“O-Hori-san,” I asked, “what did you say was the name of this inn?”
O-Owre-san was always off to the bath as soon as his feet were inside an inn. This time I had marvelled that the habit was so strong that he could put off attempting to solve the mystery of our reception, especially as Hori’s naïve casualness suggested that he knew the kernel of the mystery.
“It’s a new inn. Very good, don’t you think?” Hori answered my question.
“What is the secret?” I demanded. It was evidently very dark and if the facts had to be modified in the telling, I thought that perhaps they might come forth less modified for me than for O-Owre-san. The other inn had been one of our few planned quests. “Why didn’t we go to the other inn?”
It may have been most unfair to use such a direct method of questioning, especially the distressing, bee-line “hurry-up.” I was trading upon my being a foreigner from a land without the tradition of the proper ceremony of questions.
Yes, Hori had visited the inn of which we had had the superior report. It was a most superior place. He paused. Then he vouchsafed the information that it was expensive. That was indeed a serious objection. He thought that the bill there might have come to three, four, or even five yen a day. That explanation should have been final enough for me. It was, in fact. I would have accepted it. I merely happened to ask whether he had looked at the rooms.
“Yes,” said he, and then he suddenly threw discretion away. “And what do you think? They had rocking-chairs and American bureaus in the rooms.”
Poor Hori! He had been having to listen to us inveigh in American exaggeration against the infamous inroads of modernity. I cannot imagine that he took our chants of hatred against innovations actually at their word value, but he had had much reason to become weary and bored from their repetition. He implied that his reason for leaving the other inn was for our aesthetic protection, but be it said he was wise in his own protection. There is not much doubt that if we had reached the presence of those rooms there would have been another merry-to-do of wild epithets against machine-made American export furniture bespoiling native simplicity for him to listen to. The tourist animal is truly a snobbish beast, and natives should occasionally be given dispensations for outright murder.
Once I was chatting over tall iced lemon squashes with a Japanese physician. In a surge of confidence, and also in burning curiosity, he told me about his trip to America. He had learned his English in Japan. While visiting a family whom he had known in his homeland, he met one of America’s daughters who asked him to call. He was somewhat startled by the invitation but he remembered that he was not in the Orient. He described the conversation to me in awed phrases.
“She had a box of chocolates. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I am mad about chocolates, simply crazy.’