III

I had a queer time of it last night.

About eight o’clock I reached the hotel. It had already closed up for the night, and was but dimly lighted. I could not, of course, tell, then, the plan of the house or the layout of its garden, to say nothing of its bearing on the points of the compass. I was led by the nose, as it were, through a long, long winding sort of passage, at the end of which I was put in a small room of about six mats. I could not at all tell where I was; the place had so completely changed since I was here last. After supper, and then a dip in the hot spring bath, I was sipping tea in my room, when a young girl came in, and asked me if she should make my bed.

What struck me as not a little strange was that it was the same girl who had come out to let me in when I arrived; it was this same girl who had brought me supper and waited on me; it was this same girl who had showed me to the bath room; and it was again this same girl who took upon herself the trouble of making the bed for me. This little woman seemed to have everything on her shoulders in this establishment; and yet she seldom spoke a word. I would have done her injustice, however, if I said she was country-looking. When she went before me, with her girlish crimson obi17 tied unsentimentally on her back, and with an old-fashioned burning candle in her hand, taking me round and round along a corridor-like and stairway-like passages, when she with the same crimson obi and the same candlestick, led me down places, of which it was difficult to say whether they were corridors or staircases, down to the bath tank, I felt as if I were myself a figure in a picture moving in a world of canvas.

When she waited on me at supper, she begged me to put up with the room I was in, which was, she said, one of family use, as the other rooms were undusted, no guests coming these days. When she finished making my bed she spoke humanly, wishing me “a good night of rest,” before she left my room. My ears followed her footsteps along the long wriggling sort of passage until they finally died out far away. Then stillness fell and the whole place seemed to have become deserted by all things human.

Only once before in all my life, I went through an experience like this. Long ago I crossed Boshu from Tateyama to the Pacific sea coast, and went on foot from Kazusa to Choshi along the sea shore. On the way I stopped overnight at a place. At a place, and I cannot say less vaguely as the name of the locality and of the inn where I lodged had both long since been forgotten. It is not even clear that it was really an inn where I passed the night. The house was very large but inhabited by only two women. I asked them if they would let me stop overnight. The older of the two said “yes” and the younger said: “This way please.” I followed the latter past many spacious but deserted and neglected rooms, and was finally shown up the innermost semi-two-storey flat. I mounted three staircases and was about to enter my room, when a gust of evening wind made a bunch of bamboos, growing bendingly under the eve, rustle against my head and shoulders, somehow chilling me to the bones. The wooden flooring of the verandah, I stepped upon, was almost crumbling with age. I remarked, then, the sprouts would pierce through the flooring and take possession of the room next spring. The young woman said nothing but went away grinning.

That night, the rustling of bamboos robbed me of all my sleep. I slid open the front paper screen and found myself looking over, in the clear Summer moonlight, a grass-grown garden, which had no boundary hedge or fence, but stretched into a weedy elevation, beyond which the great ocean roared with its tumbling breakers, menacing the world of man. I passed the whole night nervously awake, imprisoning myself in an apology of a mosquito net. My lot that night might be, I thought, a page from some weird story book.

I had never since felt as I did then, until my first night at Nakoi.

I was lying on my back in my bed, and my eyes accidentally caught sight of some Chinese writing mounted in a vermilion frame, hung high up a wall. It consisted of seven big characters which said: “Shadow of bamboos sweeping no dust rises.” It was signed “Daitetsu.” Then my fancy travelled for a while into the realm of autographs. A Jakuchu in the picture hanging niche next entered my eyes. It was a picture of a crane standing on one foot, a production of a bold sweep of brush, that pleased me marvellously. In a little while I fell asleep and was soon lost in dreamland.

The Maiden of Nagara appeared before me, in a long-sleeved bridal gown, crossing a mountain on a pony. The Sasabe Otoko and the Sasada Otoko suddenly slipped into the scene, and began struggling to carry away the maiden. Thereupon the girl changed as suddenly into Ophelia, mounting a branch of willow tree, and then floating down a stream. She was singing sweetly. Eager to rescue her, I reached a long pole and ran along Mukojima with it. She showed no sign of struggle, but was smiling and singing as the tide carried her down, down to where I knew not. I hallooed and hallooed to her, with the pole on my shoulder.

