sturdy type able to wrestle with the earth for that privilege. Even after fully abjuring her errors, there was left but one road for her to travel.

  Said the person who bought the body of O-Dai at a third of the price prayed for:—

  “My business is an exceedingly shameful business. But even into this business no woman can be received who is known to have done the thing that you have done. If I were to take you into my house, no visitors would come; and the people would probably make trouble. Therefore to Ōsaka, where you are not known, you shall be sent; and the house in Ōsaka will pay the money. . . .”

  So vanished forever O-Dai,—flung into the furnace of a city’s lust. . . . Perhaps she existed only to furnish one example of facts that every foreign missionary ought to try to understand.

  Drifting

  A typhoon was coming; and I sat on the sea-wall in a great wind to look at the breakers; and old Amano Jinsuké sat beside me. Southeast all was black-blue gloom, except the sea, which had a strange and tawny color. Enormous surges were already towering in. A hundred yards away they crumbled over with thunder and earthquake, and sent their foam leaping and sheeting up the slope, to spring at our faces. After each long crash, the sound of the shingle retreating was exactly like the roar of a railway train at full speed. I told Amano Jinsuké that it made me afraid; and he smiled.

  “I swam for two nights and two days,” he said, “in a sea worse than this. I was nineteen years old at the time. Out of a crew of eight, I was the only man saved.

  “Our ship was called the Fukuju Maru; 1 —she was owned by Mayéda Jingorō, of this town. All of the crew but one were Yaidzu men. The captain was Saito Kichiyëmon,—a man more than sixty years of age: he lived in Jō-no-Koshi,—the street just behind us. There was another old man on board, called Nito Shōshichi, who lived in the Araya quarter. Then there was Terao Kankichi, forty-two years old: his brother Minosuké, a lad of sixteen, was also with us. The Terao folk lived in Araya. Then there was Saito Heikichi, thirty years old; and there was a man called Matsushirō;—he came from Suō, but had settled in Yaidzu. Washino Otokichi was another of the crew: he lived in Jō-no-Koshi, and was only twenty-one. I was the youngest on board,—excepting Terao Minosuké.

  “We sailed from Yaidzu on the morning of the tenth day of the seventh month of Manyen Gwannen, 2 —the Year of the Ape,— bound for Sanuki. On the night of the eleve
nth, in the Kishū offing, we were caught by a typhoon from the southeast. A little before midnight, the ship capsized. As I felt her going over, I caught a plank, and threw it out, and jumped. It was blowing fearfully at the time; and the night was so dark that I could see only a few feet away; but I was lucky enough to find that plank, and put it under me. In another moment the ship was gone. Near me in the water were Washino Otokichi and the Terao brothers and the man Matsushirō,—all swimming. There was no sign of the rest: they probably went down with the ship. We five kept calling to each other as we went up and down with the great seas; and I found that every one except Terao Kankichi had a plank or a timber of some sort. I cried to Kankichi:— ‘Elder brother, you have children, and I am very young;—let me give you this plank!’ He shouted back:—‘In this sea a plank is dangerous!—keep away from timber, Jinyō!—you may get hurt!’ Before I could answer him, a wave like a black mountain burst over us. I was a long time under; and when I came up again, there was no sign of Kankichi. The younger men were still swimming; but they had been swept away to the left of me;—I could not see them: we shouted to each other. I tried to keep with the waves—the others called to me:— ‘Jinyō! Jinyō!—come this way,—this way!’ But I knew that to go in their direction would be very dangerous; for every time that a wave struck me sideways, I was taken under. So I called back to them, ‘Keep with the tide!—keep with the current!’ But they did not seem to understand;—and they still called to me, ‘Kocchi é koi!—kocchi é koi!’ 3 —and their voices each time sounded more and more far away. I became afraid to answer. . . . The drowned call to you like that when they want company: Kocchi é koi!—kocchi é koi! . . .