Four Japanese Tales/The Darling of the Gods
THE DARLING OF THE GODS.
With a sudden swerve the path lept above five terraces of innundated paddy fields, similar to looking-glasses of strange shapes with their green borders like bronze frames covered with patina. My companion let down his kimono, tucked up during the ascent, and smiled, for it did not escape him that I was concentrating my attention on the words of a song upon the lips of peasant-women near by, dressed in dark blue, close-fitting trousers and wading in a field where they were transplanting seedling rice-plants in straight rows at uniform distances.
“If you had European clothes on they would have stopped their singing long ago«, he said, »Unfortunately they are not singing anything of special interest, characteristic of this part of the country. You can hear this song all over Japan. It is playful.« And word by word, so that I might better catch the meaning, he repeated its words:
»Adana e-gao ni
mayowanu mono wa
Ki-Butsu, kana-Butsu,
Ishi-botoke!«
“Who never was bewitched by the smile of a woman is a wooden Buddha, a metal Buddha, a stone Buddha,« he then added in English to make sure; for as an electrical engineer who had studied in Tokyo he of course knew English far better than I his language.
Involuntarily I laughed; although I did not say a single word, he read my thought. »Don’t you believe it! Now they are dressed for work and muddy up to the elbows and knees. Distastefully muddy. And the perfume enveloping them does not stimulate you to imagine their possible transformation into delicate and charming specimens of womanhood. But if you saw them washed and dressed for some matsuri, for some festival! Then you would understand why they say that in all Shinshu our valley is the richest in woman’s beauty. Do not forget that O-Take-San, the honorable Miss Bamboo, the famous miko or temple dancer, whom you can trace in the art and literature of the sixteenth century, came from our little village.«
It was high time for me to own to this blank in my knowledge of things Japanese; for twice already my kind guide had touched upon this beauty, whose name had survived centuries, and moreover I had gathered that even now our walk was directed towards something intimately connected with the history of her who meant so little to me and so much to the people in that part of the country.
The engineer looked at me reproachfully. »What queer people you are, you white people!” he exclaimed. »Could you not have told me long ago that the name O-Take is but an empty sound to you? You wished me to show you the kembutsu, the sights of our village. I am leading you two hours over break-neck paths to Kaze-no miya, to the Temple of the Winds, and now when we are within five minutes of our destination, it transpires that you never heard of our renowned country-woman! Do you know at least what a miko is?
»You said yourself that it means a temple dancer,« I managed to help myself out of the difficulty. He started to walk again.« Yes, in a Shinto temple. Literally it means the darling of the gods; and the duty of these priestesses is still, as it always was, to dance for the delectation of the gods during festivals and to wait on the priests in ordinary temple services. At different places different requirements were made upon these priestesses, who were always chosen only from certain families. In some places girls could be priestesses only before coming to maturity, in others even to the age of sixteen or seventeen; and today unusually beautiful and graceful dancers are often not dismissed from the temple even after marriage. Everywhere and always she who was chosen to be the darling of the gods was comely enough to become the darling of a man; however, the priestesses were deterred from this eventuality by the requirement of absolute chastity,—and by the advantages accruing to them and their families from their position. Nevertheless their liberty was curtailed only in the evening and at night, when their innocence was most endangered; then they were always shut up in a special dwelling behind the temple. And if it happened that some miko made a mistep, she did not share the fate of the fallen Vestal Virgin; she merely ceased to be the darling of the gods, having become the darling of a human being and a woman who had learned to know man’s love.« He hesitated and turned to me. »You know, I suppose, that the miko-kagura, or temple dance of the priestesses does not at all approach your Western idea of dancing?«
“Oh, yes, my ignorance does not go quite so far after all”, I asured him. »They dance mainly with their hands. Harmonious movements, full of charming meanings for the intiated Acompanied perhaps by archaic music, ancient chants, the clapping of hands, the bubbling sounds of small drums. Have I retrieved my honor?«
He nodded and waved his hands towards the wood in which above the undergrowth of various shrubs and trees loomed the remnants of a once mighty and venerable cryptomeria grove.