My hallooing awoke me. I was wet with perspiration. What a curious mixture of the poetical and vulgar, I thought. Priest Ta Hui in the Sung days of China, who claimed to be able to have everything his way after he had attained his Buddhistic emancipation, complained that he was nevertheless vulnerable to unworthy thoughts that cropped up in his dreams. He is said to have suffered long and greatly from this failing. I thought that was quite natural. It would do little credit to anyone making art one’s life to dream a not more beautiful dream. One such as I dreamed would in greater part make neither a picture nor poetry worthy of the name. Thinking thus, I turned my body over in bed and saw the moon shining on the paper screen, casting on it the shadow of some branches of tree. The night looked almost bright.

Possibly just a fancy; but I thought I heard someone singing or rather chanting softly. I pricked my ears to know if it was a song that had escaped from dreamland into this world of reality, or a real voice flowing into dreams? I was sure there was someone singing. The voice was indisputably thin and low; but faint as it was, it was pulsating the Spring night, which was on the verge of sleep. The weird part of it was that, whatever its tune, its wording, of which there was no reason that it could be heard clearly, being not uttered near me, nevertheless came distinctly, the sinking voice repeating over and over the song of Nagarano Otome: “Even like the dew drop, that when autumn comes, lodges on grass leaves, must I roll off to die.”

The chanting sounded first near the verandah; but it gradually grew fainter and farther. What ceases suddenly produces a feeling of suddenness; but it leaves little room for sentiment. A voice that speaks peremptorily resolution rouses also a feeling of peremptoriness and resolution in others. But confronted by a phenomenon that had no definite limit but went on thinning and thinning until it would imperceptibly disappear altogether, you could not help feeling that you must mince up the minute and split the second, your sense of helplessness and hopelessness momentarily deepening. The chant sounded dying like a dying man, becoming more and more feeble like an outgoing light; and in that song that distracted the heart as if with the approaching end, there was a tune that spoke for all the sorrows of the Spring of the whole world.

I listened to the song, holding myself down in the bed; but as it went farther and farther, I felt, I must chase it, despite the consciousness that it was luring me out by the ear. The thinner it grew the more I felt that I should let my ear only fly after it. Just at the moment I thought, however hard I might listen, my ears would hear no more, I could constrain myself no longer and unconsciously I slipped out of my bed. The same moment I opened the shoji,18 and stood out in the verandah, with the lower half of my body bathing in the moonlight and a tree throwing its waving shadow on my night clothes. These details did not occur to me, however, at the instant I opened the shoji.

But that dying sound? I looked in the direction toward which my ear was running. There I espied a shadowy form in the moonlight as it were, with its back to a tree, which, if in bloom, might be an aronia. The misty dark thing flanked right, stepping on the shadow of blossoms on the ground, even before it had left on me a clear impression that “it must be it.” A corner of the roof, thrown on the ground, of a room adjoining mine, seemed to move lithely, and the next moment shut out from view a tall figure of a woman.

I was lost to myself for many moments, as I stood thinly clad in my night gown, with my hand on the screen. The minute I returned to myself, I was made keenly conscious that a night of Spring in the mountain was decidedly chilly. As it was, I did not hesitate to permit myself to creep back into the bed from which I had crept out, and started on another train of thought. I took out my watch from under the pillow and found it pointing at ten past one. I put the watch back under the pillow, and returned to my thoughts. “It cannot be a spook,” I thought. If not an apparition, it must be a human being, and if a human being, it must be a woman. She might have been the O-Jo-san of this house. If so, it seemed rather defying propriety that a young woman, who had taken a divorce of her husband should, at that hour of night, be out in the garden, that ran into the mountain. In any case, sleep had become impossible, that watch of mine under the pillow ticking me to irrepressible wakefulness. The tiny ticking of my watch had never before troubled me; but on this particular night it seemed to say “No sleep for you tonight, but think, think, think.” It was outrageously extraordinary.

