An Artist's Letters from Japan

by John La Farge

It was there that I drew the biggest of them all, on one of my first days here, a statue of Jizo, with Nan-tai-san half veiled in the distance behind him—a great cedar shading him, and all but the little path and the bridge of a single stone overgrown with weeds and bushes. These gods along the river are all ugly and barbarous,—country gods, as it were,—alien as possible, while the nature about them, though strange, is not so far away from me.

STATUE OF OYA JIZO.

Their ugliness was accentuated by a sort of efflorescence, or moss growth, curled and ragged by weather, made of innumerable slips of paper pasted upon them by troops of pilgrims to the holy places, who make a point of thus marking off their visits to each successive sacred object. Fortunately, they are what the Japanese call "wet goods," that is to say, unprotected by roof or temple, and the rains of heaven cleanse them and leave only the black and white of the lichens. They always worried me like a bad dream when I passed them in the evening, on my way home from work, and I can sympathize with the superstition which makes it impossible to count them. But this is on the Dayagawa, the main confluent which rushes down from Lake Chiuzenji. Our path led through the other river, over causeways and bridges, up to the hills on the other side, and to a high moorland from which the immense southern plain and distant mountains appeared swimming in light. Two faint blue triangles in the air were the peaks of Tsŭkŭba; nearer on the west, the mountains of Nikko were covered with cloud, through which the sunburst poured down upon their bases.

As we rode we passed beneath plantations covered with water, so that their mirror, at the level of the eye, reflected the mountains and clouds and upper sky in a transparent picture, spotted with innumerable tufts of brilliant green. And then we dismounted at a little tea-house, and sat under a rustic arbor, while our feminine grooms, stripping to the waist, wiped and sponged their sweating arm-pits and bosoms, in unconcernedness of sex. Yet when they noticed my sketching them, as if I did not take their nakedness for granted, sleeves and gowns were rapidly pulled over the uncovered flesh. So true it is that conduct depends upon the kind of attention it calls for. Nor was the universal standard of feminine propriety unrespected by them, when, on our return, my guide, who had, in every possible way that I could imagine, expressed her adherence to the ways of nature, met with the disaster of having her back hair come down; for then, with a shriek, she dropped the rein, and retired, blushing, behind the nearest tree, where, in equal hurry, another girl guide proceeded to console her, and to re-arrange the proper structure of shining black hair and ivory pins.

Then we descended by a narrow path, over which hung tree-camellias, still spotted with their last white blossoms, whose edges were rusted by the heat.

The main fall of Urami-no-Taki drops into a deep basin, edged by rocks, from a hollow in the highest hill, over which hang great trees. On each side lesser cascades rush or tumble over the rocky faces, and under the main column small streams slide down, or drop in thin pillars to join it. There is a path, frequented by pilgrims, which passes behind and underneath the fall, so that we can stand behind and look through it, whence its name. All is wilderness; but a high relief of the protector Fudo, guardian and friend of such places, is carved on the rock behind the falls, and shows through the rumpled edges of the water. All was shade, except where the sun struck in the emerald hollow above the fall, or where a beam lighted up here and there a patch of the great and small cascades, or the trees and rocks about them. And here, again, the intense silence, broken by the rush of the waterfall, recalled the pictures of K'wan-on, whose meaning and whose images bring back to me the Buddhistic idea of compassion. The deity, or goddess, seated in abstraction by the falling waters of life, represents, I suppose, more especially an ideal of contemplation, as the original Indian name indicated, I think; but her name to-day is that of the Compassionate One.

PEASANT GIRLS AND MOUNTAIN HORSES OF NIKKO.

Of the divinity's many incarnations one has interested me as typical, and will amuse you. It is when—in the year 696 B. C., though the precise date is not exactly material—this power is born as a girl, daughter to one of the many kings of China. Then follows a legend like that of Saint Barbara. She is in no hurry to follow her princess's duty of getting married, and pleasing her parents thereby. She is satisfied with a virgin life, and makes delays by persuading her father to build palaces for her bridal to come; and when all this has been done, and there is no final escape, she ends by an absolute refusal of marriage. At which, evidently from a long experience of the uselessness of argument with her sex, her father cuts her head off, and I regret to say that she thereupon goes to Hell. I suppose that she goes there, because, however laudable and high her ideal of life might have been, it should have been confined within the views of her country, that is to say, of obedience to parents first and foremost. However, she went there, and put up with it, and that so admirably that the divinity who rules the place was obliged to dismiss her, for her contentment with her lot was spreading as an example to the damned, and threatened the very existence of Hell. Since then her appearances again in this world have been on errands of compassion and of help. Nor is this constant willingness to act on behalf of others, and thereby to leave the realm of absolute peace, incompatible with that continual contemplation of which her pictures or images offer an ideal, enchanting to me.