[NIKKO TO YOKOHAMA]
Near Utsunomiya, August 30.
We left Nikko this morning; a hot, moist, quiet, lovely morning. We dawdled at our friends' house and breakfasted, and said good-by to our worthy landlord. Yesterday he had found fault with my sketching him in his ordinary yellow priest's dress, while he had vestments as beautiful as any painter or clergyman could desire; in proof of which he had rushed into his house and reappeared in those lovely things and moved about the green of the garden looking as radiant as any flamingo. But I knew not of these possessions of his, and regretted quite as deeply as he could himself not having painted him in them.
It was a sad moment—that of leaving his little garden for good, and walking down the road to the enormous steps under the trees by the river, where we reversed the picture of our arrival six weeks ago. There stood the naked runners, and our hostess above us, as we sat in the kurumas, but this time the doctor was not with us, except to bid us good-by. His place was filled by the professional guide and factotum, who sat anxious for departure in his own kuruma, and who for days had been packing and labeling and helping to make lists, and receiving instructions, and bustling about at times when he was not sleeping—and generally making life a misery. We rattled over the bridge, passed the children going to school, and the polite policeman with spectacles and sword, who looks like a German Rath of some kind or other, and the woman of the Eta class[7] who has sold us skins of monkeys and of badgers, as well as two baby monkeys, whom we have disrespectfully named Sesson and Sosen, after the painters who so beautifully portrayed their ancestors.
Soon we had entered the long avenue of cryptomeria and kept on through shadow and sunlight, with our runners at their fullest gait, for we had to be in time for the afternoon train at Utsunomiya, and it is twenty-two miles from Nikko. But we were more than in time, and had to wait at an inn near the station. I am absurdly stupid and fatigued, so that I have given up watching the landscape and merely make these notes. Besides, there is a missionary near us so self-contented that I feel like withdrawing into my own self and dreaming of the times he was not here. I recall a little story of Utsunomiya, connected with my associations of Nikko, which I shall try to tell you; though, at the very start, I find a difficulty in my having heard it told in several different and contradictory ways—and I can only travel one at a time. As I shall tell it, it represents a legend believed at least in the theater, which, as we know, everywhere makes a kind of history.
The story is about the shogun Iyémitsŭ, whose temple, you know, is at Nikko, and who was near missing the honor of being divinized there later, owing to a plot arranged by his enemies, the scene of which was this little town of Utsunomiya. At that time he was but a boy, the heir-apparent, and was on his way to Nikko, as was his official duty, to worship at the tomb of his grandfather Iyéyasŭ, lately deceased. In this story Iyémitsŭ is not in the legitimate line of descent, but is made the heir by the decision of the great Iyéyasŭ.
His father, Hidetada, was shogun, as you know, having succeeded Iyéyasŭ, during the latter's lifetime,—the old man remaining in reality the master, though absolved from external responsibilities. Now, Hidetada's wife was of the family of Nobunaga, on her mother's side—and bore him a son, who was named during his childhood Kuni Matsu. Another son, whose boy name was Take Chiyo, was the son of Kasuga No Tsubone, a remarkable woman. Each son had tutors, people of importance, and around each boy gathered a number of ambitious interests, all the fiercer that they were dissembled and depended for success upon the choice of either heir as shogun, to succeed father and grandfather. The claim of the other son was favored by the father and more generally accepted; but the son of Kasuga was superior in looks, manners, and intelligence, and his mother hoped to influence in his favor old Iyéyasŭ, the grandfather.
Iyéyasŭ was then living in retirement at Sunpu, that is now called Shidzuoka, which is on the road called the Tokaido.
Kasuga took advantage of a pilgrimage to the shrines of Ise to stop on her road, and naturally offer homage to the head of the family, the grandfather of her son. Besides the power of her own personality, she was able to place before Iyéyasŭ very strong arguments for choosing as the heir of the line a youth as promising as her Take Chiyo.