Japan

by Percivel Lowell

To Basil Hall Chamberlain, Esq.
From you, my dear Basil, the confidant of my hopes toward Noto, I
know I may look for sympathy now that my advances have met with such
happy issue, however incomplete be my account. And so I ask you to
be my best man in the matter before the world.

Ever yours,
Percival Lowell.

We made for the main hut, a low, mouse-colored shanty fast asleep and deep drifted in snow. The advance porter summoned the place, and the summons drew to what did for door a man as mouselike as his mansion. He had about him a subdued, monkish demeanor that only partially hid an alertness within, - a secular monk befitting the spot. He showed himself a kindly body, and after he had helped the porters off with their packs, led the way into the room in which he and his mate hibernated. It was a room very much in the rough; boards for walls, for ceiling, for floor, its only furnishing a fire.

The fancy took me to go to Noto.

It seemed a strange fancy to my friends.

Yet I make no apology for it; for it was a case of love at first sight.

When Yejiro pushed the shoji and the amado (night shutters) apart in the morning, he disclosed a bank of snow four feet deep; not a snowfall over night, but the relic of the winter. I found myself in a snow grotto beyond which nothing was visible. He then imparted to me the cheerful news that the watchman had changed his mind, and now refused to set out with us. It was too late in the day to start, the man said, which, in view of his having informed us only the night before that the snow would not be fit to travel on till this very hour, was scarcely logical.

It was on the day but one before the festival of the fifth moon that we set out, or, in English, the third of May; and those emblems of good luck, the festival fishes, were already swimming in the air above the house eaves, as we scurried through the streets in jinrikisha toward the Uyeno railway station. We had been a little behindhand in starting, but by extra exertions on the part of the runners we succeeded in reaching the station just in time to be shut out by the gatekeeper.

The owner of the farmhouse had inherited it from his father. There was nothing very odd about this even to our other-world notions of property, except that the father was still living, as hale and hearty as you please, in a little den at the foot of the garden. He was, in short, what is known as an inkyo, or one "dwelling in retirement," - a singular state, composed of equal parts of this world and the next; like dying in theory, and then undertaking to live on in practice.

Shops and Shopping - The Barber's Shop - A Paper Waterproof - Ito's Vanity - Preparations for the Journey - Transport and Prices - Money and Measurements.

"A Plague of Immoderate Rain" - A Confidential Servant - Ito's Diary- -Ito's Excellences - Ito's Faults - Prophecy of the Future of Japan - Curious Queries - Superfine English - Economical Travelling - The Japanese Pack-horse again.

KUBOTA, July 24.

A Supposed Act of Worship - Parental Tenderness - Morning Visits - Wretched Cultivation - Honesty and Generosity - A "Dug-out" - Female Occupations - The Ancient Fate - A New Arrival - A Perilous Prescription - The Shrine of Yoshitsune - The Chief's Return.

Comfort disappears - Fine Scenery - An Alarm - A Farm-house - An unusual Costume - Bridling a Horse - Female Dress and Ugliness - Babies - My Mago - Beauties of the Kinugawa - Fujihara - My Servant - Horse-shoes - An absurd Mistake.

FUJIHARA, June 24.

Ito's informants were right. Comfort was left behind at Nikko!