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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

The inn, in truth, was very old. By any law of survival chances the wandering wings should have burned to earth long ago. To greet us there were no smiling and chattering maids gathered behind a mistress; instead, an old man and a very small girl, his granddaughter or more likely his great-granddaughter, met us in the dark entrance with protests that the house was unworthy of our presence. We hastily denied them their words. Hori could employ the polite phrases of Japan. We impulsively, directly, and bluntly told them “no.” It was not alone the pathos of the two figures which appealed. It was somewhat that their dignity had not surrendered to ruin, and it was somewhat a something else, indescribable, in the atmosphere that charmed.

We followed the master along a labyrinthine corridor. The soft wood planks of the floor had been polished to a deep reddish gleam under the bare feet of generations of hurrying ne-sans. He led us past inner courtyards to the farthest wing. Our room hung over the river at an elbow of the stream. Even with the shogi pushed wide open we were hidden completely from the eyes of the town by heavily leafed trees.

The mats on the floor had turned a dingy, mottled brown and black from their once light golden yellow, but they were clean. The sacred takemona corner still compelled its importance. It had been built in an age when the demand for its existence was the ardent faith of the builders rather than an architectural tradition. The room was about thirty-five feet long and fifteen feet deep, perhaps a little larger. The ceiling was proportionately high.

Hori was still doubtful, not gloomily so, but from the knowledge that an inn is proved by its service. The host was kneeling, as immobile as a temple image, awaiting our orders. His skin was as bloodless as the vellum of the painting which hung behind him. His watchful eyes, however, were intensely bright in their deep sockets. Hori began inquiries about dinner. The ancient bowed his head to the floor, drawing in his breath sharply against his teeth. Dinner was now being prepared for his family, he said, but it would be unworthy of his guests. The formal phrase of polite deprecation carried this truth, as Hori discovered by further questioning; it was not that the dinner was or was not worthy—it was the failure of quantity. We should not have long to wait, said our host, but food would have to be sent for.

As we sat in a circle planning what we should have, the old man smiled and pointed to a patched square in the matting. Underneath the square, he said, was a depression for holding bronze braziers. When the nobility, in the old feudal times, had travelled the Nakescendo trail, this was the room of honour that had been given to the daimyos. It had been often the custom for the retainers of a daimyo themselves to prepare his dinner over the braziers. Our sitting there, planning what we should have, had reminded him of the dead past. His words came slowly as if between each word of recollection his spirit journeyed back into the very maw of oblivion and then had to return again to the world.

“Are the braziers still hidden there?” Hori interrupted.

Yes, the braziers were under the floor or somewhere to be found.

Hori turned to us and put us through a questioning until he rediscovered the word “picnic” for his vocabulary. “That’s what we will have, a picnic, right here,” he declared, and he turned back to the host to explain. The old man almost gasped, at least approaching as near to such escape of emotion as he probably ever had at the request of a guest.

“But you will then have to have a special waitress,” he said. “My granddaughter is indeed too young for that privilege.” Always when he used depreciatory adjectives about the child’s unworthiness he failed lamentably to harden his caressing tone. She was, however, as he had said, little older than a baby. The services of a maid we should have to pay for, but, under the spell of the conjuring up of the memories of those bygone revels in our room, what cared we for saving our precious yen? We had become reincarnations of the two-sworded swaggerers. We waved our arms grandiloquently.