I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him, could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch your legs and be comfortable."
After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a mass of snowy white bloom.
But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs. Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them. Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's life.
Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies," daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough Corrib.
"Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas,
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these,
Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land—
Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO
"Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands,—like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour you still can find Horai—but not elsewhere.... Remember that Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,—the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,—never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...."