"Best love to you. Perhaps we shall meet in a few years. My boy is well, beginning to walk a little. My book was to be issued on the 29th Sept.
"Ever affectionately,
"Lafcadio."
CHAPTER XXI
KOBE
Last spring I journeyed to Japan with Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio Hearn's half-sister, and her daughter. Mrs. Atkinson was anxious to make the acquaintance of her Japanese half-sister-in-law to ascertain the circumstances surrounding the family, also if it were possible to carry out her half-brother's wishes with regard to educating his eldest son, Kazuo—his Benjamin—in England.
The first place at which we landed was Kobe, situated on the eastern end of the Inland Sea, opposite Osaka, the Manchester of Japan.
Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed to reside in the city under Japanese law.
During the six weeks on board the P. & O. coming out, I had been reading Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji—gateway of the Inland Sea—it had blown a gale, and the Japanese steamer, the Chikugo Maru, to which we had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea, made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes, and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by symbolic Torii leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing villages that seemed to have grown on the shore, their thatched roofs covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "Yane-shobu." At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in geta and kimono, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,—a magic that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions, telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur.