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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
began for him a series of wanderings destined to carry him round the world. Korea first afforded him a
refuge; then China, where he lived as a teacher; and at last he found himself on board a steamer bound
for Marseilles. He had little money; but he did not ask himself how he was going to live in Europe.
Young, tall, athletic, frugal and inured to hardship, he felt sure of himself; and he had letters to men
abroad who could smooth his way.
But long years were to pass before he could see his native land again.
VII
During those years he saw Western civilization as few Japanese ever saw it; for he wandered through
Europe and America, living in many cities, and toiling in many capacities, - sometimes with his brain,
oftener with his hands, - and so was able to study the highest and the lowest, the best and the worst of the
life about him. But he saw with the eyes of the Far East; and the ways of his judgments were not as our
ways. For even as the Occident regards the Far East, so does the Far East regard the Occident, - only with
this difference: that what each most esteems in itself is least likely to be esteemed by the other. And both
are partly right and partly wrong; and there never has been, and never can be, perfect mutual
comprehension.
Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him, - a world of giants; and that which depresses even
the boldest Occidental who finds himself, without means or friends, alone in a great city, must often have
depressed the Oriental exile: that vague uneasiness aroused by the sense of being invisible to hurrying
millions; by the ceaseless roar of traffic drowning voices; by monstrosities of architecture without a soul;
by the dynamic display of wealth forcing mind and hand, as mere cheap machinery, to the uttermost
limits of the possible. Perhaps he saw such cities as Dore saw London: sullen majesty of arched glooms
and granite deeps opening into granite deeps beyond range of vision, and mountains of masonry with
seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power
slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was nothing to make appeal to him between those
endless cliffs of stone which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the wind. All that which
draws us to great cities repelled or oppressed him; even luminous Paris soon filled him with weariness. It
was the first foreign city in which he made a long sojourn. French art, as reflecting the aesthetic thought
of the most gifted of European races, surprised him much, but charmed him not at all. What surprised
him especially were its studies of the nude, in which he recognized only an open confession of the one
human weakness which, next to disloyalty or cowardice, his stoical training had taught him to most
despise. Modern French literature gave him other reasons for astonishment. He could little comprehend
the amazing art of the story-teller; the worth of the workmanship in itself was not visible to him; and if
he could have been made to understand it as a European understands, he would have remained none the
less convinced that such application of genius to production signified social depravity. And gradually, in
the luxurious life of the capital itself, he found proof for the belief suggested to him by the art and the
literature of the period. He visited the pleasure-resorts, the theatres, the opera; he saw with the eyes of an
ascetic and a soldier, and wondered why the Western conception of the worth of life differed so little
from the Far-Eastern conception of folly and of effeminacy. He saw fashionable balls, and exposures de
rigueur intolerable to the Far-Eastern sense of modesty, - artistically calculated to suggest what would
cause a Japanese woman to die of shame; and he wondered at criticisms he had heard about the natural,
modest, healthy half-nudity of Japanese toiling under a summer sun. He saw cathedrals and churches in
vast number, and near to them the palaces of vice, and establishments enriched by the stealthy sale of
artistic obscenities. He listened to sermons by great preachers; and he heard blasphemies against all faith
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