Kotmasu is so terribly English.
Even his attire this morning is that odd mixture of Anglo-Japanese garments he so much affects, consisting of a straw hat and tennis flannels, worn in conjunction with the flowered dressing-gown-like garment of a well-to-do merchant.
He looks a strange figure as he stands talking to me, in the sun, at the corner of the little narrow alley leading from the water-side into one of the newer streets, the incongruities of his garments thrown up into strong relief by a background formed by the sail of a large trading-junk alongside the quay, which a swarm of Japanese coolies, all dressed alike in tight hose and dark butcher’s-blue cotton tunics, with some bizarre device in a different colour on the back, were unloading with extraordinary rapidity.
“I must go back to the warehouse,” he says, after considering my remark. “I will come to see you to-night.”
He shakes hands; and a coolie who has been staring at my “strange white face,” as I overheard him call it, for at least five minutes, to the neglect of his work, appears much mystified by the supposed rite.
I am glad Kotmasu is coming, as I wish him to believe in my experiment as thoroughly as I do myself.
The books have come, and I return to the warehouse of my parcels-agent to see if they are unpacked.
Mr. Karu’s office is always a source of wonder to me.
The amount of business transacted there, in a building of toy-like dimensions and fragile structure, was little less than marvellous. Whenever a parcel heavier than usual was dropped on the floor by a careless coolie, I expected that the room, with its ink-stained, paper-panelled walls, on which were pasted or fixed with quaint-headed pins the steamship bills and those of several of the theatre tea-houses, would collapse forthwith with no more warning than the crack of its slight, dry timbers.