“He never used an umbrella....
“He liked to bathe in tepid water....
“He feared cold; his study having a large stove and double doors; he never, however, used gloves in the coldest weather.”...
And so on, to the nth power of fatigue. Personally nothing would have been so obnoxious to the man as this piling up of unimportant detail and banal ana about his private life. He was entirely free of that egotism, frequently afflicting the literary artist, which made the crowing cocks, the black beetles, and the marital infelicities of the Carlyles matters of such import as to deserve being solemnly and meticulously recorded for the benefit of an awestruck world.
At first the change of residence, the necessary interruption of the heavy work of preparing lectures, the teaching, and its attendant official duties seem to have broken the train of his inspiration—for “Gleanings in Buddha-Fields,” though published the year after his arrival in Tōkyō, had been completed while in Kōbe, and he complains bitterly in his letters that “the Holy Ghost had departed from him,” and was constantly endeavouring to find some means of renewing the fire. In a letter to his friend Amenomori he says: “But somehow, working is ‘against the grain.’ I get no thrill, no frisson, no sensation. I want new experiences, perhaps; and Tōkyō is no place for them. Perhaps the power to feel thrill dies with the approach of a man’s fiftieth year. Perhaps the only land to find the new sensations is in the Past,—floats blue-peaked under some beautiful dead sun ‘in the tropic clime of youth.’ Must I die and be born again to feel the charm of the Far East;—or will Nobushige Amenomori discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the Fountain of Immortality? Alas, I don’t know!” Indeed, in “Exotics and Retrospectives” he returned for part of his material to old memories of the West Indies, and the next four volumes—“In Ghostly Japan” (with its monstrous fantasy of the Mountain of Skulls), “Shadowings,” “A Japanese Miscellany,” and “Kotto”—show that the altar still waited for the coal, the contents of these being merely studies, masterly as they were, such as an artist might make while waiting for some great idea to form itself, worthy of a broad canvas.
As the letters show, prodigious care and patience were expended upon each of these sketches. In advising a friend he explains his own methods:—
“Now with regard to your own sketch or story. If you are quite dissatisfied with it, I think this is probably due not to what you suppose,—imperfection of expression,—but rather to the fact that some latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself in your mind with sufficient sharpness. You feel something and have not been able to express the feeling—only because you do not yet quite know what it is. We feel without understanding feeling; and our most powerful emotions are the most undefinable. This must be so, because they are inherited accumulations of feeling, and the multiplicity of them—superimposed one over another—blurs them, and makes them dim, even though enormously increasing their strength.... Unconscious brain-work is the best to develop such latent feeling or thought. By quietly writing the thing over and over again, I find that the emotion or idea often develops itself in the process,—unconsciously. Again, it is often worth while to try to analyze the feeling that remains dim. The effort of trying to understand exactly what it is that moves us sometimes proves successful.... If you have any feeling—no matter what—strongly latent in the mind (even only a haunting sadness or a mysterious joy), you may be sure that it is expressible. Some feelings are, of course, very difficult to develop. I shall show you one of these days, when we see each other, a page that I worked at for months before the idea came clearly.... When the best result comes, it ought to surprise you, for our best work is out of the Unconscious.”
In all these studies the tendency grew constantly more marked to abandon the earlier richness of his style; a pellucid simplicity was plainly the aim of his intention. The transparent, shadowy, “weird stories” of “Kwaidan” were as unlike the splendid floridity of his West Indian studies as a Shintō shrine is unlike a Gothic cathedral. These ghostly sketches might have been made by the brush of a Japanese artist; a grey whirl of water about a phantom fish—a shadow of a pine bough across the face of a spectral moon—an outline of mountains as filmy as dreams: brief, almost childishly simple, and yet suggesting things poignant, things ineffable.
“Ants,” the last study in “Kwaidan,” was, however, of a very different character. The old Occidental fire and power was visible again; his inspiration was reillumined. Then suddenly the broad canvas was spread for him and he wrote “Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation,” one of the most astonishing reviews of the life and soul of a great nation ever attempted.
To understand the generation of this book it is necessary to explain the conditions of the last years of his life in Tōkyō. Of his private existence at this time Mrs. Hearn’s reminiscences furnish again a delightful and vivid record.