»Two hundred steps more, and we are at the Temple of the Winds, or at least at its ruins«, he remarked.« »There was born the fame of O-Take, than whom the gods never had a more charming darling or a more bewitching dancer. She was also something of a soothsayer, if we may believe hearsay. There are no written proofs of it, though these are not lacking as far as her beauty and art went. But it seems that, unlike the Shinto priestesses of today, the miko of the olden times were sometimes endowed with clairvoyant and occult powers. It is said the Gods used to enter their bodies and speak through their lips.« He shrugged his soulders. »On the whole there is no reason for us to disbelieve that O-Take was also a divineress. Her bodily and spiritual gifts must have been many, for she ruined many men. But at that time she was no longer the darling of the gods.«
He stopped and for a while we walked in silence along a narrow and rough path, bordered on either side by fields that resembled glistening fens. Bright-colored dragon-flies darted above the water. Here and there a frog jumped from the path and splashed into one of the fields. From behind us again was wafted the singing of the villagers, now dragging in a melancholy manner.
»A strange concidence«, my companion remarked. »Just now they began an old song about our O-Take. Like a bamboo twing in spring she was — — those are the opening words of the ballad. Now, however, listen rather to the voices of our semi. I have heard that tropical cicadas are miserable fiddlers in comparison with our semi. I do not know; I never have been in the tropics, as you have.«
I assured him that the fame of the semi was entirely deserved. I did not wonder that the humble folk likened its droning to the voice of a Buddhist priest chanting the sacred sutras. He seemed to be delighted, and to forgive me my obdurate indifference to the name and history of that O-Take, to whom he himself doubtless was attracted. I recollected that his face was infused with color as if in momentary excitement when he began to relate about the beautiful miko of the sixteenth century; but then I put aside the thought as romantic and on the whole unfounded. When we entered the wood, the sweet buzzing sound which filled the perfumed air turned my thoughts into other channels. How strange that this woody nook, with vegetation in reality little different from that of Central Europe, is so unmistakably Japanese, I said to myself; almost every tree, every piece of sod, every bush tries to express exactly what the art of this nation does; and everything is stylized . . .
The shadow of the wood was pleasantly cool; hard by a pheasant made itself heard; the mournful song of a bird resounded for a while in a thicket. Then the path flowed into the remains of the cryptomeria grove like a brook into a lake. The mighty pillarlike trunks rose high above the rest of the trees, here sparser, and in places large open spaces were thus formed, looking like air-bubbles filled with a delicate, diffused green. But presently there appeared bubbles tinged with a salmon-orange hue. Like clouds alight with a wonderfully beautiful fire there floated high above us the blossoming crowns of giant azaleas.
My companion turned to me, interrupting our silence, of which I had not even been aware up to that moment. »These tsutsudji were blossoming here already at the time when people on their way to Kaze-no miya told each other how they looked forward with delight to beholding the dances of the most charming pet of the gods who ever graced the festivals of the Temple of the Winds. Today there exist no larger azaleas in the whole of Japan, except in Yamoto.« He cast a slow side-long glance at me, from which I felt that his thoughts were wandering far away from me in time, and still near in space. »And hither used to come Masushige, a young samurai, wounded with love for the comely temple dancer . . .« He laughed somewhat absently, and it seemed as if his lips were still whispering though he had already come to a full stop.
And before I could answer, the thicket opened and before us there appeared the melancholy ruins of the Temple of the Winds, here and there invaded by different plants. Only the torii, the Shinto gate resembling a great Chinese ideograph, was almost new while the rest was time worn, falling to decay.
»Look, yonder is the platform on which O-Take used to dance her miko-kagura,« he remarked in a somewhat shaken voice. »And in the background, where now bamboo is growing, you can see the last remains of the so colled miko-yashiki, where the darlings of the gods used to be shut up for the night. Would you believe that when I stand here I can imagine so vividly and in such detail the original appearance of the temple and all the rest of the buildings that I sometimes find it difficult to see what you must see?« He stopped almost embarrassed.
»Sit down on these bulging roots,« he added after a moment. »I will relate to you somewhat more coherently the story, of the temple dancer. All that happens, happens well. After all there could be no more appropriate place for this story.« And he sat down as if really tired.
