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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
as on her bridal day.
Two physicians came from the public hospital, - Japanese military surgeons. They asked straight hard
questions, - questions that cut open the self of the man down to the core. Then they told him truth cold
and sharp as edged steel, - and left him with his dead.
The people wondered he did not become a priest, - fair evidence that his conscience had been awakened.
By day he sits among his bales of Kyoto silks and Osaka figured goods, - earnest and silent. His clerks
think him a good master; he never speaks harshly. Often he works far into the night; and he has changed
his dwelling-place. There are strangers in the pretty house where Haru lived; and the owner never visits
it. Perhaps because he might see there one slender shadow, still arranging flowers, or bending with
iris-grace above the goldfish in his pond. But wherever he rest, sometime in the silent hours he must see
the same soundless presence near his pillow, - sewing, smoothing, softly seeming to make beautiful the
robes he once put on only to betray. And at other times - in the busiest moments of his busy life - the
clamor of the great shop dies; the ideographs of his ledger dim and vanish; and a plaintive little voice,
which the gods refuse to silence, utters into the solitude of his heart, like a question, the single word, -
" Anata?" (1) "Thou?"
VIII. A GLIMPSE OF TENDENCIES
I
The foreign concession of an open port offers a striking contrast to its far-Eastern environment. In the
well-ordered ugliness of its streets one finds suggestions of places not on this side of the world, - just as
though fragments of the Occident had been magically brought oversea: bits of Liverpool, of Marseilles,
of New York, of New Orleans, and bits also of tropical towns in colonies twelve or fifteen thousand
miles away. The mercantile buildings - immense by comparison with the low light Japanese shops - seem
to utter the menace of financial power. The dwellings, of every conceivable design - from that of an
Indian bungalow to that of an English or French country-manor, with turrets and bow-windows - are
surrounded by commonplace gardens of clipped shrubbery; the white roadways are solid and level as
tables, and bordered with boxed-up trees. Nearly all things conventional in England or America have
been domiciled in these districts. You see church-steeples and factory-chimneys and telegraph-poles and
street-lamps. You see warehouses of imported brick with iron shutters, and shop fronts with plate-glass
windows, and sidewalks, and cast-iron railings. There are morning and evening and weekly newspapers;
clubs and reading-rooms and bowling alleys; billiard halls and barrooms; schools and bethels. There are
electric-light and telephone companies; hospitals, courts, jails, and a foreign police. There are foreign
lawyers, doctors, and druggists; foreign grocers, confectioners, bakers, dairymen; foreign dress-makers
and tailors; foreign school-teachers and music-teachers. There is a town-hall, for municipal business and
public meetings of all kinds, - likewise for amateur theatricals or lectures and concerts; and very rarely
some dramatic company, on a tour of the world, halts there awhile to make men laugh and women cry
like they used to do at home. There are cricket-grounds, racecourses, public parks, - or, as we should call
them in England, "squares," - yachting associations, athletic societies, and swimming baths. Among the
familiar noises are the endless tinkling of piano-practice, the crashing of a town-band, and an occasional
wheezing of accordions: in fact, one misses only the organ-grinder. The population is English, French,
German, American, Danish, Swedish, Swiss, Russian, with a thin sprinkling of Italians and Levantines. I
had almost forgotten the Chinese. They are present in multitude, and have a little corner of the district to
themselves. But the dominant element is English and American, the English being in the majority. All
the faults and some of the finer qualities of the masterful races can be studied here to better advantage
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