Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  “A ship is a world,” Thomas Knox wrote in his guide for travelers, “and the ocean is the measureless azure in which it floats.” As the memory of the life they had left behind began to recede, the passengers were thrown upon one another to relieve the monotony of the trip. “Our small, circumscribed world daily grows in importance in our estimation,” Bisland recorded. “We know intimately the characters, tastes, and histories of our companions. We take each other’s photographs, and exchange warm professions of friendship; we advise each other about the future, and confide the incidents of the past.” Up on deck the first-class passengers played draughts and quoits and cards, and gossiped, and flirted, and broke in to the ancient storehouse of nautical jokes: What colors are the waves and the winds? The waves rose and the winds blew. Why is a fast young lady like a steamer? There is always a swell after her. What is the difference between an auction and seasickness? One is a sale of effects, the other the effects of a sail. Why should a seasick man wear a plaid waistcoat? To keep a check on his stomach.

  In the evenings there was group singing around the piano; some of the other passengers bent over chess and backgammon boards or dealt out hands of whist. In recent years tableaux vivants had become an increasingly popular diversion. To perform a tableau vivant, participants selected a well-known scene—usually one from a painting, but occasionally from a book or a play—and dressed themselves as the figures portrayed there. They would arrange themselves behind a curtain or folding screen, assuming the positions shown in the tableau; then the audience was invited in and the curtain dramatically removed to reveal the scene, the participants remaining perfectly still for as long as possible. Remarkable effects could be accomplished with just a few shawls or cloaks, some wigs, spectacles, cleverly concealed pillows, a bit of burnt cork. “The more complete the transformation the greater the fun,” advised Lady Gertrude Elizabeth Campbell in her book Etiquette of Good Society, “gentlemen dressed as ladies, children metamorphosed into adults, thin people made up into stout ones—any change, in fact, but that of ladies donning male attire.”

  Early in the morning of December 8, 1889, one of the sailors pointed to the horizon and announced, “That is Japan.” Elizabeth Bisland joined in the excitement among the passengers, though as far as she could tell there was nothing to be seen but the same monotonous sea and sky. After a time a delicate gray cloud could be made out low on the far horizon; as the ship steamed closer the cloud began to assume the shape of a cone, lifting itself ever higher from the sea until it was no longer a cloud at all but a snow-capped mountain, white on top and dark below, spreading out toward the bottom like an inverted fan. Mount Fuji, or Fujiyama, as the Japanese called her, “Mother of Fire” (for it was an active volcano that had last erupted in the year 1707), rose more than twelve thousand feet into the sky, unmarred by any surrounding peaks, isolated in its majesty. Seeing it for the first time, Bisland understood at once how it could figure so strongly in the Japanese imagination, could be worshipped as a sacred place, made the site of countless pilgrimages. She recalled the lines of the ancient Japanese poem: “Wouldst thou of the lofty gods / Know the annals, only Fuji / Can the secret story tell thee.” Gazing in silent awe at the mountain glowing pink in the morning sun, she knew it was a sight she would not forget.

  Elizabeth Bisland was now twenty-four days out of New York; traveling so long due west, she had at last reached the East.

  DECEMBER 8–10, 1889

  Yokohama, Japan

  The Oceanic cruised up the long bay toward Yokohama. The green hills that sloped down to the water were a tonic to eyes long accustomed to seeing only blue, as were the bright red buoys bobbing in the harbor. All around them large ships lay at anchor: oceangoing steamships, British, French, and German merchant vessels, American men-of-war. A cloud of sampans descended on the Oceanic as it made anchor well offshore, the native craft looking something like flat-bottomed Indian canoes. The boatmen stood at the front of the sampans, which they propelled with surprising speed by means of a single long pole. They had narrow wrists and delicate hands and wore blue cotton robes that seemed to merge with the sea and sky. The Oceanic’s first-class passengers gathered at the gangplank to await a pilot boat; the Chinese in steerage were not allowed to go ashore and would remain on the ship for the two days it was docked in Yokohama. On the ship, Bisland had become friends with a pretty dark-eyed American named Madge, who shared her excitement about Japan; the two young women were privately hoping to be transported to the pier on one of the sampans, but the missionaries had far too much baggage for that, and meekly they relented and joined the others on a more prosaic steam launch. Ascending a flight of stone steps Elizabeth Bisland was, at long last, on solid ground; after sixteen days at sea the ground seemed to sway beneath her.