***
»Like a bamboo shoot in spring . . . such was O-Take-San even at a tender age, and as the old song runs, already the fact that she was named »Bamboo« was a sign of divine favor. And the third verse describes how already as a child, dressed in the white robe of a priestess, she raised aloft the suzu more graciously than ever any »darling of the gods« before her. The suzu seemed to grow from out of her white hand, my companion emphasised, repeating the fifth verse of the ballad. »I suppose you know what the suzu is.«
I had to confess that I did not. “The suzu is a special bronze instrument hung with little bells, which the miko uses in dancing,” the engineer explained patiently, fixing his eyes on the bamboo thicket. “To this very day it preserved the shape of a bamboo shoot in remembrance of the mythical episode which this dance represents. As you know, Ama-terasu, the Goddess of the Sun, having been offended by her brother Susa-no-o, in her anger hid herself in a cave, leaving the earth plunged in grievous darkness. The rest of the gods in vain endeavored to persuade her to come out; Ama-terasu, however, remained obdurate. Then the gods and goddesess gathered about the cavern, and began to sing and dance; one of them Ame-no-uzume-no-mikoto, tied little bells to the bamboo shoot she held and by means of it finally enticed the angered goddess to the door. Hardly had she opened it when one of the gods put a mirror before her eyes, and she, bewitched by her own beauty, followed, the mirror out in front of the cave. The earth was again immersed in sunlight . . .« He silenced himself, as if half his soul were somewhere else than at the ruins of this temple, and then he added hurriedly: »The suzu, having the form of a bamboo shoot, seemed to grow from out of the white hand of her who was as slender and beautiful even as a bamboo shoot . . . that is the simile understood by every Japanese. Perhaps you have noticed that young bamboo shoots grow from out of a protecting white sheath, surrounding the joints of the culm at that point; keeping this in your mind, you can better appreciate the appropriateness of the comparison and the wonderful succinctness of that single line. Unfortunately however, our old ballad is all too succinct.«
It was evident that the subject of his narrative was too dear to him to allow his slighting any stage of it without adornments of his own imagiation, gradually heating to the story; and when he was at his best he wished to say so much so beautifully that more than once his supply of English words or some phrase failed him, and then he became impatient, almost angry, cutting up his sentences and losing the main thread. At other times, however, when the stream of his eloquence flowed continuously and every sentence was like a brisk ripple, foaming with some adroit turn of speech, he seemed to live the story to such a degree that he began to forget his real relation to the narrated episodes. From time to time he talked of O-Take as if he had known her, as if now he were relating something he had lived through; I explained this to myself as due to his narrative glow, temperament, and subtly different understanding of English and of our Western logic in sentence-building. For that matter, his inimitable, fragmentary style soon began to affect me, perhaps partly for the reason that he himself was carried away, until even to me the temple dancer became something more than a mere image but recently conceived; I felt that her charm still emanated from the ruins of the temple she formerly graced, that in the atmosphere formerly permeated by the admiration awakened by her there still vibrated the desires she never disappointed by fulfillment, and that these vibrations called forth in my imagination her real image. From time to time I was surprised by the concidence}coincidence of my expectation with the words of the engineer; it was almost as if he were relating to me something which, I had just become aware, was already known to me.
I acknowledge that the story excited me somewhat; and still it was so entirely simple. The comely little O-Take was from her earliest childhood the companion of Masushige; they were both of the same age to an hour, and because their families lived close to each other and were on friendly terms, it was not to be wondered at that the simultaneous arrival into the world of the two children was looked upon as a sort of mystic sign, which the mutual sympathy of O-Take and Masushige seemed to confirm. But nobody had the slightest idea that this reciprocation was only seeming, that O-Take, on the surface so sweet and gentle, knew how to torture her companion in every conceivable way, at the same time being unwilling to forego his society altogether. Countless, it would seem, were the subterfuges through which she tortured him; but I must confess that more than one of the examples offered by the engineer seemed rather petty to me. He perceived my doubts, interrupted himself for a moment, impatiently motioned with his hand and remarked: “The suffering of childhood loses nothing in poignancy because it is sometimes imaginary or exaggerated by individual sensitiveness. Rest assured that Masushige’s daily tragedies were not less cruhing than many an exemplary suffering made so much of in your literatures and to us Orientals either incomprehensible or even comical.« And before I could answer, he plunged into his story again, or better said, into Masushige’s story, which he related as if he drew upon his own memories, half intoxicating and half poisonous.
