For out of those ugly disfigured lips there gushed and rippled a miracle of a voice—young, deep, unutterably touching in its penetrating sweetness. "Woman or wood-fairy?" queried a bystander. Woman only,—but a very, very great artist. The way she handled her instrument might have astounded the most skillful geisha; but no such voice had ever been heard from any geisha, and no such song. She sang as only a peasant can sing,—with vocal rhythms learned, perhaps, from the cicada and the wild nightingales,—and with fractions and semi-fractions and demi-semi-fractions of tones never written down in the musical language of the West.
And as she sang, those who listened began to weep silently. I did not distinguish the words; but I felt the sorrow and the sweetness and the patience of the life of Japan pass with her voice into my heart,—plaintively seeking for something never there. A tenderness invisible seemed to gather and quiver about us; and sensations of places and of times forgotten came softly back, mingled with feelings ghostlier,—feelings not of any place or time in living memory.
Then I saw that the singer was blind.
When the song was finished, we coaxed the woman into the house, and questioned her. Once she had been fairly well to do, and had learned the samisen when a girl. The little boy was her son. Her husband was paralyzed. Her eyes had been destroyed by smallpox. But she was strong, and able to walk great distances. When the child became tired, she would carry him on her back. She could support the little one, as well as the bed-ridden husband, because whenever she sang the people cried, and gave her coppers and food…. Such was her story. We gave her some money and a meal; and she went away, guided by her boy.
I bought a copy of the ballad, which was about a recent double suicide: "The sorrowful ditty of Tamayone and Takejiro,— composed by Tabenaka Yone of Number Fourteen of the Fourth Ward of Nippon-bashi in the South District of the City of Osaka." It had evidently been printed from a wooden block; and there were two little pictures. One showed a girl and boy sorrowing together. The other—a sort of tail-piece—represented a writing-stand, a dying lamp, an open letter, incense burning in a cup, and a vase containing shikimi,—that sacred plant used in the Buddhist ceremony of making offerings to the dead. The queer cursive text, looking like shorthand written perpendicularly, yielded to translation only lines like these:—
"In the First Ward of Nichi-Hommachi, in far-famed Osaka— O the sorrow of this tale of shinju!
"Tamayone, aged nineteen,—to see her was to love her, for
Takejiro, the young workman.
"For the time of two lives they exchange mutual vows— O the sorrow of loving a courtesan!
"On their arms they tattoo a Raindragon, and the character
'Bamboo'—thinking never of the troubles of life….
"But he cannot pay the fifty-five yen for her freedom— O the anguish of Takejiro's heart!