In a beautiful chapter Hearn outlines all that might be written about the important subject of incense. He tells a good deal about its religious, luxurious, and ghostly uses. There is also a charming custom of giving parties where dainty games are played with it.
Sometimes there can be love between the living and the dead, or so it appears in the ghostly story of "A Passional Karma," or O-Tsuyu, who died of love of Shinzaburō and returns to be his bride. Every night, by the light of their Peony Lanterns, she, accompanied by her maid, comes to keep the ghostly tryst. Shinzaburō does not know that O-Tsuyu is dead, but his servant Tomozō, overhearing voices, gazes through a chink, and sees—
the face of a woman long dead,—and the fingers caressing were fingers of naked bone,—and of the body below the waist there was not anything: it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow. Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the eyes of the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death.
Now he whose bride is a ghost cannot live. No matter what force flows in his blood he must certainly perish. Shinzaburō is warned and an amulet to protect him from the dead is given to him, but treachery is played, and the amulet is stolen; so one morning Tomozō finds his master
hideously dead;—and the face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear;—and lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast about his neck.
The gentle heart of the Japanese shines in the chapter on "Bits of Poetry." You might find yourself, Hearn says, in a community so poor that you could not even buy a cup of real tea, but no place could you discover "where there is nobody capable of making a poem." Poems are written on all occasions and for all occasions.
Poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil;—for example, upon braziers, iron-kettles, vases, wooden-trays, lacquer-ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,—even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women's crêpe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches.
A Japanese artist would not think of elaborating a sketch, and a poem to be perfect must also only stir one's fancy. Ittakkiri, meaning "entirely vanished" in the sense of "all told," is a term applied contemptuously to him who expresses all his thought.
Japan is rich in proverbs. Hearn has translated one hundred examples of Buddhist proverbs.
Karu-toki no Jizō-gao; nasu-toki no Emma-gao.
(Borrowing-time, the face of Jizō; repaying-time, the face of Emma.)
Sodé no furi-awasé mo tashō no en.
(Even the touching of sleeves in passing is caused by some relation in a former life.)