"Out of the East": Reveries and Studies in New Japan

TO NISHIDA SENTARŌ IN DEAR REMEMBRANCE OF IZUMO DAYS
The Dream of a Summer Day first appeared in the Japan Daily Mail.
The hotel seemed to me a paradise, and the maids thereof celestial beings. This was because I had just fled away from one of the Open Ports, where I had ventured to seek comfort in a European hotel, supplied with all modern improvements. To find myself at ease once more in a yukata, seated upon cool, soft matting, waited upon by sweet-voiced girls, and surrounded by things of beauty, was therefore like a redemption from all the sorrows of the nineteenth century. Bamboo-shoots and lotus-bulbs were given me for breakfast, and a fan from heaven for a keepsake. The design upon that fan represented only the white rushing burst of one great wave on a beach, and sea-birds shooting in exultation through the blue overhead. But to behold it was worth all the trouble of the journey. It was a glory of light, a thunder of motion, a triumph of sea-wind,—all in one. It made me want to shout when I looked at it.
Between the cedarn balcony pillars I could see the course of the pretty gray town following the shore-sweep,—and yellow lazy junks asleep at anchor,—and the opening of the bay between enormous green cliffs,—and beyond it the blaze of summer to the horizon. In that horizon there were mountain shapes faint as old memories. And all things but the gray town, and the yellow junks, and the green cliffs, were blue.
She asked whither I honorably intended to go, that she might order a kuruma for me. And I made answer:—
To Kumamoto. But the name of your house I much wish to know, that I may always remember it.
My guest-rooms, she said, are augustly insignificant, and my maidens honorably rude. But the house is called the House of Urashima. And now I go to order a kuruma.
The music of her voice passed; and I felt enchantment falling all about me,—like the thrilling of a ghostly web. For the name was the name of the story of a song that bewitches men.