Arriving however at the point when O-Take became a miko in the Temple of the Winds, he suddenly dropped Masushige and devoted himself to an eloquent description of O-Take’s growing beauty, her success and her strange power over all with whom she came into contact. Already when she was nine years old her fame as a temple dancer spread from Shinshu into the neighboring provinces; and upon festival days Kaze-no-miya was visited by an ever increasing number of strangers. O-Take moved as lightly and noiselessly on the platform as if she were floating, and her arms seemed to chant with every gesture. The mystic suzu with its little bells was endowed by her charming hand with so much life that people hearing and seeing it would feel as if they had conceived a new meaning in the old parable, a new meaning which disclosed to them the profoundest mysteries of their beings; and they were happy, they smiled, but when the dance was over, they tried in vain to remember what a short time before had been so clear to them. Her face was always pretty, but from the time she became a priestess it grew beautiful in some superhuman way, at the same time always seeming to be different. Once it was her oblique and lustrous eyes that attracted, once it was her scarlet lips and delicate nose with its quivering nostrils, again it was her forehead, cheeks and chin, at another time something undescribable and intangible perhaps in the expression of her face, perhaps in that which was hidden behind her face.
For soon it was evident that from time to time O-Take was carried away by her dancing into religious ecstasy. Then even the dullest became aware that they did not exist for her as an audience, that she was not even conscious of this world, but that she really was dancing in the dusky eternity of space in front of the cave in which the refractory Sun-Goddess had hidden herself. Only some, gifted with instinctive insight, felt that in her exaltation there was something disquieting, which after each festival persecuted them in their subconsciousness, even in the privacy of their thoughts and conceptions. Finally it was rumored that at times the gods enter the body of this darling of theirs and prophesy through her lips; then even noblemen from distant towns and the envoys of powerful daimios began to make pilgrimages to the Temple of the Winds, to make this or that inquiry of the prophetess. Her answers had all the charm of double and enigmatic meaning that since the beginning of the world has characterized all oracles; nobody could complain of the answers of the gods given him in Kaze-no-miya but only perchance of his own interpretation of them.
There were many who forgot what they really came to ask; when O-Take was twelve years old, many a samurai had more questions in his heart when leaving than when he came. But though she had ripened into a woman, O-Take did not even in the following years give the slightest cause for the suspicion that she ever forgot for a moment the requirement of chastity not only of body but also of thought. It looked as if youths and young men for her were not distinguishable from children, women, and old men; she was so kind to everyone that it hurt, she was so modest and courteous that it crushed, and when he with whom she had just been talking stepped back, he felt as if he had been engulfed by a chasm before her eyes and had been instantly forgotten by her, even with his sad fate. She was so chaste that also those who never desired to sin, when looking at her or even at the thought of her felt a wild ebullition of the senses that filled them with horror. And still her dance brought all nearer to the joyous and clean fundaments of life; some in its beginning, some in its middle and others in its end found the key to happiness which at other times seemed impossible, and unimaginable; but the same people either before this feeling of equilibrium or after it grew restless, became abashed in the presence of their neighbors, and took fright at their own fancies.
Such was this temple dancer when she was sixteen years of age; inviolable and still desired by many, chaste and maddening, gentle and cruel: »In her was personified the primordial principle of the relation of the human to the superhuman,« said the engineer after some deliberation, »she was a dancing problem of sex, intellect, instinct, religion, exaltation, good-evil, the longing for the infinite, art, soul-body . . . Oh, a dancing problem, that is all . . .« He snapped his fingers and tossed his head.« Of course, the mob did not comprehend of what exactly consisted the strange fascination of her singing and dancing. The mob never understands. All such things are reserved for the elect; that is all that the mob understands, and that is why it hates the elect. For to the elect all things have manifold, deepened meanings,« He smiled in apology and hurriedly returned to the story, the outline of which he had broken by this deviation; but the forgotten Masushige made use of this crevice to force his way back into the narrative. For naturally Masushige was of the elect. It might be said simply that Masushige never ceased loving O-Take; on the contrary, his love increased till it became the desire of a man for a woman, and O-Take’s inaccessibility excited him to the paroxysms of a morbid imagination and irritated senses; but the young engineer took pains to transpose his Masushige into as extraordinary a key as possible. He made out of the natural desire of a love- smitten youth a mystic affair, the symbol of the eternal, something of the Faust tragedy. But then he gradualy slipped into a more natural key, without hunting far-fetched explanations for different points of his story.
