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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
night, where stars were faintly burning still, - and they could not see Fuji. "Ah!" laughed an officer they
questioned, "you are looking too low! higher up - much higher!" Then they looked up, up, up into the
heart of the sky, and saw the mighty summit pinkening like a wondrous phantom lotos-bud in the flush of
the coming day: a spectacle that smote them dumb. Swiftly the eternal snow yellowed into gold, then
whitened as the sun reached out beams to it over the curve of the world, over the shadowy ranges, over
the very stars, it seemed; for the giant base remained viewless. And the night fled utterly; and soft blue
light bathed all the hollow heaven; and colors awoke from sleep; - and before the gazers there opened the
luminous bay of Yokohama, with the sacred peak, its base ever invisible, hanging above all like a snowy
ghost in the arch of the infinite day.
Still in the wanderer's ears the words rang, "Ah! you are looking too low! - higher up - much
higher!" - making vague rhythm with an immense, irresistible emotion swelling at his heart. Then
everything dimmed: he saw neither Fuji above, nor the nearing hills below, changing their vapory blue to
green, nor the crowding of the ships in the bay; nor anything of the modern Japan; he saw the Old. The
land-wind, delicately scented with odors of spring, rushed to him, touched his blood, and startled from
long-closed cells of memory the shades of all that he had once abandoned and striven to forget. He saw
the faces of his dead: he knew their voices over the graves of the years. Again he was a very little boy in
his father's yashiki, wandering from luminous room to room, playing in sunned spaces where
leaf-shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green dreamy peace of the landscape
garden. Once more he felt the light touch of his mother's hand guiding his little steps to the place of
morning worship, before the household shrine, before the tablets of the ancestors; and the lips of the man
murmured again, with sudden new-found meaning, the simple prayer of the child.
XI. IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
"Do you know anything about josses?"
"Josses?"
"Yes; idols, Japanese idols, - josses." "Something," I answered, "but not very much."
"Well, come, and look at my collection, won't you? I've been collecting josses for twenty years, and I've
got some worth seeing. They're not for sale, though, - except to the British Museum."
I followed the curio dealer through the bric-a-brac of his shop, and across a paved yard into an unusually
large go-down(1). Like all go-downs it was dark: I could barely discern a stairway sloping up through
gloom. He paused at the foot.
"You'll be able to see better in a moment," he said. "I had this place built expressly for them; but now it
is scarcely big enough. They're all in the second story. Go right up; only be careful, - the steps are bad."
I climbed, and reached a sort of gloaming, under a very high roof, and found myself face to face with the
gods.
In the dusk of the great go-down the spectacle was more than weird: it was apparitional. Arhats and
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and the shapes of a mythology older than they, filled all the shadowy space;
not ranked by hierarchies, as in a temple, but mingled without order, as in a silent panic. Out of the
wilderness of multiple heads and broken aureoles and hands uplifted in menace or in prayer, - a
shimmering confusion of dusty gold half lighted by cobwebbed air-holes in the heavy walls, - I could at
first discern little; then, as the dimness cleared, I began to distinguish personalities. I saw Kwannon, of
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