It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its shoji was comforting after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows, genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit, while on the upper step of the genkan (entrance-room) with extended hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first, when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely." Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us, when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental widows when referring to the departed.
The doors of the Butsudan were set wide open, and on the kamidan, or shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third had been buried with the writer of Japan, beneath his tombstone in the Zoshigaya Cemetery.
As we stood in the study opposite the Butsudan the ghostly charm, the emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection, crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort.
Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo, describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that hangs in the study.
Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste, subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit. Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment—a donkey being an unknown animal in Japan—when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour.
It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some sort—everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good or bad omen.
Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because her mother—for politeness' sake, I imagine—told her that Mrs. Atkinson was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys, were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese, declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially, indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and intelligent.
What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in kimonos and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish smile—for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of their father's birth—with the background of bookcases full of English books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese kakemonos and ideographs.
Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up. The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days "freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."