Strange things happen in the group of tales, and not the least is the tale of the maiden in the screen whose loveliness so bewitches a youth that he becomes sick unto death. Then an old scholar tells him that the person whom the picture represents is dead, but since the painter painted her mind as well as her form, her spirit lives in the picture and he may yet win her.
So every day, Tokkei, following out the old scholar's injunctions, sits before the portrait calling softly the maiden's name. And finally after many days the maiden answered, "Hai!" And stepping down from out the screen, she kneels to take the cup of wine (which was to be so), whispering charmingly, "How could you love me so much?"
Also there is the tale of the Corpse Rider, in which the husband had to ride for one whole night, so far that he could not know the distance, the dead body of his divorced wife; and this was to save him from her vengeance.
The gruesome gleams here, and again in the tale of "The Reconciliation," when the repentant husband found that the wife he was holding in his arms is "a corpse so wasted that little remained save the bones, and the long black tangled hair."
There is no small amount of etiquette in the prefixes and suffixes of the Japanese female names. The majority of the Yobina, or personal names, are not æsthetic. Some are called after the flowers, and there are also place names, as for instance Miné (Peak) Hama (Shore); but the large proportion express moral or mental attributes.
Tenderness, kindness, deftness, cleverness, are frequently represented by yobina; but appellations implying physical charm, or suggesting æsthetic ideas only, are comparatively uncommon. One reason for the fact may be that very æsthetic names are given to geisha and to jōro, and consequently vulgarized. But the chief reason certainly is that the domestic virtues still occupy in the Japanese moral estimate a place not less important than that accorded to religious faith in the life of our own Middle Ages. Not in theory only, but in every-day practice, moral beauty is placed far above physical beauty; and girls are usually selected as wives, not for their good looks, but for their domestic qualities.
I give a few names gleaned from Hearn's lists:—O-Jun—"Faithful-to-death"; O-Tamé—"For-the-sake-of,"—a name suggesting unselfishness; O-Chika—"Closely Dear"; O-Suki—"The Beloved"—Aimée; O-Taë—"The Exquisite"; Tokiwa—"Eternally Constant."
From the "Fantasies," we read of the Mystery of Crowds, and the horrors of Gothic Architecture, the joys of levitation while one is asleep—with a moral attached; of Noctilucæ. Also, as we gaze with the adolescent youth into a pair of eyes we come to know that
The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning-star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,—a ghost-light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,—eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.
Thus, and only thus, the depth of that gaze is the depth of the Sea of Death and Birth, and its mystery is the World-Soul's vision, watching us out of the silent vast of the Abyss of Being.
Thus, and only thus, do truth and illusion mingle in the magic of eyes,—the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present;—and the sudden splendour in the soul of the Seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet-lightning of the Infinite Memory.
A Japanese Miscellany[37] (14) was the next book. What does the memory hold of these stories and sketches? Surely that picture of Old Japan with its charming sentiment for Dragon-flies, to which such delicate poems were written.