[No date.]
... I wonder whether it was because of the sorrow that I suffered—my face and limbs became slightly swollen during the fortnight[51] after my boy's death.—It was nothing very serious, after all, and it soon went away.... Now the period of twenty-one days [the period of danger] is past....
*
Here the poor mother's diary ends. The closing statement regarding the time of twenty-one days from the birth of her child leaves it probable that these last lines were written on the thirteenth or fourteenth day of the third month. She died on the twenty-eighth of the same month.
*
I doubt if any one not really familiar with the life of Japan can fully understand this simple history. But to imagine the merely material conditions of the existence here recorded should not be difficult:—the couple occupying a tiny house of two rooms—one room of six mats and one of three;—the husband earning barely per month;—the wife sewing, washing, cooking (outside the house, of course);—no comfort of fire, even during the period of greatest cold. I estimate that the pair must have lived at an average cost of about seven pence a day, not including house-rent. Their pleasures were indeed very cheap: a payment of twopence admitted them to theatres or to gidayū-recitations; and their sight-seeing was done on foot. Yet even these diversions were luxuries for them. Expenses represented by the necessary purchase of clothing, or by the obligation of making presents to kindred upon the occasion of a marriage or a birth or a death, could only have been met by heroic economy. Now it is true that thousands of poor folk in Tōkyō live still more cheaply than this,—live upon a much smaller income than £1 per month,—and nevertheless remain always clean, neat, and cheerful. But only a very strong woman can easily bear and bring up children under such conditions,—conditions much more hazardous than those of the harder but healthier peasant-life of the interior. And, as might be supposed, the weakly fail and perish in multitude.
*
Readers of the diary may have wondered at the eagerness shown by so shy and gentle a woman to become thus suddenly the wife of a total stranger, about whose character she knew absolutely nothing. A majority of Japanese marriages, indeed, are arranged for in the matter-of-fact way here described, and with the aid of a nakōdo; but the circumstances, in this particular case, were exceptionally discomforting. The explanation is pathetically simple. All good girls are expected to marry; and to remain unmarried after a certain age is a shame and a reproach. The dread of such reproach, doubtless, impelled the writer of the diary to snatch at the first chance of fulfilling her natural destiny. She was already twenty-nine years old;—another such chance might never have offered itself.
*
To me the chief significance of this humble confession of struggle and failure is not in the utterance of anything exceptional, but in the expression of something as common to Japanese life as blue air and sunshine. The brave resolve of the woman to win affection by docility and by faultless performance of duty, her gratitude for every small kindness, her childlike piety, her supreme unselfishness, her Buddhist interpretation of suffering as the penalty for some fault committed in a previous life, her attempts to write poetry when her heart was breaking,—all this, indeed, I find touching, and more than touching. But I do not find it exceptional. The traits revealed are typical,—typical of the moral nature of the woman of the people. Perhaps there are not many Japanese women of the same humble class who could express their personal joy and pain in a record at once so artless and pathetic; but there are millions of such women inheriting—from ages and ages of unquestioning faith—a like conception of life as duty, and an equal capacity of unselfish attachment.