Lafcadio Hearn's Japan (27 page)

“Did you go with them?”

“No: they left immediately after having killed the third man,— taking the heads with them;—and they paid no attention to me. I stayed on the bridge, afraid to move, until they were very far away. Then I ran back to the burning town;—I ran quick, quick! There I was told that the Satsuma troops were retreating. Soon afterwards, the army came from T
ō
ky
ō
; and I was given some work: I carried straw sandals for the soldiers.”

“Who were the men that you saw killed on the bridge?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you never try to find out?”

“No,” said Heishichi, again mopping his forehead: “I said nothing about the matter until many years after the war.”

“But why?” I persisted.

Heishichi gave me one astonished look, smiled in a pitying way, and answered,—

“Because it would have been wrong;—it would have been ungrateful.”

I felt properly rebuked.

And we resumed our journey.

The Case of O-Dai

I

O-Dai pushed aside the lamplet and the incense-cup and the water vessel on the Buddha-shelf, and opened the little shrine before which they had been placed. Within were the
ihai,
the mortuary tablets of her people,—five in all; and a gilded figure of the Bodhisattva Kwannon stood smiling behind them. The
ihai
of the grandparents occupied the left side; those of the parents the right; and between them was a smaller tablet, bearing the
kaimyo
of a child-brother with whom she used to play and quarrel, to laugh and cry, in other and happier years. Also the shrine contained a
makémono,
or scroll, inscribed with the spirit-names of many ancestors. Before that shrine, from her infancy, O-Dai had been wont to pray.

The tablets and the scroll signified more to her faith in former time—very much more—than remembrance of a father's affection and a mother's caress;—more than any remembrance of the ever-loving, ever-patient, ever-smiling elders who had fostered her babyhood, carried her pickaback to every temple-festival, invented her pleasures, consoled her small sorrows, and soothed her fretfulness with song;—more than the memory of the laughter and the tears, the cooing and the calling and the running of the dear and mischievous little brother;—more than all the traditions of the ancestors.

For those objects signified the actual viewless presence of the lost,—the haunting of invisible sympathy and tenderness,—the gladness and the grief of the dead in the joy and the sorrow of the living. When, in other time, at evening dusk, she was wont to kindle the lamplet before them, how often had she seen the tiny flame astir with a motion not its own!

Yet the
ihai
is even more than a token to pious fancy. Strange possibilities of transmutation, transubstantiation, belong to it. It serves as temporary body for the spirit between death and birth: each fiber of its incense-penetrated wood lives with a viewless life-potential. The will of the ghost may quicken it. Sometimes, through power of love, it changes to flesh and blood. By help of the
ihai
the buried mother returns to suckle her babe in the dark. By help of the
ihai,
the maid consumed upon the funeral pyre may return to wed her betrothed,—even to bless him with a son. By power of the
ihai,
the dead servant may come back from the dust of his rest to save his lord from ruin. Then, after love or loyalty has wrought its will, the personality vanishes;—the body again becomes, to outward seeming, only a tablet.

All this O-Dai ought to have known and remembered. Maybe she did; for she wept as she took the tablets and the scroll out of the shrine, and dropped them from a window into the river below. She did not dare to look after them, as the current whirled them away.

II

O-Dai had done this by order of two English missionary-women who, by various acts of seeming kindness, had persuaded her to become a Christian. (Converts are always commanded to bury or to cast away their ancestral tablets.) These missionary-women—the first 
ever seen in the province—had promised O-Dai, their only convert, an allowance of three
yen
a month, as assistant,—because she could read and write. By the toil of her hands she had never been able to earn more than two
yen
a month; and out of that sum she had to pay a rent of twenty five
sen
for the use of the upper floor of a little house, belonging to a dealer in second-hand goods. Thither, after the death of her parents, she had taken her loom, and the ancestral tablets. She had been obliged to work very hard indeed in order to live. But with three
yen
a month she could live very well; and the missionary-women had a room for her. She did not think that the people would mind her change of religion.

As a matter of fact they did not much care. They did not know anything about Christianity, and did not want to know: they only laughed at the girl for being so foolish as to follow the ways of the foreign women. They regarded her as a dupe, and mocked her without malice. And they continued to laugh at her, good-humoredly enough, until the day when she was seen to throw the tablets into the river. Then they stopped laughing. They judged the act in itself, without discussing its motives. Their judgment was instantaneous, unanimous, and voiceless. They said no word of reproach to O-Dai. They merely ignored her existence.