A frightful thing will make poetry when you regard it merely as the form itself of frightfulness; just as a weird eerie sight may be worked into a picture, if you treat it as something horrid in itself, independent of you. Likewise a disappointed love makes an excellent theme of art when gentleness, sympathy, worries and, indeed, even the very overflow of pains, it occasions, are turned objectively into visions before you, divorced from the actual torments felt in your heart. Nay, some people imagine that they are disappointed in love in order to enjoy the pleasure of agonising themselves. Ordinary mortals laugh at them as idiotic, as lunatic; but they are no more unbalanced, from the point of view of having their own artistic ground to stand on, than those who go into the ecstacy of living in a world of their own by creating scenery that nowhere exists.

Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common people, idiots, lunatics⁠—whatever be their qualification in their daily life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit subjects for their canvas or for their pen. But they betray not even a shadow of grievance when they tell others of their experiences. They not only narrate gleefully the things they enjoyed and were delighted with, but are enthusiastic over events that once tortured them but now come back as sweet memories. Not that they mean to deceive themselves and others; but the truth is that when out on the road they see and feel as ordinary mortals do, but they become poets when they talk of their past. And this accounts for their inconsistencies. He may be called an artist, then, who lives in a triangle, built by knocking off a corner called common sense of the four-angled world.

Be it in nature or in the world of man, artists thus discover countless gems and stones of inestimable value, in places which the multitude dare not approach. The secret of such a discovery is commonly called beautifying. But in reality there is no beautification about it at all, light and colour having in their brilliancy always existed in this mundane world; but because flowers fall from the sky in vain for common eyes; because worldly trammels are unshakable; because the thought of success and prosperity hang so heavy on the human mind, nobody has been able to see the beauties of a railway train till Turner showed them, and the world waited for Ohkyo to be shown the aesthetics of a ghost.

The shadow I had just seen had, as a phenomenon complete in itself and nothing more, something poetical about it that none could deny who saw or heard it. A sequestered spa in the bosom of a mountain⁠—the shadow of flowers in a Spring night⁠—The soft warbling of a song under a telltale moon⁠—a dreamy figure in pale moonlight⁠—every one of them would have made a capital subject for an artist. For all that, I was trying unnecessarily to see what might be behind the vision, and a blood-chilling sensation that had taken possession of me blinded me to the elegance of the situation, which was perfectly consistent in itself and the picturesqueness that could not be hoped for. I thought myself unworthy of my professed unhumanity and felt I must go through more training before I could proclaim myself a poet or an artist. Salvator Rosa of Italy came vividly before my eyes with his perilous tale of joining the banditti of the Abruzzi. I had wandered away from my home with just a sketch book, and I should be ashamed of myself, if I had not Rosa’s resolve.

How should I rehabilitate myself as a poet in such circumstances? All that is necessary is, I argued to myself, I may put myself in a condition that would enable me to take hold of my feelings, lay them before me, stand a step behind, and examine them calmly unprejudicedly as if I were another person, not myself. The poet is under an obligation, when he dies, to dissect his own body and publish the cause of his malady. There may be various ways of doing this; but the easiest and nearest is to make an instantaneous survey of everything you can lay your hand on, and reduce it into a seventeen syllable hokku. The seventeen syllable effusion is the simplest of poems, and you can have it, when you are washing your face in the morning, or when you are going in a tram car. It makes a poet of you most simply and most easily. To be a poet is to be enlightened, and I mean no disparagement, when I say, it is the simplest and easiest. The simpler the more beneficial it is, and should the more be respected. Suppose you lose your temper. You make a seventeen syllable hokku of your indignation. The moment seventeen syllables get into shape, your anger becomes something outside of you⁠—you cannot be fuming with anger and composing a hokku at the same time. You are moved to tears; you make seventeen syllables, and they delight you. When your tears are changed into seventeen syllables, your tearful anguish has left you, and you have become a self only joyous of being a man capable of weeping.

This has always been the stand I insisted upon, and I now wanted to put it to a practical test. Lying abed, I set about making a series of seventeen syllables of the events of the night. A very deliberate enterprise as I was undertaking, I lay open my sketchbook near the pillow, to jot down in it as fast as I got the lines, lest they might become lost as fugitive thoughts, hard to recapture.

