In many ways the present book on Japan is his happiest, for the charm over everything is fresh and radiant. It is here that we learn the old graceful customs, the touching child-like ways, and the sacred appealing rites and beliefs that so endear to us the Japanese. Later we are to have studies more philosophical, more erudite, but none more penetrating in virtue of the very simplicity of subject.
It is difficult to believe that the writer, bewitched with the warmth and colour of the tropics, giving his pen an unlicensed flow of word colour and enthusiasm, in a few years could have matured into this quiet, gentle thinker equally absorbed by the East. One finds scarcely a trace of the Hearn of the tropics: therein lies his unique genius; just so admirably as he reflected the West Indian life, does he now reflect that of the Japanese.
It is the old Japan that Hearn loves, and the passing of which he mourns even at the first. In his Preface, he says, "My own conviction, and that of many impartial and more experienced observers of Japanese life, is that Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose." Also in one of his letters he writes, "I felt, as never before, how utterly dead old Japan is, and how ugly New Japan is becoming." It is old Japan that we find in the present volume. It is much as if we looked into a diary of his first days in the Orient, giving his impressions and conclusions, as well as portraying the pictures themselves.
One of the reviews of the book contains the following:—
"If Japan is all that he says; if the Japanese are so compounded of all the virtues, and so innocent of the ugly failings that mar our Western civilization, then the poet's dream of a Golden Age has actually been realized in the remote East. Much as we should like to believe that such a land and such a people actually exist, we cannot altogether conquer our doubts, or avoid the suspicion that the author's feeling sometimes gets the better of his judgment." (379.)
And another says:—
"In volume one he is still the outside observer, remote enough to be amused with the little pretty, bird-like glances of the Orient towards the Occident, pleased at the happy chance which makes a blind shampooer's cry musical as she taps her way down the street, instead of giving her a voice raucous as that which hurts and haunts the unwilling ears of wayfarers down Newgate Street and on Ludgate-Hill; or complimentary to the cunning fancy which paints a branch of flowering cherry in a cleft bamboo on a square of faintly-coloured paper and calls the cherry blossom 'beauty' and the bamboo 'long life.' He notices the shapely feet of the people: 'bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny, tiny geta, or feet of young girls in snowy tabi. The tabi, the white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect—the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness.'
"A little further on the leaven of witchcraft is working, and he cannot write so airily. It is not as a mere spectator that he talks of his visit to the Buddhist cemetery, where the rotting wooden laths stand huddled about the graves, and one tomb bears an English name and a cross chiselled upon it. Here he made acquaintance with the god, who is the lover of little children, Jizō-Sama, about whose feet are little piles of stones heaped there by the hands of mothers of dead children. He is not quite as much in earnest as volume two will find him, or he could not call the gentle god 'that charming divinity'; but the sight-seer is dying in him nevertheless. It was with a friend's hand that he struck the great bell at Enoshima." (286.)
But even here with a new world unfolding to his delighted eyes, it was colour that Hearn really wanted.
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.