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Lafcadio Hearn - Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, 1
crowd bears me thither. Out of the broad entrance, over a dark gliding mass which I know to be heads
and shoulders of crowding worshippers, beams a broad band of yellow light; and before reaching the
lion-guarded steps I hear the continuous clanging of the temple gong, each clang the signal of an offering
and a prayer. Doubtless a cataract of cash is pouring into the great alms-chest; for to-night is the Festival
of Yakushi-Nyorai, the Physician of Souls. Borne to the steps at last, I find myself able to halt a moment,
despite the pressure of the throng, before the stand of a lantern-seller selling the most beautiful lanterns
that I have ever seen. Each is a gigantic lotus-flower of paper, so perfectly made in every detail as to
seem a great living blossom freshly plucked; the petals are crimson at their bases, paling to white at their
tips; the calyx is a faultless mimicry of nature, and beneath it hangs a beautiful fringe of paper cuttings,
coloured with the colours of the flower, green below the calyx, white in the middle, crimson at the ends.
In the heart of the blossom is set a microscopic oil-lamp of baked clay; and this being lighted, all the
flower becomes luminous, diaphanous - a lotus of white and crimson fire. There is a slender gilded
wooden hoop by which to hang it up, and the price is four cents! How can people afford to make such
things for four cents, even in this country of astounding cheapness?
Akira is trying to tell me something about the hyaku-hachino-mukaebi, the Hundred and Eight Fires, to
be lighted to-morrow evening, which bear some figurative relation unto the Hundred and Eight Foolish
Desires; but I cannot hear him for the clatter of the geta and the komageta, the wooden clogs and wooden
sandals of the worshippers ascending to the shrine of Yakushi-Nyorai. The light straw sandals of the
poorer men, the zori and the waraji, are silent; the great clatter is really made by the delicate feet of
women and girls, balancing themselves carefully upon their noisy geta. And most of these little feet are
clad with spotless tabi, white as a white lotus. White feet of little blue-robed mothers they mostly are -
mothers climbing patiently and smilingly, with pretty placid babies at their backs, up the hill to Buddha.
And while through the tinted lantern light I wander on with the gentle noisy people, up the great steps of
stone, between other displays of lotus-blossoms, between other high hedgerows of paper flowers, my
thought suddenly goes back to the little broken shrine in the poor woman's room, with the humble
playthings hanging before it, and the laughing, twirling mask of Otafuku. I see the happy, funny little
eyes, oblique and silky-shadowed like Otafuku's own, which used to look at those toys, - toys in which
the fresh child-senses found a charm that I can but faintly divine, a delight hereditary, ancestral. I see the
tender little creature being borne, as it was doubtless borne many times, through just such a peaceful
throng as this, in just such a lukewarm, luminous night, peeping over the mother's shoulder, softly
clinging at her neck with tiny hands.
Somewhere among this multitude she is - the mother. She will feel again to-night the faint touch of little
hands, yet will not turn her head to look and laugh, as in other days.
Chapter Six Bon-odori
1
Over the mountains to Izumo, the land of the Kamiyo, [1] the land of the Ancient Gods. A journey of
four days by kuruma, with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan; for we have taken the
longest and least frequented route.
Through valleys most of this long route lies, valleys always open to higher valleys, while the road
ascends, valleys between mountains with rice-fields ascending their slopes by successions of diked
terraces which look like enormous green flights of steps. Above them are shadowing sombre forests of
cedar and pine; and above these wooded summits loom indigo shapes of farther hills overtopped by
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