In the end even daimios with their trains did not disdain to make pilgrimages to Kaze-no-miya; one poet and then another sang the praises of O-Take and her divine dance; the temple dancer of a formerly unknown nook became the subject of paintings. And Masushige was jealous, tortured himself, and longed with all his soul and all his heart, with all his young body, which withered with vain desire . . . With a few sentences the engineer succeeded in depicting his condition as vividly and as truthfully as if he were describing his own suffering; and it did not escape me that now his face was pale and his eyes shone strangely.
Then sudendly his story took an unexpected turn; and he endeavored not to betray with a single word the surprise in store. Almost sentimentally he described Masushige’s strolls about the Temple of the Winds, his sighs, his impotent outbursts of despairing determination which never ripened into acts; nor did he neglect to mention trifling episodes in which O-Take sometimes tortured Masushige, not directly as in her childhood, but indirectly in such a refined way that he did not even have the sweet certainty of really being tortured, of being worth at least so much trouble to her. And one afternoon he met her in the woods, in a fragrant wild nook of a secluded spot, where he often took refuge with his love and pain. She was so beautiful and her eyes burned with such a strange fire that he caught his breath and in the first moment thought he had fallen victim to witchcraft, that his senses were deceiving him. It was, however, the real O-Take, flesh and blood, white but flaming with red flames, palpably a mortal but still like a being from another world . . . She knew of his haunt, she knew of his love, and she came after him . . . She made a secret of nothing. He had never heard of anything like it; he would never have expected a hundredth part exactly from her. »We are promised to each other, we are predestined for each other,« she said joyously, »and I have always loved you. I always danced for you, for the gods and for you . . . But today I shall dance for you alone, for myself and for you, and I will dance the sun of love out from the cave where it hid to leave our world in darkness.«
She talked as if in a fever, but as he was equally agitated, neither her appearance nor her actions surprised him. At last his tongue loosened; he told her of the tortures of his long love, in ardent and gentle words he told of his longings; in answer she began to dance as he never before had seen anyone dance, singing at the same time about her strange heart, which at once loved and tortured, as if obeying some mysterious command, which at once tortured and pined, perhaps in consequence of some sin commited in a longpast incarnation, which at once grievously tortured and voluptupusly benumbed itself with this pleasure of suffering . . . She undulated like a field of ripening rice in the wind, she bent like an iris stem weighed down by the splendor of its bloom, and her arms opened like the wings of a butterfly . . . Burning passionate words flowed from her lips, but her appearance preserved the chastity that so much excited and drove to despair those who had understood that O-Take was created for the love of men and not of gods . . . And before they parted, the goddess of love really allowed herself to be persuaded to come out of her cave, their world was flooded with a magnificent glow, and embracing him. O-Take whispered threats that filled him with wild delight. »You must never love any one but me,« she breathed, sighing with pleasure »only me and always me. And if another were in your embrace, I would feel it even if I were a thousand miles away, my heart would know it and would be embittered with an awful hatred, and without my willing it would send out an Iki-ryó. . . a phantom of revenge, which can murder in broad daylight even if he who hates does not wish to murder.«
Then the engineer interrupted his narrative for an instant. »Perhaps you never heard of Iki-ryó. The common people believe that hate can embody itself, of its own accord hunt him, who did a wrong, and kill him against the will of the person harboring hate. And for this reason, they say, we should never hate, even if we are terribly wronged, because we never know whether against our will our hatred will not commit murder. For in that case the sin would be upon our heads.« He became silent, allowing his eyes to rove over the quiet idyl of the temple’s ruins. He was somewhat out of breath like one who is relating things that lie too close to his heart; and when after a few moments he resumed his story, he did so with, an involuntary, profound sigh, seemingly relative to Masushige’s short happiness.
