“I slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning over a soft green cloud of foliage rising from the river-bounded garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ōhashi-gawa, opening into the Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a dim grey frame of peaks.... But oh, the charm of the vision,—those first ghostly love-colours of a morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself!... Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake verge.... All the bases of the mountains are veiled by them ... so that the lake appears incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume—an exquisite chaos, ever changing aspect as the delicate fogs rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun’s yellow rim comes into sight, fine thin lines of warmer tone—violets and opalines—shoot across the flood, tree-tops take tender fire.... Looking sunward, up the long Ōhashi-gawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden bridge, one high-pooped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw,—a dream of Orient seas, so idealized by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost that catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly semi-diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light.”
Here, constantly absorbed when off duty in the study of the sights and sounds of the city,—the multitudinous soft clapping of hands that greeted the rising sun, the thin ringing of thousands of wooden geta across the bridge, the fantastic craft of the water traffic, the trades of the street merchants, the plays and songs of the children,—he began to register his first impressions, to make his first studies for his first book. Of its two volumes he afterwards spoke slightingly as full of misconceptions and errors, but it at once, upon its appearance in print, attracted the serious consideration of literary critics, and is the work which, with “Japan: an Interpretation,” remains most popular with his Japanese friends. It records his many expeditions to the islands and ports of the three provinces included in the Ken of Shimane, and his study of the manners, customs, and religion of the people. Of special value was his visit to the famous temple at Kizuki, to whose shrine he was the first Westerner ever admitted. Lord Senke Takamori, priest of this temple, was a friend of the family of the lady who became Hearn’s wife, and prince of a house which had passed its office by direct male line through eighty-two generations; as old a house as that of the Mikado himself. From him Hearn received the unusual courtesy of having ordered for his special benefit a religious dance by the temple attendants.
It was while Lafcadio was living in the house by the Ōhashi bridge that he married, in January, 1891, Setsu Koizumi, a lady of high samurai rank. The revolution in Japan which overthrew the power of the Shōguns and restored the Mikado to temporal power had broken the whole feudal structure of Japanese society, and with the downfall of the daimyōs, whose position was similar to that of the dukes of feudal England, fell the lesser nobility, the samurai, or “two-sworded” men. Many of these sank into as great poverty as that which befel the émigrés after the French Revolution, and among those whose fortunes were entirely ruined were the Koizumis. Sentarō Nishida, who appears to have been a sort of head master of the Jinjō-chūgakkō, in special charge of the English department, was of one of the lesser samurai families, his mother having been an inmate of the Koizumi household before the decline of their fortunes. Because of his fluency in English, as well as because of what seems to have been a peculiar sweetness and dignity of character, he soon became the interpreter and special friend of the new English teacher. It was through his mediation that the marriage was arranged. Under ordinary circumstances a Japanese woman of rank would consider an alliance with a foreigner an inexpugnable disgrace; but the circumstances of the Koizumis were not ordinary, and whatever may have been the secret feelings of the girl of twenty-two, it is certain that she immediately became passionately attached to her husband, and the marriage continued to the end to be a very happy one. It was celebrated by the local rites, as to have married according to English laws, under the then existing treaties, would have deprived her of her Japanese citizenship and obliged them to remove to one of the open ports; but the question of the legality of the marriage and of her future troubled Hearn from the beginning, and finally obliged him to renounce his English allegiance and become a subject of the Mikado in order that she and her children might never suffer from any complications or doubts as to their position. This could only be achieved by his adoption into his wife’s family. He took their name, Koizumi, which signifies “Little Spring,” and for personal title chose the classical term for Izumo province, Yakumo, meaning “Eight Clouds”—or “the place of the issuing of clouds”—and also being the first word of the oldest known Japanese poem.
Mrs. Hearn says: “We afterwards removed to a samurai house where we could have a home of our own conveniently equipped with numbers of rooms,—our household consisting of us two, maids, and a small cat. Now about this cat: while we lived near the lake, when the spring was yet cold, as I was watching from the veranda the evening shadow falling upon the lake one day, I found a group of boys trying to drown a small cat near our house. I asked the boys and took it home. ‘O pity! cruel boys!’ Hearn said, and took that all-wet, shivering creature into his own bosom (underneath the cloth) and kindly warmed it. This strongly impressed me with his deep sincerity, which I ever after witnessed at various occasions. Such conduct would be very extreme, but he had such an intensity in his character.” This cat seems to have been an important member of the household. Professor Ōtani in referring to it says: “It was a purely black cat. It was given the name of Hinoko (a spark) by him, because of its glaring eyes like live coals. It became his pet. It was often held in his hat.”
Later another pet was added to the establishment—an uguisu, sent to him by “the sweetest lady in Japan, daughter of the Governor of Izumo, who, thinking the foreign teacher might feel lonesome during a brief illness, made him the gift of this dainty creature.”
“You do not know what an uguisu is?” he says. “An uguisu is a holy little bird that professes Buddhism ... very brief indeed is my little feathered Buddhist’s confession of faith,—only the sacred name of the sutras reiterated over and over again, like a litany—‘Ho-ke-kyō!’—a single word only. But also it is written: ‘He who shall joyfully accept but a single word from this sutra, incalculably greater shall be his merit than the merit of one who should supply all the beings in the four hundred thousand worlds with all the necessaries for happiness.’ ... Always he makes a reverent little pause after uttering it. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds; then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name in a tone as of meditative wonder; then another pause; then another wild, rich, passionate warble. Could you see him you would marvel how so powerful and penetrating a soprano could ripple from so minute a throat, yet his chant can be heard a whole chō away ... a neutral-tinted mite almost lost in his box-cage darkened with paper screens, for he loves the gloom. Delicate he is, and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at precisely the same hour each day.”
In this house, surrounded with beautiful gardens, and lying under the very shadow of the ruined Daimyō castle, Hearn and his wife passed a very happy year. The rent was about four dollars a month; his salaries from the middle and normal schools, added to what he earned with his pen, made him for the first time in his life easy about money matters. He was extremely popular with all classes, from the governor to the barber; the charm and wonder of the life about him was still unstaled by usage, and he found himself at last able to achieve some of that beauty and force of style for which he had so long laboured. He even found pleasure in the fact that most of his friends were of no greater stature than himself. It seems to have been in every way the happiest portion of his life. Mrs. Hearn’s notes concerning it are so delightful as to deserve literal reproduction.
“The governor of the prefecture at that time was Viscount Yasusada Koteda, an earnest advocate of preserving old, genuine Japanese essentials, a conservatist. He was very much skilful in fencing; was much respected by the people in general.
“Mr. Koteda was also very kind to Lafcadio.
“Thus all Izumo proved favourable to him. The place welcomed him and treated him as a member of its family, a guest, a good friend, and not as a stranger or a foreigner. To him all things were full of novel interest; and the hospitality and good-naturedness of the city-people were the great pleasure for him. Matsue was, as it were, a paradise for him; and he became enthusiastically fond of Matsue. The newspapers of the city often published his anecdotes for his praise. The students were very pleased that they had a good teacher. In the meantime, the wonderful thread of marriage happened to unite me with Lafcadio....