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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

The change for the silver piece which I put down was a heap of coppers. It must have weighed half a pound or more. I might not have been so generous if the wealth had been more portable. As it was, I invited in two or three boys from the circle of the crowd. A carpenter’s apprentice had been sitting on the bench beside me. He had paid for one bowl of snow which he had held close to his lips, tossing the sugar powdered ambrosia into his mouth with dexterous flips of a tiny tin spoon. He looked at the ice supply about to disappear into the pit and I invited him to a further participation. He glanced at me intensely for a second as if he wished to solve by that one glance every reason for my existence. Then he turned his attention to his second bowl, which I paid for. His hair was clipped close to his skull. The fresh, youthfully transparent skin of his face was stretched like a sheet of rubber, the tension holding down his nose and allowing his eyes to stare with an openness impossible to optics otherwise socketed.

Just how the round, cannonball head of the Japanese boy evolutes into the featured physiognomy of the Japanese man is puzzling. It must be a sort of bursting. The schoolboy’s eyes betray the passing moods of his emotions, but there is always something beyond the mood of the moment in his gazing, an intangible yearning for infinity. It must at times be terrifying for an Anglo-Saxon teacher or missionary to face those eyes. Such a victim may find respite by swearing in the court of all that is practical and material that the mere physical strangeness of the deep staring has bewitched him. He is wise if, by clinging to analysis of the objective world, he can restrain all passion to disturb such mysteries—otherwise he may be led into a voyage such as that of Urashima to the enchanted island. And then, if ever he seeks to return to his Western identity, he may find that the world which he once knew has died and that he stands neither wedded to the daughter of the Dragon King nor possessing the substance of his former self.

I was thus dreamily communing, studying the face of the carpenter’s apprentice. It was he who recalled me from such heat born, mental wanderings by finishing his ice, picking up his kimono and throwing it over his shoulder, and walking off with the air of, “Well, you ice dreamer, I have been with you for a moment, but now I have work to do in the world.” I followed after him and walked out again into the fiery street.

I can swear that the ice had cooled me back to the normal. I felt myself a part of the obvious world. I had banished the disease known as the imagination. I was doing the most practical thing for the moment, going back to my rucksack. But I can also swear that the real world was most unfairly unreal. Great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers, who had passed so far along on their journey through life that probably they had given up hope of ever again seeing anything new and worldly strange to interest them, had been carried to the fronts of the houses to behold the outlander. It was as if I had not come to see Japan but Japan had been waiting long and patiently to see me, a parading manikin in a linen suit and yellow boots and a pith helmet. The naked, old, old women, their ribs slowly moving under their dried skin as if breathing and staring were their last hold upon the temporal world, knelt, supported by their children, on the mats. Walking slowly by I felt that I was the sacrificial pageant of the ceremony for their final surrender. There was not a sound from their lips. I began to have a sense of remarkable completeness, that I was a single figure with no possible replica. It was not until I saw O-Owre-san’s blue shirt that I was able to snap the thread which was leading me not out of but into the tortuous labyrinth of such speculative folly.

“I was just going back to look for you,” said he, “I thought you must have had a sunstroke.”

It seemed just then an unnecessary and a too complicated endeavour to explain the minute difference between standing with one’s toes on the edge of the calamity which he had feared for me and the actuality of toppling over the precipice. Thus I merely replied that I was feeling all right.

Some tribes of men have in their dogma that the beard must never be trimmed. I am able to imagine that O-Owre-san would carry a sympathetic understanding always with him, no matter among what races he might go adventuring, except into the society of the disbelievers in beard trimming. He demands an extreme exactitude in the trimming of his own beard which proclaims the existence of a certain precise flair of idealism. This flair may be seen manifested in him also in such croppings out as his appreciation for flawless cloisonné. The fact that he had discovered a barber shop and had not made immediate use of his find was overwhelming proof that he had been really solicitous about me. Now that I had returned he made no further delay but sat down in the chair. I stretched out on the matting to wait. The barber’s daughter brought cushions and placed them under my head and then knelt at my shoulder to send scurrying breaths of cool air from her fan across my face.

When I awoke O-Owre-san was paying the barber’s charge. It amounted, if I remember, to three sen, or perhaps three and one-half sen. Whatever it was the now properly trimmed kebukei foreigner left four sen and one-half from his honourable purse, and there was another copper or two as thanks to O-Momo-san for the gentle medicine of her fan.

The barber’s clippers, which he had used with such art, had perhaps cost four yen. If so, they would—as may be determined by simple division—require at least one hundred similar payments before the return to the barber of their initial cost; and there were the razors, and the chair, and the shining cups and bottles, all representing capital outlay; and there must have been rent to pay. There are three demi-gods of the East and only under their reign lies the answer. Great is rice, that it satisfies the hunger. Great is cotton, that it clothes the limbs. Great is art, that it can build the home from the simple bamboo. The barber jingled the four sen and a half between his palms, and the jingle was the music that sings of the buying of the rice, the cotton, and the bamboo. There is mystery and magic in economics; and there is, in the submission of man to recognize money as a medium of exchange and in his cooperating to maintain that recognition by law and force, the greatest story in the world.

The barber ceased jingling the coins and dropped them into a drawer. His daughter remained kneeling, her wistful, gentle head bowed low in good-byes. She had been silent but I imagined that I knew two of her thoughts—no, I should say, two of her moods. One was quite obvious. She had been amused (it was an adventure in its way) to fan to sleep a foreign guest. But the other mood, born of dreaming, was asking where the road led, which those strange visitors were striking out upon, stretching away into the distance as does the march into the beyond of life.