I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient, indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the Butsudan, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern education as a material weakness?
"The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy."
After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of "tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)—his Papa San's favourite cake, Kazuo told us—had been handed round and partaken of, jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery. As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove, stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies—along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots, enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab was the inscription—
"Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"—"Believing Man Similar to Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment."
The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand, as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman, Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the moment, buried—an alien amongst aliens—in a Buddhist grave, under a Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own people.
CONCLUSION
Lafcadio Hearn's was a personality and genius which people will always judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi, or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages"; while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament.
If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature, would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology" that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one—"not that he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap wood underneath—it looks all right, only because you don't know how we patch up things."