Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

The Japanese believe that they are a silent people. That faith is one of the supreme misbeliefs of the world. Before dinner, when we were sitting on our narrow balcony, we had said good-evening to a circle of young men who were lounging on cushions in the large room next to ours. Later they dressed and went out and we forgot them. I awoke to hear through the thin wall that they had returned. They were holding a Japanese conversation. Such a conversation can only be described by telling what it is not. In rhythm it is neither the cæsura of the French peasant woman retailing gossip, nor is it the eluding tempo-harmonic tune of the Red Indian drum beat; it is not the Chinese intoning nor is it a staccato. At first the foreign ear does not distinguish the beat of the cadences but once captured the appreciation of the subtle metrical wave is never again lost. We had the opportunity of full orientation that night. The paper wall was but a second tympan to our ears.

Their conversation as an entity was a musical composition effected without counterpoint and played by the instruments in succession. First there was a swing of phrases from one speaker, and then after a decorous and proper dramatic pause there was an answering swing from another. No speaker was interrupted. The right of reply was passed about as if it were as physically tangible as a loving cup.

There was one distinct suggestion from the monotony of it all above every other impression, a something absolutely alien to any Occidental conversation. While they talked and drank tea and drank tea and talked, I twisted about under my tent puzzled to solve what that impression was. Suddenly I found words to express to myself the sought-for revelation. The effect of a long Japanese conversation is that of voiceful contemplation. Separated from them physically only by a paper wall, we belonged to another world, a world which has ordered its existence without finding contemplation and its manifestations a necessary adjunct.

The mosquitoes, which all night had kept up a noisy circling over our net, flew off at daybreak. Some speaker spoke the concluding word in the next room and for a few minutes the universe was quiet. Then came the high shrieking of the ungreased axles of coolie carts being dragged to the rice fields. I took my quilt and cushions out onto the balcony. The inn began waking up. Down in the garden two kitchen maids appeared. They were arousing their energy by dipping their faces into brass basins of cold well water. I left my balcony and wandered below to find a basin for myself.

The inn had filled during the night with guests of all descriptions and ranks. They were coming forth from under their quilts. A ne-san stepped to the wellside and filled a basin for me and then ran off to find a gift toothbrush. Another maid, lazily binding on her obi, stayed her dressing for a moment to pour cool water from a wooden dipper over my head and neck. Getting up o’ the morning is a social cooperation in a Japanese inn.

Breakfast came. After breakfast I sat down on the balcony cushions to smoke and to breathe the delicious morning air and I promptly went to sleep. I wished to go on sleeping forever and to let the world work, or walk, or talk, or do anything it might choose to do, but O-Owre-san appeared, saying that he had paid the bill. He had stuffed our presents into his rucksacks and had had the dramatic farewells to himself. After one has accepted a going-away present, one goes. Tense good-byes do not brook recapture. The super-wanderer is thus forbidden ever to retrace his steps. For him alone, his life being always the anticipation of the next note of the magic flute, does the present become real by eternally existing as a becoming. He will not pay the price for contentment, which is to re-live and rethink the past.

When we at length reached Nagoya, where the government bureau records temperatures scientifically, we learned that the week had been really one of extraordinary heat. Among other symptoms of the week, deranged livers and prickly irritation had inspired angry letters in the readers’ columns of the foreign newspapers, belabouring everything native, particularly the casual discarding of clothing. A newspaper editor told us that such attacks of hyper-sensitiveness over nudity come not to foreigners newly arrived nor to those residents who sanely take long vacations back to their homelands (where they may have the rejuvenation of themselves being homogeneous with the masses), but to the conscientious unfortunates who remain too long at their posts. Round and about them for the twenty-four hours of the day and the seven days of the week surges the sea of native life. The feeling of lonesome strangeness, which can never be entirely lost by the foreigner, feeds on its own black moods and this poisonous diet suddenly nourishes a dull hatred. Then come the bitter letters to the press demanding that the Japanese reform themselves into Utopian perfection and threatening that unless they so do the foreign guests of the empire will assemble in convention and design an all-enveloping bag (with a drawing string to be pulled tight about the neck of the wearer) as a national costume for their hosts for evermore.

If hot days in the port cities, where there is some mild regulation of costume, can bring such disturbances of mind to anxiously missioning folk, we thought that it was as well that they were not walking with us that day through the villages of the broad plain which slopes from Mount Keisoku to Ise Bay. It was before we were out of the hills that our road carried us through a grove. A stone-flagged walk led into the shadows of the trees and we could see at its end the beginning of a long flight of stone steps which bespoke some hidden and ancient shrine beyond. A small stream flowed alongside the path and cut our road under an arched stone bridge. We heard shouts of laughter from the pines and the next moment an avalanche of children came tumbling along as fast as their legs could take them. Some were cupids with bright coloured kimonos streaming from their shoulders; some did not have even that restraint. A tall, slender maiden was in pursuit, and the pursuit was part of some game. They dashed by us through the light and shadow and were lost again in the pines.

It was the reincarnation of a Greek relief. In that flash of the moment in which we saw them, the glistening nude body of the pursuing girl running through the green and brown and grey of the grove was passionately and superbly the plea of nature against man’s crucifying purity upon the cross of sophistication.