Lucian Swift Kirtland

“ THE INN AT KAMA-SUWA
The railway train with its sly befuddling through the luxury of speed has picked the traveller’s wallet. Cooped behind a smudged window, how can he sense the personality of the town he enters? One should stand in isolation on the heights above a city, and then follow down some path until within the streets one is absorbed by the throbbing life. ”

“ Or will her imagining heart know adventure in the world beyond the vision of her doorstep? Perhaps the sen will come so slowly to the barber’s drawer that the wistful daughter will be sold to a geisha master, and in filial piety, fulfilling the contract, she may go even to Tokyo where she will be taught to sing and to dance and to laugh gaily. She may find that life is kind. Again, she may be sold to another life—under the juggernaut of poverty—and in the Nightless City knowledge will come to dwell in the empty place where wistfulness was. ”

“ The rhythm of the art of the Japanese tea-house is not dependent upon regularity nor balance. Its perfection can never be completed. The last word cannot be spoken. It is like life.
We walked over the soft mats examining the work of the craftsman builder who had made his material yield its beauty through the grain and line of each plank, board, beam, pillar, and panel. I moved a cushion to the balcony and sat down to study the room in deeper perspective. I never followed out this sedate contemplation, for instead I happened to look over the balcony. ”

“ We sat down to listen to the birds, admire the butterflies, and watch the gold and silver fish bob out of the water. The silent temple, hidden in the shadows of the trees, was built after the noble lines of the Kyoto tradition and may have been contemporary with that era. We were waiting for Hori. We knew that we had several intricate turnings before we should come to our mountain road to Kama-Suwa, and we were indulging ourselves that morning in unwonted conservatism over the possibility of a mistake. ”

“ Two of the rooms were crowded with supper parties, of wine, women, and song, but compared to the revelries of bucolic bloods in other lands, something might be said in praise of such restraint as prevailed in the Fujimi tea-house. It may be no honour nor compliment to the spirit of refinement to wish vice as well as virtue clothed in some modicum of grace and retirement, but it does make the world easier to live in. ”

“ The vase was shaped like a bottle and the inn had been called “The Bottle Inn” from that day, seventy years in the past. Our host, a youth on that day, had thought that the inn would ever be rich and renowned. He sighed. The tradition of its renown had faded and been forgotten in this age of railways. No longer did turbulent guests demand that the bottle be brought out and shown.
If his dramatic genius had been subtly leading us toward turbulence, we obeyed the pulling of the strings. We demanded to know whether the vase was still under his roof. Our host smiled. ”

“ I mentioned my change of heart to O-Owre-san as we were sitting down in the shade of a ramune shop, where unabashed nudity had gathered in a circle to regard the foreigners. He did not seem to be moved to interest by my reformation. I heaped a malediction on his head. Surely if I were willing to rearrange my opinions seven times daily at some one stage he might agree.
It was during this rest that I came upon the happiest adventure that the mouth of man may hope to experience in this imperfect world. ”

“ What are the real wishes of the leaders in Tokyo, the statesmen who are planning policies and at the same time must strive to please the great banking houses of the world?—do they look forward to the time when factories will fill the land and the spinners will not be sitting in their own doorways but the children of to-day’s workers will be standing in long rows before machines? “We are taught,” explained a Japanese, “to pay our heavy taxes cheerfully so that the empire may expand and develop. Wealth will be thus created and then taxes can be reduced.” ”

“ A slight breeze stirred the branches of the trees and started swinging the paper lanterns which hung over a stone fountain. Other guests of the inn had finished their dinners and it was their toothbrush hour. Dressed in their cotton kimonos they stood bending over shining brass basins filled from the well fountain. It would probably be useless to ask any Occidental to imagine that the function of teeth cleansing with long, flexible handled brushes may be a social and picturesque addendum to garden life; we have too long looked upon ablutions as being merely necessitous. ”

“ An accommodation train has the verve of life which the conventions of a through express stifle; but whether it be a New England local with bird cages, or the Italian misti with priests and snuff boxes, nursing madonnas, garlic sandwiches, and chianti bottles, or the stifling wooden boxes of Northern India crowded with Afridi and Babus, no train in all the world is as domestic as the Japanese kisha. ”

“ O-Owre-san shook my four-poster and begged me to consider the matter-of-factness of rolling out from my mosquito netting and taking a bite of cold breakfast. The sensuous breeze of the East, which comes for a brief hour with the first light of the sun, was blowing the curtains back from the window. I was willing to consider the getting up and the eating of the breakfast and I was willing to call both endeavours matter-of-fact, but the imagination that it was to be the first day on the highroad belonged to no such mere negativity of living. ”

“ We were always hungry. And we had learned always to expect the inn dinners to satisfy our demands. That night we truly had marvellous dishes. The bamboo shoots were as tender as bamboo shoots can be. Whether supreme genius or chance was responsible for the sauce for the chicken, the result was perfection. Dinner was very early. After the meal I found a longer kimono and, as the rain had stopped for an interval, Hori and I walked to a hill to see the sunset. On our way back we passed the tea-house which had been so enthusiastically recommended by the mistress of the baths. ”

“ Just how the round, cannonball head of the Japanese boy evolutes into the featured physiognomy of the Japanese man is puzzling. It must be a sort of bursting. The schoolboy’s eyes betray the passing moods of his emotions, but there is always something beyond the mood of the moment in his gazing, an intangible yearning for infinity. It must at times be terrifying for an Anglo-Saxon teacher or missionary to face those eyes. ”

