Perhaps it will interest you to know the effect of Japanese life upon your little friend after the experiences of a year and a half. At first, the sense of existence here is like that of escaping from an almost unbearable atmospheric pressure into a rarefied, highly oxygenated medium. That feeling continues: in Japan the law of life is not as with us,—that each one strives to expand his own individuality at the expense of his neighbour’s. But on the other hand, how much one loses! Never a fine inspiration, a deep emotion, a profound joy or a profound pain—never a thrill, or, as the French say so much better than we, a frisson. So literary work is dry, bony, hard, dead work. I have confined myself strictly to the most emotional phases of Japanese life,—popular religion and popular imagination, and yet I can find nothing like what I would get at once in any Latin country, a strong emotional thrill. Whether it is that the difference in our ancestral history renders what we call soul-sympathy almost impossible, or whether it is that the Japanese are psychically smaller than we, I cannot venture to decide—I hope the former. But the experience of all thinking persons with whom I have had a chance to speak seems to be the same.
But how sweet the Japanese woman is!—all the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be con centrated in her. It shakes one’s faith in some Occidental doctrines. If this be the result of suppression and oppression,—then these are not altogether bad. On the other hand, how diamond-hard the character of the American woman becomes under the idolatry of which she is the subject. In the eternal order of things which is the highest being,—the childish, confiding, sweet Japanese girl,—or the superb, calculating, penetrating Occidental Circe of our more artificial society, with her enormous power for evil, and her limited capacity for good? Viscount Torio’s idea haunts me more and more;—I think there are very formidable truths in his observations about Western sociology. And the question comes: “In order to comprehend the highest good, is it necessary that we must first learn the largest power of evil?” For the one may be the Shadow of the other.
I am very much disappointed with Rein. I got much more information about my own particular line of study from your “Things Japanese” than from Rein. Rein himself confesses, after seven or eight years’ labour, that he has only been able to make “a patchwork”! What, then, can a man like myself hope to do,—without scientific knowledge, and without any hope of even acquiring the language of the country so as to read even a newspaper? Really it seems to me almost an impertinence on my part to try to write anything about Japan at all, and the only fact which gives me courage is that there exists no book especially devoted to the subject I hope to consider.
The deity of Mionoseki is called always by the people Ebisu, or Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami;—in the guide the deity is said to be Hiruko, who, I believe, has been identified by Shintō commentators with Hiruko, as I find in the article on the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, in the Asiatic Transactions. But I am not sure what to say about Hiruko being the deity of Mio Jinja, as a general statement. My friends say that only a Shintō priest can decide, and I am going to see one.
Most truly,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Matsue, August, 1891.
Dear Professor Chamberlain,—I have just received and read your most interesting letter on my return from Kizuki,—where I should have liked to remain longer, but I must go to see the Bon-odori at Shimo-ichi, where it is danced differently from anywhere else, so far as I can learn, and in a thrillingly ghostly manner,—so that one thinks he is looking at a Dance of Souls.