“Kaidono tsuyuo furu-u-ya monogurui,”19 I wrote down as my first production. If the reading of it did not strike me as particularly captivating, neither did it give rise to any uncomfortably creepy feeling. I next jotted down: “Hanano kage, onnano kageno oborokana.”20 It was faulty with a redundancy. I forgave myself for it; because all I wanted was to recover calmness and humour myself into an easy frame of mind. For the third piece, I ventured: “Shoichi-i onnani bakete oborozuki.”21 It sounded droll and amused me.

All was right at this rate, I thought, and getting into the spirit of the thing, I scribbled down all that follow, one after another:

“Haruno hoshio otoshite
Yowano kazashikana.”22

“Haruno yono kumoni
Nurasuya araigami.”23

“Haruya koyoi
Uta tsukamatsuru onsugata.”24

“Kaido no seiga
Detekuru tsukiyokana.”25

“Uta oriori gekkano
Haruo ochikochisu.”26

“Omoi kitte fukeyuku
Haruno hitorikana.”27

Sleep was stealing over me by the time I had finished committing the last piece to the sketchbook.

I was half asleep and half awake, in a condition, to describe which was invented, I thought, the expression “as in a trance.” Nobody is conscious of self in a sound sleep; but in wakefulness the world outside is never forgotten. Between the two regions lies the borderland of vision, where things look too misty to be called awake, and yet too animate to be in sleep. It is a condition in which “up awake” and “lie asleep” are put in one and the same cup and stirred and mixed up with the straw of poetry and song. Shade off the colours of nature into all but a dream, push this universe of reality adrift into the sea of haze, and smooth into curves all sharp angles with the magic hand of the genie of sleep. Breathe slow pulsation into the world so tempered. Imagine clouds of smoke crawling the surface of such a world, unable to fly away though it would; imagine again your soul about to depart lingering, unable to leave its shell. Such is the condition I mean. It is again the state in which the soul is lambently struggling, and finally unable to preserve its entity dissolves into an ethereal existence and clings and hangs about with no heart to depart.

I was traversing this borderland of dreamy consciousness when the karakami28 of my room opened, as if of its own accord, and in the opening appeared the figure of a woman, like a phantom. The apparition did not cause me surprise, nor did it frighten me: I simply looked at it with easy pleasant sensation. Perhaps I put it too strongly to say I “looked at”; for the truth was, the shadowy thing slid with no permission of mine behind the lids of my eyes, which were closed. The phantom slowly came into my room, with the smoothness of a fairy queen walking across a placid surface of water. The matted floor gave no sound of human footsteps. I could not tell distinctly as I was looking through closed eyelids; but she looked fair, with a wealth of hair and a long well-shaped neck, making me feel as if I were throwing my eyes on a vignette of latter-day vogue, held up against a light.

The vision stopped before a cupboard in the rear of the room. A karakami screening the cupboard was pushed open and a slim arm visible in the dark came out of a sleeve. The screen closed then and the phantom sailed noiselessly back to the opening, which, in the next moment, closed of itself. Sleep now gathered faster and faster on me. The dead must feel as I did then, I obscurely imagined, before being reborn into a horse or an ox.

I did not know how long I had been wandering between man and horse; only I opened my eyes. The curtain of night had apparently been raised long since, and the world was light from end to end, with the bright Spring sun printing darkly bamboo lattices on the window shoji,29 leaving no room, as it appeared, for any spooky things to lurk about on the face of the earth. The mysterious apparition must have hied into the far, far away world on the other side of the Styx.

I went straightway down to the bathroom for a morning dip. I just held my head above water for a full five minutes, perfectly will-less to wash my face or to be getting out. How could I have gone, I wondered, into such state of mind as I did last night and how could the world go head-over-heels so completely by merely crossing the boundary line of night and day.

I was too lazy to dry myself and was coming out of the bathroom almost wet, when to my surprise, simultaneous with my opening the bathroom door from within, a voice⁠—that of a woman⁠—outside said: “Good morning, did you sleep well last night?”