  She stood at the edge of the Bund, the tree-lined esplanade that ran along the waterfront, captivated by the scene: all around her was Japan. Men wearing large mushroom-shaped straw hats trotted by pulling two-wheeled vehicles behind them. These were the famous jinrikishas—manpower carriages, in the Japanese—a word sometimes abridged to ’rikishas, and eventually Anglicized into “rickshaws.” Each jinrikisha carried a single passenger, who sat on a high leather seat covered by a retractable hood; it was something like one of the hansom cabs found in New York, though here of course the pulling was done by a man rather than a horse. Bisland noticed a strange quiet on the bustling street, and then realized it was the absence of horse traffic. Teams of porters—coolies, the foreigners called them—carried merchandise on poles strung across their shoulders, chanting a strange song as they walked. Their heads were completely shaven, other than a curious little twist of hair on top. The women wore their hair pulled back from their face in elaborate thick coils gleaming with oil, clasped tightly with pins of ivory or jade; they wore bright silk kimonos and wooden clogs that made a pleasant clicking sound on the macadamized street. Along the esplanade tonsured children in flowered gowns flew box-shaped kites.

  Near the pier a group of jinrikisha drivers offered rides to the tourists just off the ships. The men dressed in a style that put Bisland in mind of medieval knights, in pale blue cotton robes like tunics and skin-tight breeches that came down to their knees; their legs, she observed admiringly, were as lean and muscular as those of a thoroughbred horse. They wore straw sandals tied to their feet by a strap around the big toe. An hour on a jinrikisha cost only fifteen cents, and for seventy-five cents one could ride for the entire day. At the end of the day, Bisland reported, the jinrikisha driver “will not be winded at all, and will be in a gay and charming temper.” The men ran in sun and rain alike (Yokohama’s annual rainfall averaged about sixty inches), in the humidity of summer and the near-freezing temperatures of winter, and were expected to maintain a speed of anywhere from five to seven miles per hour. The exhausting pace of the job, the regular alternation of overheating and sudden cooling, produced chronic ailments of the throat and lungs that frequently led to consumption and then to death; a jinrikisha driver’s working life, it was said, rarely lasted more than five years.

  Bisland engaged a jinrikisha from one of the men who had smiled at her (she had already come to think of them as the “medieval folk”); he settled himself between its two wooden shafts and, grabbing hold, set off at a brisk trot to her hotel. From here, the trip would cost only a dime. They passed the Yokohama Rowing and Athletic Club, adjoining the French pier; the United Club, a popular stopping place for British visitors to the city; and several hotels, trading houses, and foreign consulates. Four decades earlier Yokohama had been a small fishing village, but in 1858 the Japanese shogun signed a treaty with U.S. consul Townsend Harris that granted the United States the right to trade with the Japanese, and on July 4 of the following year, Yokohama was officially designated as the first foreign port established under the terms of the treaty. By 1889 it was Japan’s chief port; the city now had a population of about eighty-five thousand, of whom slightly more than a thousand were foreigners, and was
divided into Japanese and European sections. Many of the foreign residents lived in villas on the cliffs that overlooked the water, an especially picturesque area known as the Bluff, surrounded by large gardens and cricket fields, and most of the rest in large stone houses on the Bund.

  Bisland was staying at the Grand Hotel, at the southern end of the Bund, a gabled mansion with a courtyard landscaped with flowering trees. Arriving at the hotel she was greeted by a steward in stockinged feet who led her to a large room facing the water; the room, she was surprised to see, had steam heat and electric call buttons. A pair of tall French doors opened onto a wide terrace, where Yokohama Bay spread itself out below her. Darkness closed down swiftly; the moon rose large and yellow, the ships in the harbor outlined in black against the sky as if drawn with a pen. In the evening the jinrikisha drivers hung pink paper lanterns from their vehicles, droplets of colored light streaming back and forth on the Bund. Before long it was time to change for dinner.

