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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

We were talking idly one day with a maid in a certain inn. Her name was O-Kimi-san, and she was pretty in the flush of youth, and “very pretty anyhow,” as O-Owre-san critically observed. Her feet were quick as sunshine when she ran for our dinner trays, or to bring tea instantly to our room upon our coming in from the street, or to fetch glowing charcoal to our elbow if we should wish to smoke, and her fingers were cunning in all the other little luxuries of service. She was saving money, she said, for the wedding which might be, but as she had neither father nor mother to arrange a marriage she added quite simply that she was only hoping to be married. She desired to wed a merchant, with a shop of his own, having a little room upstairs over the bazaar so that the good wife might be able to run down and attend to customers between domestic duties. She declared an antique shop would be the best, for one can buy nowadays from the wholesalers such wonderful, not-to-be-detected imitations. But her eyes grew sad. It was not within reason to hope that a merchant with such a shop would ever love a dowerless girl, and it was taking so long to save the capital herself. Why, one of the maids of the inn had been there sixteen years! If she had only three hundred yen the heaven upon earth might be hers.

I know that O-Momo-san, the daughter of the barber, when she sat wondering what lay beyond the farthest distance she could see along the road, was not imagining a little shop, where between domestic cares she could take time to wait upon customers.

It is for the imagination of dreaming O-Momo-san that the priests light the incense at the sacred altar; it is for practical O-Kimi-san that they read the traditional advice from the theology of moral maxims. The Marys and the Marthas! The cherry blossoms are a bloom of mysterious beauty for the daughter of the barber; they are a symbol of gay festival time for the practical maid of the inn. Will it be the end for the daughter of the barber of Kasada to marry her father’s apprentice and to live on in the little shop, dreaming until dreams slumber and are forgotten, knowing only this of the old Tokaido that it leads away in a straight line until it is lost in the brilliant blur of the sun on the waters of the rice fields? Or will her imagining heart know adventure in the world beyond the vision of her doorstep? Perhaps the sen will come so slowly to the barber’s drawer that the wistful daughter will be sold to a geisha master, and in filial piety, fulfilling the contract, she may go even to Tokyo where she will be taught to sing and to dance and to laugh gaily. She may find that life is kind. Again, she may be sold to another life—under the juggernaut of poverty—and in the Nightless City knowledge will come to dwell in the empty place where wistfulness was.

We walked away from Kasada along the unchanging road; one blade of rice was like another, one step was like another, finally one thought became like another. Nagoya was many miles ahead. O-Owre-san, the tramper, is of the faith which holds that to give in to a stretch of road just because it is dull is to surrender for no reason at all. That is good doctrine. I have something of it, but my hold upon the faith is admixed with a Catholicism which does not preclude the restful and inward harmony of maintaining speaking acquaintance with several conflicting beliefs. On the other hand O-Owre-san will, simply and unostentatiously, subordinate his preferences, but the surrender is so generous that that virtue is usually a protection in itself against applied selfishness. To escape any disagreeable feeling of shame I thought it might be that O-Owre-san could be induced to make the suggestion himself that we take some more rapid means of transportation. We were in the land of jiu-jitsu. The fundamental idea of this system is that you politely assist your opponent to throw himself. I began by alluding to the thrills and possibilities of the antique shops of Nagoya. If we should continue walking we could not reach there until late at night, and if we should find Kenjiro Hori waiting for us and prepared to be off early the next morning, when would there be time for exploring? I then ventured casually that the railroad would take us to Nagoya in a couple of hours. Imagination began to work as my ally. O-Owre-san at last queried directly whether I would be willing to give up walking in the country for exploration in the city. I yielded. Thus, when the arrogant Tokaido of steel crossed our road, as the map had told me it soon would, two foreigners with rucksacks found places amid teapots and babies, bundles and ever fanning elders, and soon they saw the tall smokestacks of modern Nagoya.

Our kit of clean linen and clean suits had been forwarded from Kyoto in care of the foreign hotel. Perhaps we each had had the idea when the bag was packed that we would be exceedingly content to catch up with it again, not alone for the contents but in anticipation that the finding would mean that we would be again surrounded by the comfort of Western standards exotically flourishing. Alas for the stability of our tenet! We were aware that our capitulation to the simplicity of the native inns sprang partly from the glamour of the new, but the conquest had come from realization and not mere anticipation. Dilettantes we were, truly, and as such we acknowledged ourselves, but we should be credited that we escaped the eczema of reformers. We had no obsession to hasten back to our own land to argue the multitudes out of the custom of wearing shoes in the house or sitting on chairs instead of floors. Nevertheless when we walked into the door of the hotel and up the stairs every tread of our heavy, dusty boots struck at our sensibility of a better fitness and order.

We walked along the upstairs hall and passed a room with wide open double doors. There was Kenjiro Hori waiting for us; that is, a semblance of O-Hori-san was there, his material body. When a Japanese sleeps his absorption by his dream hours is so complete that one is tempted to believe that his so-called waking hours (no matter how manifested in energy) may be only a hazy interim between periods of a much more important psychic existence. We walked into the room and sat down and talked things over and waited for the opening of Hori’s eyelids, but they moved not. O-Owre-san at last departed to seek treasure trove in the antique shops and I decided for the laziness of a bath.

I asked for a hot bath. The bath boy’s uniform was starched and new, and he was starched and new in his position as drawer of water. He was very proud of such responsibility and was very earnest and very smiling. In some other occupation he had picked up a little English. He promised to hurry. Minutes went by. Above the sound of the running of the water I could hear a mysterious pounding and scraping. This combination of noises continued with no regard for passing time. Now and again I pounded on the door in Occidental impatience. “Very quick! Very quick!” would come his answer. When the bolt did snap back I could see from his perspiring face that he must have been hurrying after some fashion of his own. He bowed and pointed to the tub. I put in one foot—and out it came. The water might have come from a glacier.

“I asked for a hot bath—o yu, furo,” I shouted.

There was no retreat of the smiles. They even grew.

“Japanese man, he take hot bath. Foreign man, he take cold bath.”