CHAPTER XVI
MATSUE
"Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive."
The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue—birth-place of the rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion—was one of the happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career.
His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"—then he howled and wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however, though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work, the one which is most read and by which he is best known.
Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still an animating power.
How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant vendors, the sellers of daikon and other strange vegetables ... and the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.
Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the sun's yellow rim came into sight.