An Artist's Letters from Japan. John La FargeЧитать онлайн книгу.
late in the day. European children were out with their Japanese nurses; from time to time a phaeton or a curricle passed with European occupants, and even in this tremendous heat ladies rode out on horseback. But the human beings are not the novelty, not even the Japanese; what is absorbingly new is the light, its whiteness, its silvery milkiness. We have come into it as through an open door after fourteen gray days of the Pacific which ended only at sunrise this very morning. And we looked again at all the light outside, from the dining-room, where we lunched, where the waiters slipped about in black clothes like those of the runners, and where we were joined at table by a foreign gentleman with high cheek-bones, yellow face, and slanting eyes, and dressed in the latest European fashion with high collar, four-in-hand scarf, and pointed shoes. He was very courteous, and managed what little English he used as skilfully as he dresses. And he gave me a touch of the far East in the story of his being here; for he is under a cloud, an amiable exile whose return to his native land might involve his being boiled in oil, or other ingenious form of death. For well as he figured at luncheon with us, I hear that he has been obliged to leave because of his having poisoned too many of his guests one day at table,—former enemies of his,—and because of his having despatched with the sword those whose digestion had resisted his efforts at conciliation. However this may be, his extradition is demanded; to which he objects, invoking Western ideas of civilization, and protesting that his excesses have been merely political. Then, late in the afternoon, we sauntered out into the Japanese quarter—walking, so that we might mingle with the gray, black, and blue crowd, and respectfully followed by our jinrikisha men, who slowly dragged our carriages behind them, like grooms following their masters. We stopped at little curio shops and bargained over miserable odds and ends, calling up, I feel sure, the unexpressed contempt of the Doctor, the great collector of precious lacquers; but it is so amusing to see things as they are, and not as they should be. We went into a show which had an enormous draped sign outside, and where, in uncertain darkness, an old, miserable, distorted dwarf played the part of a spider in a web, to the accompaniment of fiendish music and the declamation of the showman. Then we lingered outside of a booth in which a wrestling match was going on, but did not enter, and we saw the big wrestlers go in or come out, their shoulders far above the heads of a smaller race of men, and we turned at every moment to look at the children, many of whom are so pretty, and who seem to have an easy time of it. Men carry them in their arms as women do with us, and many a little elder sister walks about with the infant of the family slung behind her maternal shoulders. And then there are curious combinations of Western and Eastern dress—rarely successful. Our hats and shoes and umbrellas—all made here, are used, and our ugly shirts stiffen out the folds of the soft Japanese robes; but the multitude wear their usual dress and make no abuse of hats.
Wearied by the novelty, every detail of which, however, was known to us before, we walked back in the white, milky sunset, which was like a brilliant twilight.
July 5.
We made our first visit to town yesterday; that is to say, we went to Tokio, which is about twenty miles off. Of course we took our jinrikishas at the door of the hotel, and passing through the wide Yokohama streets, saw the semi-European houses, some with high garden walls in which are small doors: there are sidewalks, too, and European shops, and Colonial buildings, post-office, and telegraph office; and the Japanese kura, or storehouses—heavy tile-roofed buildings with black and white earthen surfaces, the black polished to a glaze, as was done with Greek and Etruscan vases. They have deep windows or doors, recessed like our safes, with a great air of solidity, which contrasts with that temporary wooden structure, the usual Japanese house. I came near saying that the little railway station is like ours; but it is better than most of ours, with neat arrangements. We entered the little cars; I noticed, in the third class, Japanese curled up on the seats. The grade is as level as a table, the landscape is lovely, and we saw the shapes we know so well in the prints—the curious shapes of the Japanese pines; little temples on the hillside; and rice-fields with their network of causeways, occasionally a horse or a peasant threading them. The land is cultivated like a garden, the lotus leaves fill the ditches, and one or two pink flowers are just out. From time to time we saw stretches of blue sea. And once, for an instant, as I looked up into the hazy, clouded sky, far beyond the hills, that were lost in the mist into which the rice-field stretched, I saw a pale, clear blue opening in which was an outline more distinct, something very pure, the edge of a mountain, looking as if it belonged to another world than the dewy moist one in which we are—the cone of Fusi-yama.
On passing through the station, very much like the other with its various arrangements for comfort and order,—first-, second-, and third-class rooms and so forth,—we met a crowd of jinrikishas with their runners, or, as my friends tell me to call them, kuruma and kurumaya, every man clamoring for patronage in the usual way of the hackman.
We selected as a leader Chojiro, who speaks English—a little; is a traveled man, having gone as far as Constantinople; wears the old-fashioned queue, flattened forward over the top of his shaven head; and whose naked feet were to run through the day over newly-macadamized roads, for which a horse would need to be well shod. A little way from us, on the square, stood the car of the tramway, which runs as far as Asakusa, to the great popular temples of protecting divinities, Kuwanon and Jizo,—and Benten, from whose shrine flowed one day copper coins as if from a fountain,—where Buddhist sermons are preached daily; which are full of innumerable images, pictures, and ex-votos; and where prayer-wheels, duly turned, helped the worshiper to be free from annoying sins, or to obtain his desires.
How shall I describe our ride through the enormous city? We were going far across it to call on Professor F——, the great authority on Japanese art, and to be delighted and instructed by him through some fragments of his collection.
In the first street where the tramway runs there are semi-European façades to houses, and in their pilasters the Ionic capital has at length made the circle of the world. Then we took more Oriental and narrower streets, through the quarter of the gei-sha, the dancers and singers who go out perpetually to put a finishing touch on entertainments. At such early hours they are of course unseen. Where houses seemed more closed than usual servants were attending to household duties, and we heard the occasional strum of a guitar. Then great streets again, with innumerable low houses, the usual shops, like open sheds, with swinging signs carved, painted, and gilded, or with draperies of black cloth marked with white characters. Merchants sat on their mats among the crowded goods, girls at corners drew water from the wells; in a narrower street the black streak of a file of bulls peacefully dragging merchandise; where the crowd was thickest a black-lacquered palanquin, all closed, in which was shut some obstinate adherent to ancient fashions. Then bridges and canals, and great empty spaces, long white walls with black copings, and buildings that continued the walls, with gratings like those of barracks. These were the yashikis—inclosed residences of princes who were formerly obliged to spend part of the year at the seat of government with small armies of retainers. Then the walls of the castle, great sloping ramparts of irregular blocks of masonry, about which stand strangely twisted pine-trees, while the great moats of clouded water are almost filled with the big leaves of the lotus. Now and then great gates of gray wood and enormous doors. On some of the wide avenues we met cavalry officers in European costume, correct in style, most of the younger with straggling mustaches, long and thin, whence their nickname of "horn-pouts," naturally connected with that of the "cats," devourers of fish, as the gei-sha are called. Near official buildings we saw a great deal of black frock-coats, and trousers, and spectacles. Everything was seen at a full run, our runners dragging us at horse's pace. Still it was long before we reached our destination. Streets succeeded streets, empty or full, in desolate Oriental wearisomeness. At length we stopped at a little gate in a plank fence, and entered a vast high space, formerly a prince's park, at one end of which we saw trees and hills, and we came to the Professor's house, a little European structure. My mind is