For that night O-Take disappeared from the Temple of the Winds. Not until the following day did her lover learn of it, and thinking in his first excitement that O-Take had been driven to suicide by qualms of conscience, he himself contemplated committing seppuku or harakiri, as became a samurai. Already the third day, however, it became known in the neighborhood that O-Take had run away with a young nobleman of a rich family, living in Kyoto; it transpired that she had made careful preparations for this flight, which had been agreed upon for that very night; and there were many conjectures as to the fate of both lovers, who in such an unprecendented manner had broken the customs of the country. Nobody had the least inkling that the renowned temple dancer had broken them for the first time already on the afternoon before her flight; and still less did they suspect that it was in Masushige’s embrace that O-Take for the first time scorned the grace of the Gods for the love of a man . . . And because O-Take had been the pride of the country around and had contributed materially to the prosperity of her village, the anger of the people and their bitterest condemnation turned against the seducer of the beautiful miko, not against O-Take herself, in whom both the priests and the people were willing to see the poor blinded victim of a wile.
»In this light even the ballad which we heard on our way here treats the matter,« remarked the engineer, lowering his voice, as if putting this digression into parenthesis. »As an innocent victim.«
I looked at him amazed. »And the ballad does not know of Masushige?« escaped me.
»Only of his vain love, of the virtue of O-Take, and of how he mourned because of her fall . . .«
I was on the point of asking how it was then that he had learned of the one love-meeting of O-Take with her Masushige, but at once I changed my mind. I would have been very foolish to shatter the outlines of the story; if there were some mystery here, either it would explain itself or in time I would figure out its solution. Certainly there was nothing to be gained through inquisitiveness or impatience. I did not insist on his explaining the gaps in the ballad, and he went on with his tale.
What followed, the old song did not neglect to record with due pathos: Masushige shaved his head and as a monk entered a Budhistic monastery, which just at that time had been built on the other side of the valley; he entered a monastery and did penance for his sin and for O-Take, while she in Yeddo, the Tokyo of today, was enjoying her short fame as the first profane dancer of Japan. In a short time she broke with her lover and took a new one, she performed charming and poetic dances before the haughty and the humble, she invented new forms of dancing which no one after her could execute, and for the space of two or three years she was showered with successes and riches, with the good will and admiration of all. She exchanged one lover for another, a circumstance which, however, the ballad discreetly evades, and her dances became more and more daring, until at last she was banished along with her last lover, an impoverished samurai, into exile on an island between Japan and the Loo Choo Archipelago. There she pined away with longing for fame and love, though of course the ballad affirms well-meaningly that O-Take died of grief over her transgression and vain longing for the Temple of the Winds, where once she had been so happy. And before she went away to the Kingdom of Shadows, into Meido, she remembered Masushige and sent him as a keepsake a wonderful, exquisite mirror, made for her by the greatest artist of the time, who had been enthralled by her charms, like so many others, an artist who for a short time had been her lover, like so many others. These were the sceptical additions of the enginner; the ballad limited itself to recording that from her death-bed O-Take sent Masushige her soul in the shape of a mirror.
Once more my companion interrupted his story. “I suppose it is unnecessary to call your attention to the fact that the mirror was of metal. At that time Nippon knew no other kind. And as you probably also know, these metal, always round mirrors were little miracles of beauty and taste. They were usually of bronze, and their face was magnificently polished with a mixture of tin and mercury, the back was decorated with embossed flowers, birds, dragons, or Chinese ideographs; this kind of mirror always had a handle giving the whole the appearance of a metal fan. But perhaps I may call your attention to that occult relation of the mirror to its mistress’ soul, in which our humble folk believe and have believed from time immemorial. An old Japanese proverb says that a woman’s mirror is her soul. We have many peculiar traditions about mirrors. For example, a mirror is supposed to feel all the joys and sorrows of its mistress, becoming bright and dull. Another legend relates of the mirrors of two women jealous of each other: in the deep of the night the mirrors engaged in a combat so fierce that both broke, along with the hearts of their sleeping owners. You understand, then, how a woman of occult powers like O-Take could send her first lover her soul in the mirror into which she had once gazed at her image.” He arose and stretched himself.
