'Of old in the land of Kihoku, famed for its horses, whenever a horse of rarest breed could not be obtained, men were wont to say: "There is no horse." Still there are many line lads among our students—many ryume, fine young steeds; but we have lost the best.
'To die at the age of seventeen—the best period of life for study—even when of the Ten Steps thou hadst already ascended six! Sad is the thought; but sadder still to know that thy last illness was caused only by thine own tireless zeal of study. Even yet more sad our conviction that with those rare gifts, and with that rare character of thine, thou wouldst surely, in that career to which thou wast destined, have achieved good and great things, honouring the names of thine ancestors, couldst thou have lived to manhood.
'I see thee lifting thy hand to ask some question; then bending above thy little desk to make note of all thy poor old teacher was able to tell thee. Again I see thee in the ranks—thy rifle upon thy shoulder— so bravely erect during the military exercises. Even now thy face is before me, with its smile, as plainly as if thou wert present in the body—thy voice I think I hear distinctly as though thou hadst but this instant finished speaking; yet I know that, except in memory, these never will be seen and heard again. O Heaven, why didst thou take away that dawning life from the world, and leave such a one as I—old Shokei, feeble, decrepit, and of no more use?
'To thee my relation was indeed only that of teacher to pupil. Yet what is my distress! I have a son of twenty-four years; he is now far from me, in Yokohama. I know he is only a worthless youth; [15] yet never for so much as the space of one hour does the thought of him leave his old father's heart. Then how must the father and mother, the brothers and the sisters of this gentle and gifted youth feel now that he is gone! Only to think of it forces the tears from my eyes: I cannot speak —so full my heart is.
'Aa! aa!—thou hast gone from us; thou hast gone from us! Yet though thou hast died, thy earnestness, thy goodness, will long be honoured and told of as examples to the students of our school.
'Here, therefore, do we, thy teachers and thy schoolmates, hold this service in behalf of thy spirit,—with prayer and offerings. Deign thou, 0 gentle Soul, to honour our love by the acceptance of our humble gifts.'
Then a sound of sobbing is suddenly whelmed by the resonant booming of the great fish's-head, as the high-pitched voices of the leaders of the chant begin the grand Nehan-gyo, the Sutra of Nirvana, the song of passage triumphant over the Sea of Death and Birth; and deep below those high tones and the hollow echoing of the mokugyo, the surging bass of a century of voices reciting the sonorous words, sounds like the breaking of a sea:
'Sho-gyo mu-jo, je-sho meppo.—Transient are all. They, being born, must die. And being born, are dead. And being dead, are glad to be at rest.'
CHAPTER FIVE Two Strange Festivals
THE outward signs of any Japanese matsuri are the most puzzling of enigmas to the stranger who sees them for the first time. They are many and varied; they are quite unlike anything in the way of holiday decoration ever seen in the Occident; they have each a meaning founded upon some belief or some tradition—a meaning known to every Japanese child; but that meaning is utterly impossible for any foreigner to guess. Yet whoever wishes to know something of Japanese popular life and feeling must learn the signification of at least the most common among festival symbols and tokens. Especially is such knowledge necessary to the student of Japanese art: without it, not only the delicate humour and charm of countless designs must escape him, but in many instances the designs themselves must remain incomprehensible to him. For hundreds of years the emblems of festivity have been utilised by the Japanese in graceful decorative ways: they figure in metalwork, on porcelain, on the red or black lacquer of the humblest household utensils, on little brass pipes, on the clasps of tobacco-pouches. It may even be said that the majority of common decorative design is emblematical. The very figures of which the meaning seems most obvious—those matchless studies [1] of animal or vegetable life with which the Western curio-buyer is most familiar—have usually some ethical signification which is not perceived at all. Or take the commonest design dashed with a brush upon the fusuma of a cheap hotel—a lobster, sprigs of pine, tortoises waddling in a curl of water, a pair of storks, a spray of bamboo. It is rarely that a foreign tourist thinks of asking why such designs are used instead of others, even when he has seen them repeated, with slight variation, at twenty different places along his route. They have become conventional simply because they are emblems of which the sense is known to all Japanese, however ignorant, but is never even remotely suspected by the stranger.