|
Lafcadio Hearn - Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, 1
totally unlike anything in Western melody, - impossible even to write in those tones which are the
ideographs of our music-tongue?
And the emotion itself - what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be something infinitely more old than I -
something not of only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the
universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught spontaneous harmony of that
chant with Nature's most ancient song, in some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes - all
trillings of summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land.
Chapter Seven The Chief City of the Province of the Gods
1
THE first of the noises of a Matsue day comes to the sleeper like the throbbing of a slow, enormous pulse
exactly under his ear. It is a great, soft, dull buffet of sound - like a heartbeat in its regularity, in its
muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply
the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice - a sort of colossal wooden
mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his
force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back
by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most
pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land.
Then the boom of the great bell of Tokoji the Zenshu temple, shakes over the town; then come
melancholy echoes of drumming from the tiny little temple of Jizo in the street Zaimokucho, near my
house, signalling the Buddhist hour of morning prayer. And finally the cries of the earliest itinerant
venders begin - 'Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!' - the sellers of daikon and other strange vegetables.
'Moyaya-moya!' - the plaintive call of the women who sell little thin slips of kindling-wood for the
lighting of charcoal fires.
2
Roused thus by these earliest sounds of the city's wakening life, I slide open my little Japanese paper
window to look out upon the morning over a soft green cloud of spring foliage rising from the
river-bounded garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its farther side,
glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ohashigawa, opening into the grand Shinji Lake, which spreads
out broadly to the right in a dim grey frame of peaks. Just opposite to me, across the stream, the
blue-pointed Japanese dwellings have their to [1] all closed; they are still shut up like boxes, for it is not
yet sunrise, although it is day.
But oh, the charm of the vision - those first ghostly love-colours of a morning steeped in mist soft as
sleep itself resolved into a visible exhalation! Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake
verge - long nebulous bands, such as you may have seen in old Japanese picture-books, and must have
deemed only artistic whimsicalities unless you had previously looked upon the real phenomena. All the
bases of the mountains are veiled by them, and they stretch athwart the loftier peaks at different heights
like immeasurable lengths of gauze (this singular appearance the Japanese term 'shelving'), [2] so that the
lake appears incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a beautiful spectral sea of
the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume, and
visionary strips of hill-ranges figure as league-long causeways stretching out of sight - an exquisite
chaos, ever-changing aspect as the delicate fogs rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun's yellow rim comes
|
