The summer passed in this Japanese Yashiki was as happy as any in Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled—a free, clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully. Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said, twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds, this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of two.
Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.
He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household. After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse—the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.
Hearn's description of the old Yashiki garden is done with all the descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls it; of Hijo, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and Ujo, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native gardener—a delightful old man—to keep them in perfect form.
Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns, and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light.
We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can catch the song of the caged Uguisu, an inmate of the establishment, presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of the Governor of Izumo.
The Uguisu, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name.
They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was equally wretched when he saw them withering.
One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese, "Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a serious intention).
When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident.