When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

I do not know what delighted me most in Nagasaki I never knew what delighted me most in Japan, it was all so delightful. Nagasaki was the first bit of Japan I ever saw. I found in it a new charm. China was to me like the land of the mighty magicians; Japan was fairyland.

The Japanese islands are running over with flowers. The Japanese temples are a-tinkle with the music of bells. The soft-voiced people walk among the blossoms, and their fine faces are aglow with the love of beauty, and they themselves are innocently intoxicated with the delight of living.

Nagasaki is so sweetly clean that one cannot wonder that tourists who spend a few hours there rush back to their boats and write to the journals of Europe and America that the Japanese are the cleanest people on earth. I thought that the first day I was in Nagasaki. Alas, I learned better in a dozen other Japanese cities!

It was in Nagasaki that I first felt the full force of Japanese courtesy. My husband lunched in an elaborate fashion with friends at the hotel, but I begged off and spent all of my seven hours in investigating Nagasaki. When my coolie thought I had fasted long enough, he dropped the shafts of the ’rickshaw and ran into a droll little papier-maché looking house that was perched on the hilly highway, midway between the cemetery and the bamboo-bridged streamlet. In a few moments he came back carrying a tea-tray, and followed by a half-grown girl, who had cakes and fruit in a lacquer basket. An old woman toddled after, and spread a paper napkin on my lap. I enjoyed my al fresco lunch very much, as I sat in the ’rickshaw; the sunshine danced about me, but I was cool under the shade of an immense plum tree. They brought me a strange copper bowl, filled with warm water, and when I had paid the reasonable bill, we went back to the little paradise of shops.

The great works of Western art move us to awe. Upon Europeans the universal effect of Japanese works of art is a mad, insatiable desire to possess. Very good people long to buy. I am not very good; my enemies say that I am not good at all. Certainly, until my money gave out I longed to buy everything I saw in Japan. But when my money gave out, as it soon did, my one desire was to steal. I do not remember that I ever did steal anything in Japan, but I often wanted to do so. And my husband says that he mysteriously lost a hundred yen in Yokohama.

European art—if it is great art—holds us at a distance. Japanese art woos us; we long to own it—to stroke it. Japanese art is as approachable as it is fine. Occidental art keeps us in our place.

I saw Nagasaki again, when we were leaving Japan. Again our ship stopped there for a few hours. We played Hamlet there; it was an ethereal experience—a fitting end of our stay in the daintiest, prettiest, most mannerly country on the globe. We walked through the moonlight to the theatre. The streets were silent, save for the plaintive whistle of the blind shampooers. It sounded doubly sad to me as I realised that possibly I should never hear it again.

I have often wondered what Ophelia would have said could she have seen half the strange flowers I have worn in her name. Cowboys have brought me the wild flowers of their wilder West (it was my wild West too). Maharanees have sent me scented roses from behind purdahed gardens. Gold kings and silver paupers have sent me soft flannel flowers, and pink colonial roses from the Australian bush,—in all the quarters of the globe I have been the recipient of the perfumed tribute paid to me because I represented, however unworthily, the sweet, meek maiden who was the genius-born daughter of Shakespeare’s pen.

In Nagasaki we had a paucity of scenery; but I had a wealth of flowers for the “mad scene,” and as I wreathed the wistaria and the honeysuckle with the pompom-like chrysanthemums, the Japanese lilies, and the matchless roses, I almost wept over them my farewell to Japan.

In the late starlight we went back from the theatre to the boat. Japan was almost hidden by the night. We stole into Japan in the dawning; we stole out of Japan in the midnight dusk. Fit beginning, fit end of an experience almost too exquisitely beautiful to be a reality,—an experience of which I shall always think as of a Heaven-sent dream.