Lafcadio Hearn's Japan (19 page)

 

Early in 1893 Hearn wrote to Chamberlain concerning his cook: “My cook wears a smiling, healthy, rather pleasing face. He is a good-looking young man. Whenever I used to think of him I thought of the smile. . . . One day I looked through a little hole in the shoji and saw him alone. The face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showed queer lines worn by old hardship. I thought: ‘He will look just like that when he is dead.' I went in and the man was all changed—young and happy again—nor have I ever seen that look of trouble in his face since. But I knew when he is alone he wears it. He never shows his real face to me; he wears the mask of happiness as an etiquette. . . .”

In cold Kumamoto, it was the real face that Hearn became interested in—the real face of the cook, the real face of Japan. Consequently, he wrote much less about landscape and general impressions; he wrote about particulars—particular people. Japan became much less a reflection of his own feelings; rather, he took as his own the feelings of the people he met.

In 1895—now in modern, Westernized Kobe—he wrote Chamberlain that it was a day when “I felt as if I hated Japan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came two women to the house, to sell ballads. One took her samisen and sang; and people crowded into the tiny yard to hear. Never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty, all the pain and sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting. I looked at the people, and I saw they were nearly all weeping and snuffing; and though I could not understand the words, I could feel the pathos and beauty of things. Then, too, for the first time, I noticed that the singer was blind. Both women were almost surprisingly ugly, but the voice of the one that sang was indescribably beautiful; and she sang as peasants and birds and semi sing, which is nature and is divine. They were wanderers both. I called them in, and treated them well, and heard their story. It was not romantic at all,—small-pox, blindness, a sick husband (paralyzed) and children to care for. I got two copies of the ballad, and enclose one. . . .”

Hearn was in Kobe because, the Kumamoto contract lapsed, he had to make a living and he had found a job writing editorials and occasional pieces for the
Kobe Chronicle.
It was an occupation for which he was temperamentally suited. He had been a journalist in various cities in the United States, and in Martinique as well, and in Japan he had learned how to make the casual article a vehicle of observation.

He had discovered that the Japanese form of the
zuihitsu
fitted his talent. Indeed, most of his pieces are just such “wanderings of the brush,” usually carefully formless, informal excursions, a genre which in earlier writings sometimes lent itself to effusion and in later writings often to an impressionistic precision.

His
zuihitsu
“Bits of Life and Death,” probably written in 1894, is a collection of observations of domestic life in Kumamoto. In a late Matsue piece, “On Women's Hair,” description is personified in a lively manner.

These are followed by some of his portraits of women, both alive or long dead: “A Street Singer,” “Kimiko,” and “Yuko: A Reminiscence.” After these, three small stories have been included: “On a Bridge,” “The Case of O-Dai,” and “Drifting,” the last, one of Hearn's few adventure stories.

“Diplomacy” reflects the author's continued interest in the past, in the dead, and in ghosts—though with a sardonic quality not usually encountered. The full-fledged Hearn ghost story is seen in “A Passional Karma,” one of his very finest but one not often reprinted, perhaps because of its length.

As Lafcadio's final word on the people he lived among, and as a summing up of this extraordinary experience, I include a chapter, “Survivals,” from his last completed book,
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation,
which indicates his belief in the survival of much he had known and loved—though in some other form.

The informal,
zuihitsu
-like essay fit Hearn's needs precisely because his methods were not suited to sustained writing—as the strained and laborious structure of his last book, his only treatment of a single subject at length, indicates. Hearn's vehicle was usually a single picture, or a reflection, or an impression of some sort.

Like many of his fellow
fin-de-siècle
artists in distant Europe, Hearn was, indeed, an impressionist. This quality has been described by Earl Miner as a belief that “truth is made up of varying perceptions and is relative to the perceiver.” Hearn was forced to rely on the perceptions and intuitions of impressionism both because he had no other means and because it was his only way of reaching his distant readers.

If he could render the impressions made by Japan upon him, then he could create those same impressions upon the reader. This is the method of artists as otherwise dissimilar as Flaubert (one of Hearn's enthusiasms) and the much later Ernest Hemingway, and it was the one that most suited Hearn's purposes.

These (“to create, in the minds, of the readers, a vivid impression of living in Japan”) were enforced by what Hearn was at the time learning, as differentiated from feeling. He became a student not only of fancy and folklore but also of those elements upon which they are based: religion and history. The longer he lived in the country the more seriously he studied Buddhism, and the closer he moved to that other, unreachable goal, so confidently expressed before he had even come to Japan—to become “as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and
thinking with their thoughts.”

