Lafcadio Hearn's Japan (12 page)

Other visitors are beetles of divers colors, and a sort of small roach called goki-kaburi, signifying “one whose head is covered with a bowl.” It is alleged that the goki-kaburi likes to eat human eyes, and is therefore the abhorred enemy of Ichibata-Sama,—Yakushi-Nyorai of Ichibata,—by whom diseases of the eye are healed. To kill the goki-kaburi is consequently thought to be a meritorious act in the sight of this Buddha. Always welcome are the beautiful fire-flies
(hotaru),
which enter quite noiselessly, and at once seek the darkest place in the house, slow-glimmering, like sparks moved by a gentle wind. They are supposed to be very fond of water; wherefore children sing to them this little song:—

Hotaru k
ō
e midzu nomash
ō
;
Achi no midzu wa nigaizo;
Kochi no midzu wa amaizo.
³²

A pretty gray lizard, quite different from some which usually haunt the garden, also makes its appearance at night, and pursues its prey along the ceiling. Sometimes an extraordinarily large centipede attempts the same thing, but with less success, and has to be seized with a pair of fire-tongs and thrown into the exterior darkness. Very rarely, an enormous spider appears. This creature seems inoffensive. If captured, it will feign death until certain that it is not watched, when it will run away with surprising swiftness if it gets a chance. It is hairless, and very different from the tarantula, or fukurogumo. It is called miyamagumo, or mountain spider. There are four other kinds of spiders common in this neighborhood: tenagakumo, or “long-armed spider;” hiratakumo, or “flat spider;” jikumo, or “earth spider;” and totatekumo, or “door-shutting spider.” Most spiders are considered evil beings. A spider seen anywhere at night, the people say, should be killed; for all spiders that show themselves after dark are goblins. While people are awake and watchful, such creatures make themselves small; but when everybody is fast asleep, then they assume their true goblin shape, and become monstrous.

XIII

The high wood of the hill behind the garden is full of bird life. There dwell wild uguisu, owls, wild doves, too many crows, and a queer bird that makes weird noises at night,—long deep sounds of
hoo, hoo.
It is called awamakidori or the “millet-sowing bird,” because when the farmers hear its cry, they know that it is time to plant the millet. It is quite small and brown, extremely shy, and, so far as I can learn, altogether nocturnal in its habits.

But rarely, very rarely, a far stranger cry is heard in those trees at night, a voice as of one crying in pain the syllables
“ho-to-to-gi-su.”
The cry and the name of that which utters it are one and the same,
hototogisu.

It is a bird of which weird things are told; for they say it is not really a creature of this living world, but a night wanderer from the Land of Darkness. In the Meido its dwelling is among those sunless mountains of Shide over which all souls must pass to reach the place of judgment. Once in each year it comes; the time of its coming is the end of the fifth month, by the antique counting of moons; and the peasants, hearing its voice, say one to the other, “Now must we sow the rice; for the Shide-no-taosa is with us.” The word taosa signifies the head man of a mura, or village, as villages were governed in the old days; but why the hototogisu is called the taosa of Shide I do not know. Perhaps it is deemed to be a soul from some shadowy hamlet of the Shide hills, whereat the ghosts are wont to rest on their weary way to the realm of Emma, the King of Death.

Its cry has been interpreted in various ways. Some declare that the hototogisu does not really repeat its own name, but asks, “Honzon kaketaka” (Has the honzon
³³
been suspended?) Others, resting their interpretation upon the wisdom of the Chinese, aver that the bird's speech signifies, “Surely it is better to return home.” This, at least, is true: that all who journey far from their native place, and hear the voice of the hototogisu in other distant provinces, are seized with the sickness of longing for home.

Only at night, the people say, is its voice heard, and most often upon the nights of great moons; and it chants while hovering high out of sight, wherefore a poet has sung of it thus:—

Hito koe wa
Tsuki ga naitaka
Hototogisu!
³⁴

And another has written:—

Hotogisu
Nakitsuru kata wo
Nagamureba,—
Tada ariake no
Tsuki zo nokoreru.
³⁵

The dweller in cities may pass a lifetime without hearing the hototogisu. Caged, the little creature will remain silent and die. Poets often wait vainly in the dew, from sunset till dawn, to hear the strange cry which has inspired so many exquisite verses. But those who have heard found it so mournful that they have likened it to the cry of one wounded suddenly to death.

Hototogisu
Chi ni naku koe wa Ariake no
Tsuki yori hokani
Kiku hito mo nashi.
³⁶

Concerning Izumo owls, I shall content myself with citing a composition by one of my Japanese students who wrote:

“The Owl is a hateful bird that sees in the dark. Little children who cry are frightened by the threat that the Owl will come to take them away; for the Owl cries,
‘H
ō
! H
ō
! sor
ō
tto k
ō
ka! sor
ō
tto koka!'
which means, ‘Thou! must I enter slowly?' It also cries
‘Noritsuke hose! ho! ho!'
which means, ‘Do thou make the starch to use in washing to-morrow!' And when the women hear that cry, they know that to-morrow will be a fine day. It also cries,
‘Tototo,'
‘The man dies,' and
‘K
ō
tokokko,'
‘The boy dies.' So people hate it. And crows hate it so much that it is used to catch crows. The Farmer puts an Owl in the rice-field; and all the crows come to kill it, and they get caught fast in the snares. This should teach us not to give way to our dislikes for other people.”

