Kusamakura

Climbing the mountain, I was caught up into a train of thought.

Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you to discomfort. Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in. When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art creates.

This human world of ours is the making neither of God nor of the Devil; but of common mortals; your neighbors on your right; your neighbors on your left, and your neighbors across the street. Hate you may this world of common mortals, but where else can you go? If anywhere else, it must be an unhuman world, but you will find an unhuman world a worse place to live in than this of humanity. Things being disagreeable in the world you cannot depart from it, but you must resign yourself to making the best of disagreeableness, by rubbing off its sharp corners and relaxing its pinches, to what degree you may, to pass pleasantly, even for a brief while, this life of so short a span. Here arises the heaven-ordained mission of the poet and the painter, and blessed are they, who with their art, make life in this world more rich and more cheerful.

I had a queer time of it last night.

About eight o’clock I reached the hotel. It had already closed up for the night, and was but dimly lighted. I could not, of course, tell, then, the plan of the house or the layout of its garden, to say nothing of its bearing on the points of the compass. I was led by the nose, as it were, through a long, long winding sort of passage, at the end of which I was put in a small room of about six mats. I could not at all tell where I was; the place had so completely changed since I was here last. After supper, and then a dip in the hot spring bath, I was sipping tea in my room, when a young girl came in, and asked me if she should make my bed.

What struck me as not a little strange was that it was the same girl who had come out to let me in when I arrived; it was this same girl who had brought me supper and waited on me; it was this same girl who had showed me to the bath room; and it was again this same girl who took upon herself the trouble of making the bed for me. This little woman seemed to have everything on her shoulders in this establishment; and yet she seldom spoke a word. I would have done her injustice, however, if I said she was country-looking.

Possibly just a fancy; but I thought I heard someone singing or rather chanting softly. I pricked my ears to know if it was a song that had escaped from dreamland into this world of reality, or a real voice flowing into dreams? I was sure there was someone singing. The voice was indisputably thin and low; but faint as it was, it was pulsating the Spring night, which was on the verge of sleep. The weird part of it was that, whatever its tune, its wording, of which there was no reason that it could be heard clearly, being not uttered near me, nevertheless came distinctly, the sinking voice repeating over and over the song of Nagarano Otome: “Even like the dew drop, that when autumn comes, lodges on grass leaves, must I roll off to die.”

The chanting sounded first near the verandah; but it gradually grew fainter and farther. What ceases suddenly produces a feeling of suddenness; but it leaves little room for sentiment. A voice that speaks peremptorily resolution rouses also a feeling of peremptoriness and resolution in others. But confronted by a phenomenon that had no definite limit but went on thinning and thinning until it would imperceptibly disappear altogether, you could not help feeling that you must mince up the minute and split the second, your sense of helplessness and hopelessness momentarily deepening. The chant sounded dying like a dying man, becoming more and more feeble like an outgoing light; and in that song that distracted the

I was too lazy to dry myself and was coming out of the bathroom almost wet, when to my surprise, simultaneous with my opening the bathroom door from within, a voice⁠—that of a woman⁠—outside said: “Good morning, did you sleep well last night?”

I had expected no one on the other side of the door, and the greeting came with such absolute suddenness that I was at a loss for an answer. The voice then said: “Put this on and be good; so there.” This was said as the person, from whom the voice proceeded, went behind me and put gently on my back a kimono deliciously soft to the skin, Then and only then did the command of words return to me sufficiently to enable me to blurt out: “So kind of you, thank you.” The woman withdrew a step or two backward as I turned to say this.

Now, it is an unwritten law for novelists, from time immemorial, to give the minutest portrayal of their hero or heroine. If words, phrases, clauses, and effusions employed by ancients as well as by moderns, of the East and of the West, in describing and speaking of beautiful women, were collected, they might, indeed, out-volume even the great Buddhist Sutras. The words might mount up to a countless number, if I were to pick out, from this overwhelming accumulation of adjectives, those that would fit the woman, who was standing three steps from me, with her body slightly twisted halfway round toward me and looking at me from the corner of her eyes, as if enjoying my amazement and embarrassment.

The clock had not ticked a full second when the vision returned from the opposite direction to that which it had disappeared. It was that of a slim woman in a wedding gown with long sleeves, walking gracefully along the upstairs verandah of the wing of the hotel, flanking my room. I did not know why, but the pencil fell from my fingers, and the breath I was inhaling through my nose stopped of its own accord. The sky was darkening, as if forewarning one of the cherry season showers, to hasten the evening dusk; but the gowned figure kept on appearing and disappearing in the heavily-charged atmosphere, walking with benign gentleness along the verandah, twelve yards away from me, overlooking an inner court.

The woman said nothing, nor looked either way. She was walking so softly that the rustling of her silk gown seemed scarcely to catch her ears. Some figures⁠—I could not tell what from the distance⁠—adorned the skirt of her dress, and the figured and unfigured parts shaded into each other like day into night. And the woman was indeed, walking in the borderland of night and day.

What mystified me was what made her go so persistently to and from along the verandah, dressed in her long-sleeved gown. Nor had I any idea of how long she had been at this strange exercise in her strange attire.