  The Grand Hotel was owned by two Frenchmen, both of whom had previously worked as professional chefs, and the hotel’s dinners were generally regarded as the best in Yokohama. As the waiters spoke nothing but Japanese, patrons ordered their dishes according to the numbers that preceded each listing on the menu: to begin the meal with Fish à la Chambord, for instance, one simply indicated the number two; Snipe à l’Imperiale was four, Roast Truffled Capons eleven, and Pudding à la DuBarry thirteen. Silent waiters dressed in short jackets and tight black leggings provided the service; they were, a guest of the hotel noted appreciatively, “busy, attentive, hurrying little fellows.” At dinner Bisland and some of her shipmates made the acquaintance of a Lieutenant McDonald, a paymaster in the American navy, who had been in Yokohama for two years and knew the city well. He offered to be their guide for an evening jaunt through the native town. In the hotel courtyard they found a row of jinrikishas standing in the moonlight, each with its pink lantern swinging. Together they set off through the quiet European town, the office buildings long since closed down for the night, the employees back at their homes on the Bund or the Bluff. They crossed a broad canal to Shichiu, the native town. Here the business day was not yet over; Bisland was reminded of her late-night tour through San Francisco’s Chinese Quarter, where midnight seemed as busy as noon. Crowds streamed around the line of jinrikishas; from everywhere came the clacking of wooden clogs. They rode past little stalls where steaming tea was poured out into cups the size of thimbles, and sake from porcelain bottles with long, delicate white necks like those of swans. In the residential areas the houses were long and low, made of wood or bamboo with tiled roofs; from the eaves hung soft bubbles of tinted light, lanterns of every shape and size. Everything seemed to her radiantly clean and inviting. Bands of white-robed policemen patrolled the streets, carrying lanterns and clubs; on the hour they called to one another in high-pitched cries that, like a ship’s eight bells, indicated all was well.

  Lieutenant McDonald was taking them to the theater, a large and fashionable playhouse boasting some of the finest actors in all of Japan. In the box office were piles of small flat sticks, each painted with a Japanese character; they were, Bisland discovered, shoe checks for the many pairs of sandals hanging on rows of pegs by the door—for in the theater, as in every Japanese house, one entered only in stockinged feet. As foreigners, however, they were permitted to retain their shoes, and inside, in one of the upper viewing galleries, they were given chairs so that they would not have to sit on their heels like the others in the audience. They had entered during one of the play’s intermissions. Downstairs, in the pit at the front of the stage, families sat on rugs beside little charcoal braziers that kept their teapots warm; some of the men were smoking or curled up taking a nap, while the women drank tea and chatted and their children romped around happily. From a latticed box on the side of the stage came the plaintive music of Japanese stringed instruments. After a while a gong sounded; the men woke, the children were recalled, and the play continued, the stage curtain pulled aside to reveal the front of a Japanese house.

  As the action began, two maids appeared and waited on their hands and knees for the entrance of their mistress, who turned out to be a male actor skillfully painted and gorgeously arrayed. The lady and her maids discussed what were obviously some very unhappy affairs, when next the lord of the house entered, a very aristocratic-looking man in a formal robe with two swords. Bisland, of course, could not understand what he was saying, but judging from his manner she presumed he could add nothing of cheerfulness to the situation. Matters remained at this melancholy pass for a while until a great clash of music startled the audience, a curtain was drawn aside from a little room at the other side of the theater, and the great shogun himself entered, strutting magnificently in his black velvet trousers down a raised pathway to the stage, followed by a retinue of attendants. He was, Bisland reflected, the embodiment of the sterner side of the Japanese character, the aristocratic spirit that kept feudalism alive in Japan long after Europe had abandoned it, the spirit that allowed no military conqueror ever to set foot on Japanese soil and that made the Japanese, to her mind, “the bravest and freest race in Asia.” Before exiting, the shogun pronounced his imperious decree, the nobleman bowing his head in calm acceptance and the mistress and her maids expressing extreme displeasure: the shogun seemed to have advised the nobleman that the best solution to his problem was an act of hara-kiri, the “happy dispatch.” Soon a talkative old beggar had arrived on the scene—presumably, Bisland figured, to relieve the gloom of the situation and provide the deus ex machina that would avert the tragedy. She would gladly have stayed to see how it all turned out, but by this time her companions were tired and wanted to go home. The next day they would be taking a train to Tokyo.

