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Lafcadio Hearn - Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, 1
familiar through study, after a long residence in the Orient, how nervously fascinant the oscillation of the
dance, and the singular swing of the song!
This dance, I know, began at eight o'clock; and the Ondo-tori, after having sung without a falter in his
voice for an extraordinary time, has been relieved by a second. But the great round never breaks, never
slackens its whirl; it only enlarges as the night wears on. And the second Ondo-tori is relieved by a third;
yet I would like to watch that dance for ever.
'What time do you think it is?' my friend asks, looking at his watch.
'Nearly eleven o'clock,' I make answer.
'Eleven o'clock! It is exactly eight minutes to three o'clock. And our host will have little time for sleep
before the rising of the sun.'
Chapter Twelve At Hinomisaki
KITZUKI, August 10, 1891.
MY Japanese friends urge me to visit Hinomisaki, where no European has ever been, and where there is
a far-famed double temple dedicated to Amaterasu-oho-mi-Kami, the Lady of Light, and to her divine
brother Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto. Hinomisaki is a little village on the Izumo coast about five
miles from Kitzuki. It maybe reached by a mountain path, but the way is extremely steep, rough, and
fatiguing. By boat, when the weather is fair, the trip is very agreeable. So, with a friend, I start for
Hinomisaki in a very cozy ryosen, skilfully sculled by two young fishermen.
Leaving the pretty bay of Inasa, we follow the coast to the right - a very lofty and grim coast without a
beach. Below us the clear water gradually darkens to inky blackness, as the depth increases; but at
intervals pale jagged rocks rise up from this nether darkness to catch the light fifty feet under the surface.
We keep tolerably close to the cliffs, which vary in height from three hundred to six hundred feet - their
bases rising from the water all dull iron-grey, their sides and summits green with young pines and dark
grasses that toughen in sea-wind. All the coast is abrupt, ravined, irregular - curiously breached and
fissured. Vast masses of it have toppled into the sea; and the black ruins project from the deep in a
hundred shapes of menace. Sometimes our boat glides between a double line of these; or takes a zigzag
course through labyrinths of reef-channels. So swiftly and deftly is the little craft impelled to right and
left, that one could almost believe it sees its own way and moves by its own intelligence. And again we
pass by extraordinary islets of prismatic rock whose sides, just below the water-line, are heavily mossed
with seaweed. The polygonal masses composing these shapes are called by the fishermen 'tortoise-shell
stones.' There is a legend that once Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, to try his strength, came here, and, lifting
up one of these masses of basalt, flung it across the sea to the mountain of Sanbeyama. At the foot of
Sanbe the mighty rock thus thrown by the Great Deity of Kitzuki may still be seen, it is alleged, even
unto this day.
More and more bare and rugged and ghastly the coast becomes as we journey on, and the sunken ledges
more numerous, and the protruding rocks more dangerous, splinters of strata piercing the sea-surface
from a depth of thirty fathoms. Then suddenly our boat makes a dash for the black cliff, and shoots into a
tremendous cleft of it - an earthquake fissure with sides lofty and perpendicular as the walls of a
canon-and lo! there is daylight ahead. This is a miniature strait, a short cut to the bay. We glide through it
in ten minutes, reach open water again, and Hinomisaki is before us-a semicircle of houses clustering
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