CHAPTER XXII
THE DANCE OF THE CAPITAL
The Ginza—the "Street-of-the-Silversmiths"—is the Broadway, the Piccadilly, the Boulevard des Italiens of modern Tokyo. Here old and new war daily in a combat in which the new is daily victor. Modern shop-fronts of stone and brick stand cheek by jowl with graceful, flimsy frame structures that are pure Japanese. Trolley-cars, built in the United States, fill the street with clangor and its pavements (for it has them) roar with trade.
In its flowing current one may see many types: Americans from the near-by Imperial Hotel, bristling with enthusiasm; earnest tourists with Murrays tucked in their armpits, doggedly "doing" the country; members of foreign Legations whirling in victorias; Chinamen, queued and decorously clad in flowered silk brocade; an occasional Korean with queerly shaped hat of woven horse-hair; over-dandified O-sharé-Sama—"high-collar" men, as the Tokyo phrase goes—in tweeds and yellow puttees; comfortable merchants and men of affairs in dull-colored kimono and clogs; blue-clad workmen with the marks of their trades stamped in great red or white characters on their backs; sallow, bare-footed students with caps of Waseda or the Imperial University; stolid and placid-faced Buddhist priests in rick'sha, en route to some temple funeral; soldiers in khaki with red- and yellow-striped trousers; coolies dragging carts; country people on excursions from thatched inland villages, clothed in common cloth and viewing the capital for the first time with indrawn breath and chattering exclamations; rich noblemen, beggars, idlers, guides—all are tributary to this river.
When evening falls women and children predominate: bent old women with brightly blackened teeth; patient-faced mothers with babies on their backs toddling on clacking wooden géta; white-faced vermilion-lipped geisha glimpsing by in rick'sha to some tea-house entertainment; coolie women dressed like men, trudging in the roadway; girl-students peering into jewelers' windows; children clad like gaudy moths and butterflies, clattering hand in hand, or pursuing one another with shrill cries.
Before the sun has well set lanterns begin to twinkle and glow above doorways—yellow electric bulbs in clusters, white acetylene globes, smoky oil lamps, and great red and white paper-lanterns lit by candles. As the violet of the dusk deepens to purple, these multiply till the vista is ablaze. Lines of colored lights in pink and lemon break out like air-flowers along upper stories of tea-houses, from whose interiors come the strumming of biwa and the twang of samisen. On frail balconies, pricked out with yellow lanterns, dwarf pines or jars of growing azalea hang their masses of soft green or pink down over the passers-by. From open shoji women lean, their kimono parted, their rounded breasts bared to the cool night.
On the curb peripatetic dealers squat in little stalls formed of movable screens with their wares spread before them; curio-merchants with a mélange of brass, crystal and bronze; dealers in suzumushi—musical insects in the tiniest cages of plaited straw; sellers of Buddhist texts and worm-eaten, painted scrolls; of ink-horns, shoe-sticks, eye-glasses and children's toys. At intervals grills of savory waka-fuji (salted fry-cakes) sizzle over charcoal braziers which throw a red glow on an intent row of children's faces. Here and there a shop-front emits the blatant bark of a foreign phonograph. On the corners men with arms full of vernacular evening newspapers call the names of the sheets in musical cadences, with a quaint, upward inflection. The air is filled with a heavy, rich odor, suggesting the pomade of women's head-dresses, saké, and sandalwood. In the roadway every vehicle contributes its bobbing lantern, till the traffic seems a celestial Saturnalia, staggering with drunken stars.
So it looked to Barbara as her two goriki—"strong-pull men"—whirled her rubber-tired rick'sha across the interminable city in her first bewildering view of Tokyo by night. Daunt, for her benefit, had arranged a trip to the Cherry-Viewing-Festival on the Sumida River, and a Japanese dinner at the Ogets'—the Cherry-Moon Tea-House—in the famous district of Asak'sa, where the great temple of Kwan-on the Merciful shines with its ever-burning candles. They had started from the Embassy: Baroness Stroloff, the wife of the Bulgarian Minister and Patricia's especial favorite, the twin sisters of the Danish Secretary, the Swiss Minister's daughter and two young army officers studying the language—all of whom Barbara had met at the Review—and the long procession (since police regulations in Tokyo forbid rick'sha to travel abreast) trailed "goose-fashion," threading in and out, a writhing, yellow-linked chain.
Daunt had traced their route with Barbara on a map of the city, and had translated for her the names of the streets through which they were now passing. By the Street-of-Big-Horses they skirted the District-of-Honorable-Tea-Water, threaded the Lane-where-Good-Luck-Dwells, and so, by Middle-Monkey-Music-Street, they came to the Sumida, a broader, slothful Thames, gleaming with ten thousand lanterns on sampan, houseboats and barges. The bridge of Ah-My-Wife brought them to the farther side. At the entrance of a long avenue of blooming cherry-trees a policeman halted them. Rick'sha were not permitted beyond this point and the sweating human horses were abandoned.
The road ran high along the river on a green embankment like a wide wall, between double rows of cherry-trees, whose branches interlocked overhead. It was densely crowded with people, each one of whom seemed to be carrying a colored paper-lantern or a cherry-branch drooped over the shoulder. In the hues of the loose, warm-weather kimono bloomed all the flowers of all the springs—golds and mauves and scarlets and magentas—and everywhere in the lantern-light fluttered radiant-winged children, like vivid little birds in a tropical forest. From tiny one-storied tea-houses along the way, with elevated mats covered with red flannel blankets, biwa and koto and samisen gurgled and fluted and tinkled. On the right the embankment descended steeply, giving a view of sunken roadways and tiled roofs; on the left lay the long reaches of the dreamy river murmuring with oars and voices and vibrating like a vast flood of gold and vermilion fireflies.