In 1895 he made a big step in that direction by becoming a Japanese citizen. His reasons were various, and perhaps a more or less enthusiastic empathy was among them. Yet, he already knew—and had written—that the possibility of actually becoming one with the Japanese was unlikely, and there were possibly other reasons as well.

One certainly was that he had a family to support. If Setsuko became British (Hearn's actual nationality) she would have to give up her legal rights including her land holdings. Even as the wife of a foreigner these were imperiled. So part of the reason behind the move was economic.

The result was Hearn as Japanese: Yakumo Koizumi—Setsuko's family name and a wonderfully fanciful given-name reference to beloved Matsue, the land of the eight clouds. This transformation was accompanied by a new job. Writing every day in Kobe had proved too much for the remaining eye and so the ever helpful Chamberlain found Hearn a position at the Tokyo Imperial University's College of Literature.

So there Hearn finally was—back in Tokyo. Setsuko was delighted, a country woman triumphantly in the capital, but to Lafcadio Tokyo was “the most horrible place in Japan.” In fact, as he wrote Chamberlain, “there is no Japan in it,” only “dirty shoes,—absurd fashions,—wickedly expensive living,—airs, vanities,—gossip.”

In this horrible place he lived, first, in Ushigome, near a temple he much liked. After the authorities had cut down all of its beautiful trees to make room for modernization, he moved out to Nishi-Ogikubo, the suburbs mentioned in the 1904 “Letter.” There he wrote his last books, quarreled with his friend and benefactor Chamberlain (over something so slight it is not even recorded), and became thoroughly disillusioned with the Tokyo Imperial University.

In 1903, when his contract was due for renewal, he was told that his pay was to be docked, that since he was now Japanese he would be paid as a Japanese. Indeed, he was not entitled to a foreigner's salary, but, in fact, the new president wanted to get rid of foreigners. Hearn later often repeated the “painful remark” this president had made to him: If he could not live upon the reduced salary, he should learn, like any other Japanese, to eat rice.

While this may seem only sensible to us, Hearn was of the generation that believed that the white man deserved a bit of respect. Though he disliked the imperialistic foreigner (another reason for leaving Kobe was that he found it was filled with little else), he himself embodied a number of such qualities.

To insist, as he early did, upon a picturesque country and a childlike people is to prepare the way for forces that will modernize the old, render practical the pretty, and form the simple people into something more economically profitable. Indeed, to Orientalize is to take advantage.

Hearn would have been horrified by this thought but there it is. And it is among the reasons that after the Pacific War Hearn's scholarly standing so declined. No postwar Japanologist could have quoted Hearn with approval. In addition, there was the idea that he was an amateur in a field fast becoming professional, that he had been popular—always anathema to academe—and that he was somehow a spokesman for a Japan which had been, after all, the enemy.

This latter is, of course, not true. Whatever else, even in his most smitten days, Hearn was never a spokesman for Japan. He always retained an independence of thought and this grew stronger the longer he lived in the country. Indeed, his is the first objective voice we hear above the clamor of the Orientalists seeking to love or to hate.

In his last completed book,
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation,
Hearn attempted to sum up his experience and finally give a structure to his thoughts. It should not be surprising that these are largely metaphysical. Of the book's twenty-two chapters, thirteen deal with religion or subjects involved with traditional religious issues.

While the Japanese are actually one of the least notably religious of peoples (if one of the most superstitious) Hearn's traditionalism sits well because Japan is one of the countries most consumed with its past. While it cuts down old forests and knocks down venerable buildings it is also entirely concerned with its own Japaneseness and this is predicated upon its history. Hence what the West miscalls 
ancestor worship, hence the various appeals to Japanese authenticity, the
yamato-damashii,
the
yamato-kotoba
—these qualities the pursuit of which remains a national passion. Hence too the national regard for Yakumo Koizumi. Though the Tokyo Imperial University failed to appreciate him, later generations have taken this critical and honest man and turned him into the spokesman he never was.

Which perhaps led to the often heard opinion that Hearn died disillusioned with the country. This is not true. The final book, an attempt at interpretation, is no more critical and no more disillusioned than any of the writings after that wonderful year in Matsue. When he died he was satisfied—in the bosom of his family, his measured assessment of his adopted land safely sent to the publishers. He saw Japan fairly and clearly, his view now undisturbed by the vapors and passions of earlier years.

Of this early, sustaining vision of the Japanese he was to write in his final book: “Sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream—never: but it will lift at last.”

But it did not lift to disillusion; rather it lifted, like a veil, to disclose a reality he had much earlier begun to discover, to reveal a people much like any other, and as different as any other. He reported what he saw. It is for this reason that we read him now.

Bits of Life and Death