“ In winter days when wooden shutters enclose and darken the rooms the bare simplicity may grow dreary. The wind is then the father of shivering draughts which creep over the floor, but for the days of summer, when the green valley of Fujimi lies in the shelter of the great granite ranges, the memory of the stifling cave-like rooms of our Western architecture seemed barbarous and of dull imagination in comparison. ”

“ I had most of this imagining from Hori’s understatements rather than from anything definite that he said. He is of the samurai and his ancestors learned the art of conversation in a court circle devoted to the graces. The incompleted phrase of the East so subtly makes one an accessory in the creation of the idea involved that we, of the West, who live in a world of overstatement, find ourselves disarmed to deny. One cannot discount words that have never been uttered. ”

“ Who will absolutely deny that when the endeavour to save poetical yearning from defeat is such companionship as the almost classical ceremony of watching the white fingers of a geisha pour tea into a shell of porcelain, a sort of mutual sense of responsibility to save the fineness of life may enter into the relationship as a redeeming grace against the professionalism of the geisha’s life? ”

“ They were holding a Japanese conversation. Such a conversation can only be described by telling what it is not. In rhythm it is neither the cæsura of the French peasant woman retailing gossip, nor is it the eluding tempo-harmonic tune of the Red Indian drum beat; it is not the Chinese intoning nor is it a staccato. At first the foreign ear does not distinguish the beat of the cadences but once captured the appreciation of the subtle metrical wave is never again lost. ”

“ Hardly had we, as hosts, with the aid of the baby, carried the attack with some success against rigid self-consciousness when there came the sound of a step on the stair. Immediately the mood of laughter changed to one of marked quietness and expectancy. The circle readjusted itself. The mother snatched back the baby and by some technic ended its expressions of curiosity and reduced it, as only a Japanese baby can be reduced, to a pair of staring eyes. We sat waiting the coming of the intruder. ”

“ The native inn is such an interweaving of privacy with no privacy at all that if the traveller has a sympathetic liking for the hospitality it should be put down to his temperament rather than to his reasonableness or unreasonableness. Calling upon all his reasonableness, the foreigner may still be miserable amid Japanese customs if he were born to a different crystallization. Hori considered the inn at Nirasaki to be rather superior to the average, meaning, I judged, not the luxury of the furnishings so much as the excellence of the service. ”

“ I had lost my Japanese pipe. Those little iron bowls continue to be a most admirable luxury through all of the days that one is in the land of their invention. When the traveller leaves the shores of Japan he takes away with him packages [163] of silken tobacco and his pipe, only to find that he never lights it again. The charm is broken when the circle is broken, and the circle, I suppose, is a unity when one is lying on the cushions of a balcony overlooking a garden, and a maid brings the charcoal hibachi and a pot of tea. ”

“ Great is rice, that it satisfies the hunger. Great is cotton, that it clothes the limbs. Great is art, that it can build the home from the simple bamboo. The barber jingled the four sen and a half between his palms, and the jingle was the music that sings of the buying of the rice, the cotton, and the bamboo. There is mystery and magic in economics ”

“ The conventional view is from the south, but the sacred mountain lessens never in beauty as the worshipper circles the paths about its base, north, south, east, or west. Like a glorious and beautiful soul, its moods change while it changes not. ”

“ The room to which we were taken would have been a room of dignity even for a daimyo. The maid placed our two dusty Occidental rucksacks on the shelf under the kakemona. Their very presence piped a chanty that our possessing that room was ironic comedy. We began to laugh. A ne-san is as ever ready to laugh as water is to flow, and with no other grand cause than just the doing. Our maid began laughing with us, and up the stairs came all the other maids in curiosity. Ensconced, their interest seemed permanent. Our vocabulary was very far from being sufficient to protect our Western prudery. ”

“ There was no more of a response in us when Tsuro-matsu asked us to tell a story than there had been when Hori had asked us to extemporize poetry in the valley of the Kiso. We scored a failure as always but a moment later chance gave us a second opportunity for the vindication of Occidental accomplishments.
O-Owre-san had picked up a samisen and was searching for some harmonies in the long strings. In the mystery of the night, coming out of the darkness, the music of Japan has a certain functioning charm harmonizing with the rhythm of the wings of insects beating their way through the shadows ”

“ Japan has this tradition which we have lost in our own civilization. This simplicity allows the poorest and humblest to give a gift to the richest and mightiest in the purity of hospitality. If we leave money on the tray we are robbing the peasant of his privilege. ”

“ The feeling of lonesome strangeness, which can never be entirely lost by the foreigner, feeds on its own black moods and this poisonous diet suddenly nourishes a dull hatred. Then come the bitter letters to the press demanding that the Japanese reform themselves into Utopian perfection and threatening that unless they so do the foreign guests of the empire will assemble in convention and design an all-enveloping bag (with a drawing string to be pulled tight about the neck of the wearer) as a national costume for their hosts for evermore. ”

“ When Japan, after her centuries of hermitage, had suddenly either to face the West and to compete successfully with you, or to sink into being a tributary and exploited people, our greatest necessity in patriotism was to recognize instantly that in the physical and material world we had to learn everything from you. ”

“ O-Owre-san would have none of my transcendentalism. “By leaving money,” said he, “a sum which means no more to us than does the cup of tea to the peasant, we are making an exchange of gifts. We know that he is very poor. Twenty sen is probably more than the return for two days of his labour. It will buy him a pair of wooden geta or a new pipe, or a bamboo umbrella for his wife, or such a toy for the baby as it has never dreamed of. After giving our gift we shall disappear down the road, leaving the memory of two ugly but generous foreign devils.” ”