The kites which hover over the city all day do not live in the neighborhood. Their nests are far away upon the blue peaks; but they pass much of their time in catching fish, and in stealing from back yards. They pay the wood and the garden swift and sudden piratical visits; and their sinister cry—
pi-yor
ō
yor
ō
, pi-yor
ō
yor
ō
— sounds at intervals over the town from dawn till sundown. Most insolent of all feathered creatures they certainly are,—more insolent than even their fellow-robbers, the crows. A kite will drop five miles to filch a tai out of a fish-seller's bucket, or a fried-cake out of a child's hand, and shoot back to the clouds before the victim of the theft has time to stoop for a stone. Hence the saying, “to look as surprised as if one's aburagé
³⁷
had been snatched from one's hand by a kite.” There is, moreover, no telling what a kite may think proper to steal. For example, my neighbor's servant-girl went to the river the other day, wearing in her hair a string of small scarlet beads made of rice-grains prepared and dyed in a certain ingenious way. A kite lighted upon her head, and tore away and swallowed the string of beads. But it is great fun to feed these birds with dead rats or mice which have been caught in traps over night and subsequently drowned. The instant a dead rat is exposed to view a kite pounces from the sky to bear it away. Sometimes a crow may get the start of the kite, but the crow must be able to get to the woods very swiftly indeed in order to keep his prize. The children sing this song:—

Tobi, tobi, maute mise!
Ashita no ba ni
Karasu ni kakushite
Nezumi yaru.
³⁸

The mention of dancing refers to the beautiful balancing motion of the kite's wings in flight. By suggestion this motion is poetically compared to the graceful swaying of a maiko, or dancing-girl, extending her arms and waving the long wide sleeves of her silken robe.

Although there is a numerous sub-colony of crows in the wood behind my house, the headquarters of the corvine army are in the pine grove of the ancient castle grounds, visible from my front room. To see the crows all flying home at the same hour every evening is an interesting spectacle, and popular imagination has found an amusing comparison for it in the hurry-skurry of people running to a fire. This explains the meaning of a song which children sing to the crows returning to their nests:—

Ato no karasu saki ine,
Ware ga iye ga yakeru ken,
Hay
ō
inde midzu kake,
Midzu ga nakya yarozo,
Amattara ko ni yare,
Ko ga nakya modose.
³⁹

Confucianism seems to have discovered virtue in the crow. There is a Japanese proverb,
“Karasu ni hampo no ko ari,”
meaning that the crow performs the filial duty of hampo, or, more literally, “the filial
duty of hampo exists in the crow.” “Hampo” means, literally, “to return a feeding.” The young crow is said to requite its parents' care by feeding them when it becomes strong. Another example of filial piety has been furnished by the dove.
“Hato ni sanshi no rei ari,”
— the dove sits three branches below its parent; or, more literally, “has the three-branch etiquette to perform.”

The cry of the wild dove
(yamabato),
which I hear almost daily from the wood, is the most sweetly plaintive sound that ever reached my ears. The Izumo peasantry say that the bird utters these words, which it certainly seems to do if one listen to it after having learned the alleged syllables:—

Tété
popp
ō
Kaka
popp
ō
Tété
popp
ō
Kaka
popp
ō
Tété . . . (sudden pause)

“Tété” is the baby word for “father,” and “kaka” for mother; and “popp
ō
” signifies, in infantile speech, “the bosom.”
⁴⁰

Wild uguisu also frequently sweeten my summer with their song, and sometimes come very near the house, being attracted, apparently, by the chant of my caged pet. The uguisu is very common in this province. It haunts all the woods and the sacred groves in the neighborhood of the city, and I never made a journey in Izumo during the warm season without hearing its note from some shadowy place. But there are uguisu and uguisu. There are uguisu to be had for one or two yen, but the finely trained, cage-bred singer may command not less than a hundred.

It was at a little village temple that I first heard one curious belief about this delicate creature. In Japan, the coffin in which a corpse is borne to burial is totally unlike an Occidental coffin. It is a surprisingly small square box, wherein the dead is placed in a sitting posture. How any adult corpse can be put into so small a space may well be an enigma to foreigners. In cases of pronounced
rigor mortis
the work of getting the body into the coffin is difficult even for the professional d
ō
shin-bozu. But the devout followers of Nichiren claim that after death their bodies will remain perfectly flexible; and the dead body of an uguisu, they affirm, likewise never stiffens, for this little bird is of their faith, and passes its life in singing praises unto the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law.

XIV

I have already become a little too fond of my dwelling-place. Each day, after returning from my college duties, and exchanging my teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable Japanese robe, I find more than compensation for the weariness of five class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shaded veranda overlooking the gardens. Those antique garden walls, high-mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seem to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There are no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of semi, or, at long, lazy intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog. Nay, those walls seclude me from much more than city streets. Outside them hums the changed Japan of telegraphs and newspapers and steamships; within dwell the all-reposing peace of nature and the dreams of the sixteenth century. There is a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet all about one; perhaps the gentle haunting of dead ladies who looked like the ladies of the old picture-books, and who lived here when all this was new. Even in the summer light—touching the gray strange shapes of stone, thrilling through the foliage of the long-loved trees—there is the tenderness of a phantom caress. These are the gardens of the past. The future will know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius may reproduce.

Of the human tenants here no creature seems to be afraid. The little frogs resting upon the lotus-leaves scarcely shrink from my touch; the lizards sun themselves within easy reach of my hand; the water-snakes glide across my shadow without fear; bands of semi establish their deafening orchestra on a plum branch just above my head, and a praying mantis insolently poses on my knee. Swallows and sparrows not only build their nests on my roof, but even enter my rooms without concern,—one swallow has actually built its nest in the ceiling of the bath-room,—and the weasel purloins fish under my very eyes without any scruples of conscience. A wild uguisu perches on a cedar by the window, and in a burst of savage sweetness challenges my caged pet to a contest in song; and always through the golden air, from the green twilight of the mountain pines, there purls to me, the plaintive, caressing, delicious call of the yamabato:—