Japanese Plays and Playfellows

by Osman Edwards

Could she really be of the same race as the fragile, geisha-fairies of the Myako-odori? Her photograph had better claim perhaps to the title of miyage than the crystal and jade kakemono weights, which we bought from a specious hawker on the cliffs. He who would conform to Japanese etiquette, with its charming code of trifling generosities, is sorely perturbed by this problem of miyage. The dictionary defines it clearly enough: “A present made by one returning home from a journey, or by one coming from another place—generally of some rare or curious production of another place.” Now, I was perpetually “coming from another place,” and the search before I left it for “some rare or curious production,” which would serve as a present for Ashikaga or Tōkyō friends, baffled at times even my insatiable curiosity. The hawker’s streaked pebbles were pretty enough as pledges of transitory kindness, but the souvenirs most vividly stamped on the tablets of remembrance by the glaring sunlight of Naoetsu in August show a vision of brown sea-goddesses against a turquoise sea.

III

The last lotus had shed its stately coronal of broad petals before our short stay at Akakura came to an end: business detained us in the capital throughout the September rains; when we determined to take the waters of Dōgō October was well advanced, and the hills were already flushed with reddening maple-leaves. As we sat on “the bridge that is joined to heaven” and gazed into the maple-lined ravine, which is crossed and crowned by the monastery of Tōfukuji, we seemed to be watching the slow sepulture of that lingering summer beneath a pall of fiery foliage. Yet we knew that, though there on the hills around Kyōto autumn was mistress of the woods, there still reigned on the sheltered shores of the Inland Sea a summer of St. Martin, the diaphanous ghost of summer, mild and tender in heat and hue. There and then our trip was planned. We would skirt its northern coast from Kōbe to Hiroshima, spend a day in the holy island of Miyajima, and thence take boat to Mitsugahama, the nearest port to the Dōgō baths, whence a second boat would take us back to Kōbe. Thus the circuit of the eastern waters of the sea between Shikoku and the Main Island might be accomplished in a leisurely ten days. For the moment, however, we might as well fall in with the spirit of soft melancholy which all persons of sensibility were bound to assume in the presence of maple-leaves, unless centuries of minor poetry should be coarsely disregarded. What season could be fitter for making pilgrimage to Sen-yūji, the burial-place of the Emperors? It is true that a sinister sentence in the guide-book said, “As neither the tombs nor the various treasures of the temple are shown, there is little object in visiting it.” But for all we knew, the warning might be piously designed to save a sacred privacy from the more vulgar type of tourist, whose eyes are blind to immaterial things. At any rate, that was the time, if ever, to test the meaning of Murray’s discreet dissuasion.

It certainly required no slight effort of imaginative sympathy to appraise at its historic worth a most paltry wooden bridge, devoid of grace or ornament, which seemed a rustic plank in comparison with the Shōgun’s red-lacquer Mi Hashi at Nikkō, so finely poised and firmly flung across the foaming Daiyagawa. But that was worthy of the military usurpers, who took the substance of sovereignty and left its shadow to their nominal sovereigns, while this is only Yume no Uki-hashi, the Floating Bridge of Dreams, aptly symbolic of the recluse rois fainéants, absorbed in sentiment and moonshine. Here, we are told, as the midnight mourners bore along their dead emperor to sleep with his fathers, they would throw down a little fruit, some libatory cakes, into the whispering rivulet. Then steep and dark before them rose the narrow road, which terminates in a large hollow hewn out of the hillside to be the cradle of the sceptred heirs of the sun-goddess. Like the palaces in which they lived, their houses of death are clean and august. The shrines are of plain white wood, of the sort else used only in Shintō temples; the paths, scrupulously kept, are strewn with small white pebbles and wind spirally up mound after mound into the shadow of thick pines. Six centuries of royalty are buried in that white city with no other token of their rank than strict seclusion and austere simplicity. Each group of tombs is enclosed by a high wall, and on every gate is the sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum. There is no glitter of marble or gold, as in so many burial-grounds of monarchy, no fulsome eulogy on staring tablet, but, shrouded in the same mysterious obscurity as had enveloped for the nation their half-monastic lives, the Tenshi, sons of heaven, seem fittingly interred in that precise maze of ordered tranquillity half-way between the sky and their dearly-loved Kyōto.

I could not bring myself to pass Ōsaka on the way to Kōbe without visiting the temple of Tennōji, where Mr. Lafcadio Hearn gathered some of his happiest “Gleanings in Buddhist Fields.” Though the children’s chapel has been so touchingly described by him that any other writer may well shrink from following in his footsteps, a rapid impression of a fugitive glimpse will be pardoned and more than justified if it should induce the reader to re-read his more elaborate account. An enormous temple, Tennōji lies on the very outskirts of the town, and, after traversing innumerable canals, one is still a little puzzled to locate the indo-no-kane among wide courts grouped about the central colonnade. After some searching we discerned a man and woman kneeling on the threshold of a shrine, in which a wrinkled priest in shabby brown vestments was reciting a prayer. Drawing nearer, we noticed that the man was weeping and the woman held in her hands a baby’s kimono of brightly coloured material, which soon after she handed to the priest with a few copper coins. He took the garment, folded it carefully, and placed it on a shelf. Then, raising our eyes from the personages in this pathetic scene, we observed for the first time the chapel itself. The altar bore no image of Buddha flanked by gilt lotus or vases of natural flowers, but from cloth to ceiling it was covered with a bewildering pyramid of dead toys. Almond-eyed mannikins and stiff-jointed maidens, dolls of all classes, richly or penuriously dressed, seemed to stretch imploring arms and to fix hallucinating eyes on the beholder; drums and trumpets, paper ships and indiarubber balls, masks and picture-books and rattles—all the motley companions of vanished children were huddled together like contorted imps in a chaotic pantomime. Massed and motionless in the twilight of their recess, they had the air of dead things—the shells and figments of faithful toys, whose spirits had followed the babies’ souls to paradise, that the little hands which had clasped them night and day in “this miserable, fleeting world” might not be quite comfortless in their strange new nursery. The lesson would not be lost on heartbroken mothers who parted here from their own most cherished hopes more fragile than these brittle playthings. The roof was hung, the side shelves were piled, with tiny dresses, pendent or folded; and, most curious of all, the bell-rope, that summoned Shotoku Taishi, the saintly prince, to conduct the dead infants to God was strung with overlapping woollen bibs—yellow and red and green—the clumsy counterparts, these, of aureoles. But while we had been enthralled by this canonisation of dolldom the priest had been writing, and now handed to the mother a slip of paper attached to a thin wand of bamboo. Bowing low, she took the paper, pressed it to her forehead, and crossed the enclosure to the stone chamber known as the Tortoise Tower, for there those who look down over the circular balustrade into a central cavity will perceive clear water running from the mouth of a stone tortoise. Into that sacred stream which flows from earth to heaven the paper drops, being inscribed with the new name which is bestowed on every believer after death; and the poor woman goes away not a little comforted, for now at least her child is sure of an orthodox introduction to paradise. Thus neither babe nor emperor is exempt from etiquette, whether life or death be the master of ceremonies. Inequalities persist in the very funeral rites, though in their hearts the celebrants must feel that the geisha’s flower-song is of universal application:

“Peonies, roses,

Faded, are equal;

Only while life blooms

Differ the flowers.”