CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE RAIN, NARA
kind with white blossoms, more like the European species. Both of these are wild, and from them the Japanese gardeners have raised many varieties, double and single flowered, some with the growth of the weeping-willow, and others with a spreading habit. The flowers vary in color from white to light crimson, and I noticed some young trees with large double blossoms which were pale yellow with a pink flush on the outer petals, like a delicate tea-rose.
SARA-HIKI-SAKA, NEAR YOSHINO—LATER CHERRIES
At the Tatsumi-ya, just by the remains of the huge bronze torii, which, until it was blown down by a hurricane, formed the entrance to the main street, I found a little suite of rooms built in the garden away from the rest of the house, and at once engaged them, in happy anticipation of quiet nights. These isolated rooms have some disadvantages, such as having to get to the bath and back on wet nights, but a very short acquaintance with life in a tea-house makes the traveller disregard such trifling inconveniences for the certainty of peaceful sleep. The Japanese wanderers usually finish their day’s journey about five in the afternoon, and, after the preliminary cup of tea, discard their travel-stained clothes for the clean kimono which every well-regulated tea-house supplies to its guests, then bathe in water as near the boiling-point as possible, eat their dinner, sit talking and smoking till midnight, snore till five o’clock in the morning, when the clatter of taking down shutters begins, and the elaborate business of tooth-cleaning and tongue-scraping, with an accompaniment of complex noises suggesting seasickness in its worst stages, so it is not till they have departed at six or seven o’clock that a light sleeper gets much chance. In the daytime the tea-house is deserted, except by the proprietor, who sits in the front room and does his accounts, and by the little servant-girls, who, with their heads tied up in towels, kimono tucked into their obi, and sleeves fastened back, showing a good deal of round brown leg and arm, busily sweep and dust the rooms in preparation for the new set of visitors who will arrive in the evening. The thin sliding partitions would be little bar to sound even if they reached to the top of the room, and above them there is generally a foot or so of open wood-work, which allows free ventilation and conversation between the different apartments. Privacy, as we understand it, is no part of the scheme of a Japanese tea-house. Real fresh air from outside is very difficult to get at night. During the hot weather I was always careful to examine the fastenings of the wooden shutters with which, after dark, every house is enclosed like a box, so that I could surreptitiously open a crack opposite my room, although by so doing I was disobeying the