I had expected no one on the other side of the door, and the greeting came with such absolute suddenness that I was at a loss for an answer. The voice then said: “Put this on and be good; so there.” This was said as the person, from whom the voice proceeded, went behind me and put gently on my back a kimono deliciously soft to the skin,30 Then and only then did the command of words return to me sufficiently to enable me to blurt out: “So kind of you, thank you.” The woman withdrew a step or two backward as I turned to say this.

Now, it is an unwritten law for novelists, from time immemorial, to give the minutest portrayal of their hero or heroine. If words, phrases, clauses, and effusions employed by ancients as well as by moderns, of the East and of the West, in describing and speaking of beautiful women, were collected, they might, indeed, out-volume even the great Buddhist Sutras. The words might mount up to a countless number, if I were to pick out, from this overwhelming accumulation of adjectives, those that would fit the woman, who was standing three steps from me, with her body slightly twisted halfway round toward me and looking at me from the corner of her eyes, as if enjoying my amazement and embarrassment. To confess the truth, I had never yet seen an expression like this woman’s in the thirty years of my life. According to the Greek sculptural ideals, the artists say, calmness seems to be that state of force in which it is ready for, but has not yet gone, into action. Roused into action it may awake the winds and clouds and bring down a thunderstorm. But one does not know what, and it is precisely the consciousness of this profound and unseen potentiality that makes the Greek art live for centuries and centuries with its unchanging powers of fascination. This serene calmness with its electric possibilities, it is which forms the source of what the world calls dignity and augustness. But once in motion the force must take one form or another, and once in form it can no longer retain its mystic powers, nor can it recover its perfection. There is always, thus, something low and mean in motion. This one word motion, it was, that made failures of Unkey’s Niwo and Hokusai’s comic pictures. Motion or rest? That is where the vital question hangs for us artists. The qualities of beautiful women, from the oldest of times, may be brought under either one of these categories.

But the woman before me was a puzzle, her expression defying my power of judgment. Her lips were tightly sealed, and yet they seemed to speak. Her eyes were ceaselessly on the alert, indeed, motion itself. Her face was a lovely oval, somewhat fleshy downward and altogether calmly composed. Her brow was narrow, not quite in keeping with her generally classical features. Especially noticeable were her eyebrows that almost joined, and the nervous twitching going on between them as if a drop of mint oil were drying there. Not so with her nose, which was neither too thin and sharp, bespeaking flippancy nor beetle-like, indicating dullness, but was of such shape as would make a fine picture. In short, her features, taken separately, had each its own point of significance, and it was no wonder I was at a loss as they all at once crowded into my eyes with no claim to harmony.

Supposing an earthquake occurred, convulsing the earth. Suppose that awakening to the fact that motion is against one’s nature, one strives to recover one’s former repose; but carried by the force of lost balance, one keeps on in motion, in spite of oneself, and wants in desperation to be now agitated with a vengeance. Suppose one is capable of an expression reflecting such a state of things, then it was precisely such an expression that I saw in the woman before me.

Thus it was that behind her look of contempt, I could see a flicker of yearning, and the gleam of a careful mind from under a mocking air. She looked as if she thought nothing of a hundred men, when she let loose her wit and rode on her high spirits. There was no unity of expression. I might have said, light and darkness of mind were living under the same roof, quarreling. The fact that there was no unity in her expression was evidence, as I took it, that there was no unity in her mind. That there was no unity in her mind must be the consequence of there being no unity in the world in which she had lived. Hers was the face of one struggling to overcome the unhappiness that was weighing down upon her. She must be a woman standing under a star of ill-luck.

“Thank you.” Repeating the words, I lightly bowed to her.

“Your room is dusted. Go back and you will see. I will come to you later.”

No sooner had she said this than she nimbly turned round and lightly hurried away along the passage. She had her hair done up in the “butterfly” style. I could espy her fair neck under the black hair. Quite striking was her black satin obi, wound round her shapely waist. Perhaps the satin lined only one side of the sash, I reflected as I stood watching her.