A bowler hat in Jinriksha Street, for instance, is a thing very much out of place, yet you see many of them, mostly potted down on the back of Japanese heads, and making the wearers both frightful and ridiculous-looking.
Here passes a Mousmé under an umbrella, a figure fashioned seemingly from a rainbow, a figure to bless the eye and make the heart feel glad. Here stumps along a thing that once was a Mousmé, a thing in European dress—alas!
Here you turn from a shop sign in the vernacular, and across the way, over the booth where cakes reposing on myrtle branches are sold, “Englis here is spoke,” blasts your sight.
Jinrikisha Street, and for Jinrikisha Street read nearly every other street in sea-board Japan, is a picture, as I have said, spoiled as if by a meddlesome English child.
Danjuro’s shop was all open in front so that you could come right in past the bronze stork on the tortoise, past the leaping dragon made of jointed steel, a dragon hard as adamant yet flexible as india-rubber. Then you met Danjuro, and he sank towards the floor and hissed at you by way of welcome. The chief treasures were in the cellar below, but here was quite enough to feast the eye of a not too wise amateur, and make the purse jump in his pocket.
Danjuro had the art of shop-dressing at his finger-ends. Things always looked better in his establishment than they did when fetched home.
People would cry: “Is that the Owari vase I bought? Why, what has happened to it?”
It would be the same vase, but divorced from its surroundings.
You cannot imagine the effect of a dwarf plum tree in a green tile pot upon a dragon of steel until you see them in juxtaposition, nor the strange difference certain backgrounds make in an Owari vase till you try them. Danjuro was well up in these subtleties, and this knowledge, combined with his own personality, lent an added value to his wares—twenty per cent. at least.
Here in the shop of Danjuro, in a semi-twilight, glimmer demons and beasts in porcelain and bronze. The frightful face of Akudogi shouts at you from the wall, the lotus expands over pools in the silent land of lacquer, and the hundred guinea ivory Mousmé, ten inches high, trips beneath her ivory umbrella, ever on the way to some fanciful pageant that had once existed in her creator’s dreams.