  Back at the hotel, Bisland opened the French doors and walked onto the terrace. The air felt cool and crisp on her cheeks. She realized, to her relief, that all day she had not thought about schedules. She felt deliciously tired, and very pleased to lie in a bed that was large and soft and did not sway with the motion of the waves.

  In the morning she and Madge engaged jinrikishas to take them to the main shopping street of the native town. The weather had turned colder; as they strolled about they warmed their hands at the braziers of the food stalls and drank cups of pale tea that washed away all traces of sleep and left their breath smelling like flowers. The Japanese were plump from layers of cotton-padded kimonos, their hands tucked inside the wide sleeves. It was possible, here, to imagine life in Japan before the European and American settlement. As one American visitor of the time observed, “The homes and the habits, the dress and food, the employments and amusements of the natives are here almost exactly what they were before Commodore Perry awakened the country from its long slumbers.”

  The street was lined with shops selling lacquer work, bronze, ivory, jade, all of the most astonishing craftsmanship. Every shop, it seemed, had a porcelain vase standing in the corner, with a spray of chrysanthemums artfully arranged. The shop fronts were simply bamboo curtains rolled up at the start of the business day; the floors, raised two or three feet from the ground, were covered by a fine white mat on which the shopkeepers sat on their heels, their wares displayed on shelves around them, everything within easy reach. The two women also removed their shoes and sat at the edge of the floor and did their best to communicate in the pidgin English the shopkeepers used and that to Elizabeth Bisland’s ears sounded like baby talk. They had been instructed always to bargain and never to pay more than half the asking price, but everything was so inexpensive that they were happy to pay without haggling. They were received everywhere with an air of affectionate friendliness; the shopkeepers always bowed in greeting, encouraging them to look at anything they pleased and never pressuring them to buy. After a lifetime spent amid the fierce suspicions of Americans, who seemed to look on everyone as a would-be swindler, the amiability and trustfulness of everyone here moved Bisland almost to tears. The silk shops, which they were esp
ecially eager to see, displayed elegant quilted dressing gowns, pin cushions, pillow cases, embroidered handkerchiefs, but most entrancing were the fabrics themselves. Bisland marveled at crepe of milky opal and dusky azure, crepe with the faint purples and pinks of sunsets, crepe richly patterned with bamboo fronds and chrysanthemum blossoms. In one of the shops the proprietor opened a sweet-smelling wooden box and brought out the most beautiful silk she had ever seen; it was, he told her, the “Garments of the Dawn.” The threads shimmered with the silvery white of moonlight, but within the folds the white blushed to rose, paled to blue, deepened to gold. Bisland immediately ordered a gown to be made from that fabric, and several more from some of the others; they would be ready by the following day. It was remarkable, she thought: one had only to say “Let there be a gown,” and there it was.

  The two of them lingered so long in the shops that they almost missed the train to Tokyo. Bisland spent most of the hour-long trip happily watching the passing countryside. The mist drifted in and out of the valleys between the hills; one moment the hilltops peeked out above it like islands rising from the sea, and the next melted into vapory gray outlines. Amid the fog huge dragon pines clawed the edges of the hillsides, their immense roots winding like tails around the boulders, looking exactly like the mythical creatures for which they had been named. After a time the mist floated away and the landscape became a mass of green velvet. They rode past villages of thatch-roofed farmhouses, past tidy railway stations, latticed teahouses with roofs like pagodas, little roadside temples, plum orchards, water-soaked rice paddies, nothing seeming unnecessary or out of place, everywhere an atmosphere of delicate fantasticality; it occurred to her that the Japanese painters so often derided by Western critics as simplistic and convention-bound had in fact been able to capture with exquisite fidelity, in just a few deft brushstrokes, the world as it actually existed around them.