Before, and very probably since, the apparition of Man, various races of huge and wonderful creatures, now extinct, lived on this planet. They were not all exterminated by the attacks of natural enemies: many seem to have perished simply by reason of the enormous costliness of their structures at a time when the earth was forced to become less prodigal of her gifts. Even so it may be that the Western Races will perish—because of the cost of their existence. Having accomplished their uttermost, they may vanish from the face of the world,—supplanted by peoples better fitted for survival.
Just as we have exterminated feebler races by merely overliving them,—by monopolizing and absorbing, almost without conscious effort, everything necessary to their happiness,—so may we ourselves be exterminated at last by races capable of underliving us, of monopolizing all our necessities; races more patient, more self-denying, more fertile, and much less expensive for Nature to support. These would doubtless inherit our wisdom, adopt our more useful inventions, continue the best of our industries,—perhaps even perpetuate what is most worthy to endure in our sciences and our arts. But they would scarcely regret our disappearance any more than we ourselves regret the extinction of the dinotherium or the ichthyosaurus.
[VIII]
THE RED BRIDAL
Falling in love at first sight is less common in Japan than in the West; partly because of the peculiar constitution of Eastern society, and partly because much sorrow is prevented by early marriages which parents arrange. Love suicides, on the other hand, are not infrequent; but they have the particularity of being nearly always double. Moreover, they must be considered, in the majority of instances, the results of improper relationships. Still, there are honest and brave exceptions; and these occur usually in country districts. The love in such a tragedy may have evolved suddenly out of the most innocent and natural boy-and-girl friendship, and may have a history dating back to the childhood of the victims. But even then there remains a very curious difference between a Western double suicide for love and a Japanese jōshi. The Oriental suicide is not the result of a blind, quick frenzy of pain. It is not only cool and methodical: it is sacramental. It involves a marriage of which the certificate is death. The twain pledge themselves to each other in the presence of the gods, write their farewell letters, and die. No pledge can be more profoundly sacred than this. And therefore, if it should happen that, by sudden outside interference and by medical skill, one of the pair is snatched from death, that one is bound by the most solemn obligation of love and honor to cast away life at the first possible opportunity. Of course, if both are saved, all may go well. But it were better to commit any crime of violence punishable with half a hundred years of state prison than to become known as a man who, after pledging his faith to die with a girl, had left her to travel to the Meido alone. The woman who should fail in her vow might be partially forgiven; but the man who survived a jōshi through interference, and allowed himself to live on because his purpose was once frustrated, would be regarded all his mortal days as a perjurer, a murderer, a bestial coward, a disgrace to human nature. I knew of one such case—but I would now rather try to tell the story of an humble love affair which happened at a village in one of the eastern provinces.
I
The village stands on the bank of a broad but very shallow river, the stony bed of which is completely covered with water only during the rainy season. The river traverses an immense level of rice-fields, open to the horizon north and south, but on the west walled in by a range of blue peaks, and on the east by a chain of low wooded hills. The village itself is separated from these hills only by half a mile of rice-fields; and its principal cemetery, the adjunct of a Buddhist temple dedicated to Kwannon-of-the-Eleven-Faces, is situated upon a neighboring summit. As a distributing centre, the village is not unimportant. Besides several hundred thatched dwellings of the ordinary rustic style, it contains one whole street of thriving two-story shops and inns with handsome tiled roofs. It possesses also a very picturesque ujigami, or Shintō parish temple, dedicated to the Sun-Goddess, and a pretty shrine, in a grove of mulberry-trees, dedicated to the Deity of Silkworms.
There was born in this village, in the seventh year of Meiji, in the house of one Uchida, a dyer, a boy called Tarō. His birthday happened to be an aku-nichi, or unlucky day,—the seventh of the eighth month, by the ancient Calendar of Moons. Therefore his parents, being old-fashioned folk, feared and sorrowed. But sympathizing neighbors tried to persuade them that everything was as it should be, because the calendar had been changed by the Emperor's order, and according to the new calendar the day was a kitsu-nichi, or lucky day. These representations somewhat lessened the anxiety of the parents; but when they took the child to the ujigami, they made the gods a gift of a very large paper lantern, and besought earnestly that all harm should be kept away from their boy. The kannushi, or priest, repeated the archaic formulas required, and waved the sacred gohei above the little shaven head, and prepared a small amulet to be suspended about the infant's neck; after which the parents visited the temple of Kwannon on the hill, and there also made offerings, and prayed to all the Buddhas to protect their first-born.