From time to time, through the mountains, we heard again the legend of those two remarkable seiyo-jins. We grew to have an admiration for knaves so lusty in their revels that they could leave behind such a never fading flower of memory. They must have gone forth to their travels minutely familiar with the code of Japanese etiquette, so thoroughly were they skilled in fracturing it. A riot might have been forgiven, and forgotten, but not the throwing of rice on the floor. The one constant forbidding under which a child is brought up finally leaves no process of thought in the brain that anyone could ever intentionally offend against the cleanness of the matting. It is less a gaucherie to set fire to a friend’s house and burn it to the ground than to spill a bowl of soup.
We waited for the rain to clear away, but as it did not we borrowed huge paper umbrellas and wandered off down the valley. We were in the midst of a silk spinning district and in almost every doorway sat some woman of the household busily capturing the silken threads from the cocoons. We asked permission to rest in the door of a carpenter’s shop which overhung the rocky Kiso and was shaded by the tops of great pines which grew from the sides of the valley bed. The carpenter brought us tea and stopped for a moment to point the view through the trees which had been the companion of his life.
Sometimes poverty seems to be an absolute and unarguable condition; at other times one’s ideas as to the what and when of poverty are so shifting as merely to be interrogations. There was the poverty in that valley of the struggle for some slight margin above dire want; the silk workers were speeding their machines for their pittance; the carpenter was busy through every hour of daylight. Economics and efficiency are everyday words but what is their ultimate meaning not in dollars but in life? What are the real wishes of the leaders in Tokyo, the statesmen who are planning policies and at the same time must strive to please the great banking houses of the world?—do they look forward to the time when factories will fill the land and the spinners will not be sitting in their own doorways but the children of to-day’s workers will be standing in long rows before machines? “We are taught,” explained a Japanese, “to pay our heavy taxes cheerfully so that the empire may expand and develop. Wealth will be thus created and then taxes can be reduced.”
Hori had remembrance of a traveller’s tale which he had heard long before of an ancient tea-house along the Kiso famous both for its noodle soup and its view of the spot locally believed to have been the awakening place of Urashima when he returned from the Island of the Dragon King. Considering that the story explicitly states that Urashima awoke on the seashore, the faith of the inland believers is really more marvellously imaginative than the story itself. The trudging coolies whom we stopped had never heard of the tea-house. Therefore we knocked at the first gate we came to in the bamboo wall along the road to find that our footsteps had magically led us to the famed spot itself. We left our muddy boots at the door and a maid showed us the way to the balcony of the room of honour from which we could see the tumbling river. The view is called “The Awakening.” An islet emerges from the foam of the waters and its rocks have been made to serve as a miniature temple garden. There is another view farther down the bank, from which the dwarfed pines and stone lanterns of the island may be seen to better advantage. Cicerones lie in wait there for the sightseer. In delightful contrast to the urgings generally experienced from the tribe, these guides were quite shy in the presence of foreigners.
The daughter of the house, in a kimono of silk and brocade, herself brought the tray of tea and sake and a pyramid dish of noodles. The porcelain was old and of tempting beauty. The tea was fragrant. Hori insisted that we should extemporize poetry to express our appreciation of the beauty of the Kiso, but O-Owre-san and I were rather self-conscious in our rhymes. We had been nurtured in a land of specialization where poetry is entrusted to professionals. The sun came out. We paid our reckoning, folded up our paper umbrellas, and walked back to our inn for a long night’s sleep.
VI
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOTTLE INN
In the morning Hori discovered that his military survey map somehow had been mistaken for a sheet of wrapping paper the day before. The torn-off section had served to carry rice cakes in my pocket. The tearing had strangely traversed mountains, valleys, and rivers along almost the line we purposed following. As Hori was still unemancipated from the idea that not to know where one is is to be lost, he was rather in a maze for the next few days, as we continually wandered off the edge of the map into unknown regions. He must have marvelled at times over the kindness of the Providence which had guided our steps from Kyoto to Nagoya.
The valley of the Kiso earnestly seeks to attest the theory that the inhabitants of localities with a similar climate and topography tend to have similar ideas, especially in working out ways of doing the same thing. The wide sweeping view with the snow-topped mountains on the horizon might have been Switzerland, and for a more decisive deceiving of the eye into thinking so the cottages of the peasants had the overhanging roof of the Swiss chalet with the same pitch and the same arrangement of rows of boulders on them. It is a province, also, of trousered women.