The moral resentment of a Japanese community is not always a hot resentment,—not the kind that quickly burns itself out. It may be cold. In the case of O-Dai it was cold and silent and heavy like a thickening of ice. No one uttered it. It was altogether spontaneous, instinctive. But the universal feeling might have been thus translated into speech:—

“Human society, in this most eastern East, has been held together from immemorial time by virtue of that cult which exacts the gratitude of the present to the past, the reverence of the living for the dead, the affection of the descendant for the ancestor. Far beyond the visible world extends the duty of the child to the parent, of the servant to the master, of the subject to the sovereign. Therefore do the dead preside in the family council, in the communal assembly, in the high seats of judgment, in the governing of cities, in the ruling of the land.

“Against the Virtue Supreme of Filial Piety,—against the religion of the Ancestors,—against all faith and gratitude and reverence and duty,—against the total moral experience of her race,—O-Dai has sinned the sin that cannot be forgiven. Therefore shall the people account her a creature impure,—less deserving of fellowship than the Éta,—less worthy of kindness than the dog in the street or the cat upon the roof; since even these, according to their feebler light, observe the common law of duty and affection.

“O-Dai has refused to her dead the word of thankfulness, the whisper of love, the reverence of a daughter. Therefore, now and forever, the living shall refuse to her the word of greeting, the common salutation, the kindly answer.

“O-Dai has mocked the memory of the father who begot her, the memory of the mother whose breasts she sucked, the memory of the elders who cherished her childhood, the memory of the little one who called her Sister. She has mocked at love: therefore all love shall be denied her, all offices of affection.

“To the spirit of the father who begot her, to the spirit of the mother who bore her, O-Dai has refused the shadow of a roof, and the vapor of food, and the offering of water. Even so to her shall be denied the shelter of a roof, and the gift of food, and the cup of refreshment.

“And even as she cast out the dead, the living shall cast her out. As a carcass shall she be in the way,—as the small carrion that none will turn to look upon, that none will bury, that none will pity, that none will speak for in prayer to the Gods and the Buddhas. As a
Gaki
¹
she shall be,—as a
Sh
ō
jiki-Gaki,
—seeking
sustenance in refuse-heaps. Alive into hell shall she enter;—yet shall her hell remain the single hell, the solitary hell, the hell
Kodoku,
that spheres the spirit accurst in solitude of fire. . . .”

III

Unexpectedly the missionary-women informed O-Dai that she would have to take care of herself. Perhaps she had done her best; but she certainly had not been to them of any use whatever, and they required a capable assistant. Moreover they were going away for some time, and could not take her with them. Surely she could not have been so foolish as to think that they were going to give her three
yen
per month merely for being a Christian! . . .

O-Dai cried; and they advised her to be brave, and to walk in the paths of virtue. She said that she could not find employment: they told her that no industrious and honest person need ever want for work in this busy world. Then, in desperate terror, she told them truths which they could not understand, and energetically refused to believe. She spoke of a danger imminent; and they answered her with all the harshness of which they were capable,—believing that she had confessed herself utterly depraved. In this they were wrong. There was no atom of vice in the girl: an amiable weakness and a childish trustfulness were the worst of her faults. Really she needed help,—needed it quickly,—needed it terribly. But they could understand only that she wanted money; and that she had threatened to commit sin if she did not get it. They owed her nothing, as she had always been paid in advance; and they imagined excellent reasons for denying her further aid of any sort.

So they put her into the street. Already she had sold her loom. She had nothing more to sell except the single robe upon her back, and a few pair of useless
tabi,
or cleft stockings, which the missionary-women had obliged her to buy, because they thought that it was immodest for a young girl to be seen with naked feet. (They had also obliged her to twist her hair into a hideous back-knot, because the Japanese style of wearing the hair seemed to them un-godly.)

What becomes of the Japanese girl publicly convicted of offending against filial piety? What becomes of the English girl publicly convicted of unchastity? . . .

Of course, had she been strong, O-Dai might have filled her sleeves with stones, and thrown herself into the river,—which would have been an excellent thing to do under the circumstances. Or she might have cut her throat,—which is more respectable, as the act requires both nerve and skill. But, like most converts of her class, O-Dai was weak: the courage of the race had failed in her. She wanted still to see the sun; and she was not of the sturdy type able to wrestle with the earth for that privilege. Even after fully abjuring her errors, there was left but one road for her to travel.

Said the person who bought the body of O-Dai at a third of the price prayed for:—

“My business is an exceedingly shameful business. But even into this business no woman can be received who is known to have done the thing that you have done. If I were to take you into my house, no visitors would come; and the people would probably make trouble. Therefore to
Ō
saka, where you are not known, you shall be sent; and the house in
Ō
saka will pay the money. . . .”

So vanished forever O-Dai,—flung into the furnace of a city's lust. . . . Perhaps she existed only to furnish one example of facts that every foreign missionary ought to try to understand.

Drifting