When the dance ends, I
Ask to be thine.”
For custom in those parts has gradually established the right of Love to oust Death from his old prerogative. Dancing enables the lovers to find each other more easily than at other times. Courtship is the recognised sequel of the August revels so eagerly anticipated, so long remembered. The love-sick maiden is the first to avow her passion, as little girls choose their partners at a London party. Perhaps the gentle neglected ghosts bear no resentment, but are consoled by the hope that one day it will be their turn to live again as happily as these their descendants.
Acquaintances were not as easily made in Akakura as in Ikao. The Kogakurō, as our hotel was called, contained but few other guests, and we occupied the two bedrooms which formed a sort of annexe, apart from the rest of the building. In the public baths at certain hours one was sure of meeting from twenty to thirty bathers of all ages and either sex, but they were extremely timid, kept silence when we entered, and did not respond to friendly overtures, so that we ceased to intrude upon their privacy. One old man, however, was very fond of calling and cross-examining the strangers. He had been a samurai, and at the age of seventy-six retained full vigour of mind and body. I should have given him ten years less. The landlord expressed his opinion that this visitor was a Government spy, and cautioned us against talking too freely. But, as it happened, the caution was superfluous, for the dignified old fellow spoke in such queer dialect that I could understand very few of his remarks, and conversation soon lapsed into an interchange of bows and smiles. Only one other circumstance occurred in the Kogakurō during the fortnight we spent there, to excite interest. One morning we found the cheery little landlord very depressed because a fraudulent guest had decamped during the night without paying his bill. Of course, he had only to shoot aside the wooden shutters, and the further feat of “shooting the moon” presented no difficulty.
In this dearth of human subjects to study we acquired a habit of making daily expeditions to neighbouring localities, and were often repaid by beautiful sights. Within two hours’ walking distance lies the lake of Nogiri, which is larger than Lake Haruna, but not so prettily environed. On a densely wooded islet stands a temple of Benten, “the goddess of luck, eloquence, and fertility,” to which we were ferried across by an obliging schoolboy. Before it stand two immense cedars, of which one boasts a girth of twenty-seven feet. A long flight of steps leads from the shore of the island to the shrine, and, viewed from the summit of the steps, the belt of mountains which rim the horizon amply rewards the climber. Except for this view, however, Nogiri is in itself an ordinary unromantic piece of water.
Far more exceptional is the important town of Takata, several hundred feet below the level of Taguchi, from which the railway descends a steep valley between mountain walls precipitously grand. Thousands of feet above snow is surmised, waterfalls are conjectured, but between them and the crawling train push masses of impenetrable forest. Passing Arai, with its petroleum springs, we reach flatter ground and enter Takata, once the castle town of the Sakakibara family, which shared with three others the privilege of providing a regent during the minority of a Tokugawa Shōgun. Traces of its old magnificence and of the Tokugawa patronage exist in a whole suburb of Buddhist temples, adorned in many cases with the Shōgun’s crest. They are large, richly ornamented with good carving, and approached by avenues of cryptomeria. Since the Restoration and the Shintōist reaction the fame of the Takata temples has decreased, but their splendour is only to be eclipsed in that part of the country by the celebrated Zenkōji at Nagano. At the back of one row of these temples runs a stream, spanned by as many little bridges. I never expected to see the college “backs” of Cambridge so admirably parodied.
The railway line is here the dividing-line between sacred and profane. To the left of it the Buddhist monks traffic in holy wares; to the right cotton and cotton-cloth and a species of muslin peculiar to the place compose the stock-in-trade of half the shopkeepers. The latter reside in homogeneous batches, as in feudal times: all the mercers in one part, all the curio-dealers in another, and so on. But the most curious feature in the town is the wooden projecting roof conterminous with the street on either side, which enables the pedestrian to perambulate the main thoroughfare under shelter of an arcade. These are not found in the eastern or central provinces, and have been adopted on account of heavy snow-drifts, which in winter render the roads impassable. We had cause to be grateful for this Echigo custom, as it enabled us to explore the town without being drenched by a heavy, inopportune shower.
Our longest excursion was to Naoetsu, a rising sea-port at the mouth of the Sekigawa and the present terminus of the Tōkyō and Karuizawa line. Though it has long been a port of call for steamers which ply on the western coast, it presented the appearance of a new, unfinished town. Two months before a disastrous fire had consumed three-fourths of the houses, which were rising phœnix-like from the charred relics of their own débris. But fires are so common in these flimsy, inflammable habitations that one ends by regarding them as inevitable, as instruments of the universal law of reincarnation, which applies equally to men and to the works of men’s hands. Every twenty years the two great temples of Ise are demolished and reconstructed as antique ordinance requires. Humbler buildings cannot expect to escape the fiat of periodic resurrection. There is, however, little of interest at Naoetsu, unless it be the hardy fisher-folk and field-labourers. We drove to a fine temple of Kwannon and some tea-houses surrounded by tasteful gardens overlooking the sea. But we had seen their analogues before: never had we seen in Japan, except in the case of the wrestlers, such sturdy human frames as these men and women of Echigo display. Husband and wife, naked to the waist, strain beneath a common yoke and draw ponderous carts to market. Their bronzed busts and blue cotton hakama make grateful patches of colour between the hot sky and dusty road. My photographic friend could not resist the chance of “taking” an Amazonian mother disdainfully recumbent on bent elbow and suckling her child. As she lay supine and heavy-featured, she resembled a Beaudelairian giantess in
“The deep division of prodigious breasts
The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep.”