Take good care of your health.
Ever very truly yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, January, 1892.
Dear Hendrick,—Your jolly letter just came—Jan. 3rd,—to find me celebrating the new year after the Japanese fashion. There is not one New Year’s day here, but three. Over the gate, and all the alcoves of each apartment, the straw rope (shimenawa), which is the Shintō emblem of the gods, is festooned; upon the kamidana, or “god-shelf,” lights are burning before the tablets of those deities who have pledged themselves in Japanese ideographs to love and protect this foreigner,—and I have given to them offerings of rice-cakes and sake. For the guests are dishes of raw fish, and others which it would take too long to describe, and hot sake. My little wife does the honours. Before the gate are Japanese flags and pine-trees—emblems of green old age and unflinching purpose.
—Well, here I am in Kyūshū, a thousand miles and more south of Yokohama, at a salary of 200 yen a month. All my Izumo servants came with me. Our house is not nearly so beautiful as that in Matsue, and the city is devilishly ugly and commonplace,—an enormous, half-Europeanized garrison-town, full of soldiers. I don’t like it; but Lord! I must try to make money, for nothing is sure in Japan, and I am now so tied down to the country that I can’t quit it, except for a trip, whether the Government employs me or not. I have nine lives depending on my work—wife, wife’s mother, wife’s father, wife’s adopted mother, wife’s father’s father, and then servants, and a Buddhist student. How would you like that? It wouldn’t do in America. But it is nothing here—no appreciable burden. The moral burden, however, is heavy enough. You can’t let a little world grow up around you, to depend on you, and then break it all up—not if you are a respectable person. And I indulge in the luxury of “filial piety”—a virtue of which the good and evil results are only known to us Orientals.
I translated into Hearnian dialect all you said. And my wife, whose name is Setsu, or Chi-yo (alternative), knows you well by your photograph, and said such nice things about that photograph that I dare not tell you. Which is all the more extraordinary because when I showed her some pictures of “distinguished foreigners” she and the girls all said that if they should ever meet such people they would “become Buddhas for fear”—i. e., die of fright. American and English faces—their deep-set eyes—terrify unsophisticated Japanese. Children cry with fear at the sight of a foreigner. So your photo must reveal exceptional qualities to make such an impression....
Everybody gets drunk here to-day; but a cultivated Japanese is never offensively drunk. To get properly, politely drunk upon sake is the summum bonum.... Although a gentleman knows how to act, however drunk, it is the custom, when your host makes you drunker than usual (which delights him), to call at the house next morning, and thank him for the entertainment—at the same time apologizing for any possible mistakes. Of course, there are no ladies at men’s dinners—only professional dancing-girls, maiko or geisha.
Work progresses; but the barrier of language is a serious one. My project to study Buddhism must be indefinitely delayed on that account. For the deeper mysteries of Buddhism cannot be explained in the Hearnian dialect.