TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, 1892.
Dear E. H.,— ... Your thoughts about the Shadows of the East are touching. You ought to be able to write something beautiful and quite new if you had time....
You have been seized by the fascination of monstrous cities built up to heaven, and eternally sending their thunder to the smoke-blacked sky,—cities where we live by machinery. I can shudder now only to think of walking down a street between miles of houses two hundred feet high, with a roaring of traffic through them as of a torrent in a cañon. And that fascination means elegance, fashion, social duties.... I have been trying to deal with these two problems: “What has been the moral value of Christianity to mankind?” and The answer to the former seems to be that without the brutal denial of the value of life and pleasure by Christianity, we could never have learned that the highest enjoyments are, after all, intellectual, and that progress can be effected only by self-sacrifice to interest and indifference to physical gratifications. And the latter question, though I have not yet solved it, seems to suggest that the hypocrisy itself may have large hidden value,—may be in process of transmutation into a truth.
Yes, Japanese women are all that your question implies you would wish them to be. They are children, of course. They perceive every possible shade of thought,—vexation, doubt, or pleasure,—as it passes over the face; and they know all you do not tell them. If you are unhappy about anything, then they say: mdash;and they light a little lamp, and clap their hands and pray. And the ancient gods hearken unto them; and the heart of the foreign barbarian is therewith lightened and made luminous with sunshine. And he orders the merchants of curious textures to bring their goods to the house, which they do—piling them up like mountains; and there is such choice that the pleasure of the purchase is dampened by the sense of inability to buy everything in this world. And the merchants, departing, leave behind them dreams in little Japanese brains of beautiful things to be bought next year.
Also Japanese women have curious Souls. The other day in Nagano, a politician told a treacherous lie. Whereupon his wife robed herself all in white as those are robed who are about to journey to the world of ghosts, and purified her lips according to the holy rite, and, taking from the storeroom an ancient family sword, thereupon slew herself. And she left a letter, regretting that she had but one life to give in expiation of the shame and the wrong of that lie. And the people do now worship at her grave, and strew flowers thereupon, and pray for daughters with hearts as brave.... But the worms are eating her.
Because you sent me that horrid book, I revenge myself. I send you a much more horrid book. But if you do not enjoy it, I shall commit hara kiri, or seppuku, which is the polite name. And a woman wrote it—a woman! Christopher Columbus! what a terrible woman she must be!...
The you sent is giving much amusement to friends here. Send anything really good of that sort you can find: it makes life happier for the exile.
I am not easy about my book, of which I now await the proofs. It lacks colour—it isn’t like the West Indian book. But the world here is not forceful: it is all washed in faint blues and greys and greens. There are really gamboge, or saffron-coloured valleys,—and lilac fields; but these exist only in the early summer and the rape-plant season, and ordinarily Japan is chromatically spectral. My next book will probably be on Buddhism in common life.