SAMURAI TRAILS
I
THE QUEST FOR O-HORI-SAN
After our melodramatic toast of the night before it would have been only orthodox to have said good-bye to our Occidental inn at sunrise and to have sought the road. But we had a call to make. The fulfilling of the obligation proved to be momentous. There is one never-to-be-broken rule for the foreigner in the Orient: He must consider himself always to be of extreme magnitude in the perspective, and that any action which concerns himself is momentous. If Asia had possessed this supreme self-concern, she might to-day be playing political chess with colonies in Europe. The details of our call are thus set down in faithful sequence.
“If ever you come to Japan, be sure to look me up.” This had been the farewell of Kenjiro Hori when he said good-bye to his university days in America. Hori’s affection for America had had the vigour which marks the vitality of Japanese loyalty. He had always singled out our better qualities with gratifying disregard for opposites.
We were, however, without an address except that we thought he might be in Kobe; but it seemed unreasonable that after travelling all the way to the Antipodes we should then be baulked by a mere detail. In the faith of this logic we took an early train to Kobe, and the first sign that we saw read: “Information Bureau for Foreigners.”
The man in uniform peering out of the box window was so smiling and so evidently desirous of being helpful that whether we had needed information or not, it would have been exceedingly discourteous not to have asked some question. We inquired the address of Dr. Kenjiro Hori. The information dispenser thumbed all his heap of directories. He appeared to be unravelling his thread by a most intricate system of cross reference. Then he looked at us with another smile.
“Did you find it?” we asked.
“I find no address,” said he, “but I tell ’ricksha boys take you. Ah, so!”
Such a challenge was impossible to refuse. We got into the ’rickshas and the men bent their necks and jerked the wheels into motion with strange disregard for any bee-line direction to any particular place. It appeared to be a most casual choice whether we took one corner or another. This rambling went on for some time. Suddenly they held back on the shafts and said: “Here!” We were at the door of a wholesale importing house. No one within had ever heard of O-Hori-san. When we came back to the street with this information the coolies seemed not at all surprised. They shrugged their shoulders at our mild expostulation as if implying, “Of course, if he isn’t here he must be some other place.”
After another panting dash they stopped and said: “Here!” It was obvious without inquiring that Hori could not be in that shallow, open-fronted shop. “Very well,” the shoulders answered us and on we went. We stopped for another time with the now familiar “Here!” We had traversed half Kobe. Our futile questions seemed to have nothing to do with any next step. Strangely, instead of having lost our faith it had been growing that by some system the coolies were following the quest. At this stop, when we looked inside the entrance, there was the name of Dr. Kenjiro Hori on a brass plate. We walked up the stairs and rang a bell and inquired for Dr. Hori of the boy who came.