Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi—through the medium of Professor Tanabe—asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks and the lamp were lighted before the Butsudan and a repast laid out in honour of the dead.
That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted, and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to the Métropole Hotel.
The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts.
The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me, reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic meaning. A Shirabyoshi lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there, seated on zabutons in a little shop, as large—or rather as small—as life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little musumés, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising otherness of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary land of Nippon.
I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him.
Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her "Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow and children.
A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens, and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a zabuton (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and left a will—Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his contemptible abode to smoke a pipe—further than that he knew nothing. The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku), where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any sort of favour by his colleagues.
In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the northern coast.
A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible lettering on moss-grown tombstones and sotobas, gazing at sculptures of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both. Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human life—infinite calm, infinite rest.
"Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented, with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he had hitherto subscribed?