“Well, what happened with Masushige,” I prompted him.
For the fraction of a second his eyes seemed to bulge unnaturally but he recoverd himself so quickly that in the next moment I was not sure of the fleeting impression.
“Yes, we must not forget our Masushige,” he muttered and raised his head, meeting my glance. “The ballad is silent on this point, ending with the death of O-Take and her last recollections of the Temple of the Winds, her village, and the companion of her childhood. But I ascertained facts, that is, I have a theory, I have a sort of foundation or well-founded supposition as to the foundation of theory . . . yes . . .” He became somewhat confused and stuttered.” Masushige was. . . a sort . . . of eccentric person. He never even looked into the mirror. Was he afraid of breaking his holy vows? Was he hurt too deply? All I know is that secretly he threw the mirror into the forest tarn to which I am now leading you, and which is situated near the nook where O-Take gave herself to him, only to desert him the same night . . . “He laughed somewhat forcedly.” From his monastery it was a good distance. Our Masushige must have been a sort of monomaniac, whatever his fixed idea may have been; fear of the sensuous soul of her whom he had once loved so much, or disillusion, the longing to save at least some illusion, or revenge unworthy of a monk . . . He threw the mirror into the tarn, near which he had once lived through the most beautiful moments of his life, he threw it away without ever having looked into it . . .”
I could not help smiling. “And how do you know this, if I may ask?” I said with an involuntary tinge of irony.
He turned towards me and I noticed that he was almost livid. “I found it,” he answered, “and when we return I shall show it to you.”
And he quickened his pace as if something were driving him away from the melancholy ruins of the temple; and before we had gone a hundred steps he changed his mind, suddenly declared the walk to the tarn to be be entirely superfluous, and led me back to his lodging beyond the village, halfway between the paper factory and the new electric plant. The whole way back there was no talking with him; in the end he was almost irritable and more inclined to be monosyllabic than was to my liking.
***
No sooner were we in his room than his mien changed altogether. “I was afraid that we should come home too late,” he began to explain, “and that there would be no more direct sunlight. I was very anxious that we should get here in time. That was why I hurried so impolitely. I beg your pardon a thousand times.”
I waived his apologies. “But why do we need sunlight?” I queried. I had the suspicion that he had been hurrying rather for his own satisfaction than for my sake.
“You will see in a minute.” He offered me a cushion, on which I seated myself, and after having clapped his hands three times he continued, “You are not mistaken if you think that I hurried partly for my own sake. Today I was relating the story of the temple dancer, so I wished to come in time to catch a glimpse of her phantom . . .” His eyes burned with a strange smoldering fire. “Without the sun it would be impossible,—without that sun which she worshipped with her dance as the Darling of the Gods . . .”
An aged woman, his servant, entered, knelt down and touched her forehead to the matted floor. He ordered tea and almost impatiently waved his hand to bid her leave us. “Fortunately, we still caught the sun and with it the best possible ending for my story. But we came just in the nick of time. In five minutes it would have been too late.”
Excusing himself, he hurried away and in a short time returned with an ancient mirror, the handle of which was green, as if mossgrown. “A strange shape,” I exclaimed, taking it into my hand. “The handle looks like live bamboo in this covering of patina. And look, here are wisps and leaflets of bamboo . . . A beautiful piece of work, which does not suffer in the least from the patina. One could say that age instilled life into this mirror. Doubts assailed me as to whether such a green covering could have formed under water; I doubted it and began to suspect that this part of my host’s information was untrue or at least inaccurate. But at that instant I turned the mirror over and cried out in wonder. The back was altogether unsightly, devoid of ornaments, unpolished and even rough, as if corroded. “What a pity!” escaped me. “Probably the most beautiful part of it is lost for ever!”
He was so excited that without an apology he almost tore the mirror from out of my hand. “Quickly, before the sun goes down!” he cried anxiously and turned the face of the mirror towards the sun, throwing its reflection on the opposite wall, which was plunged in deep shadow.
And then amazement laid hold of me, and I hesitated to believe my eyes: for on the paper sliding-screen there appeared in the golden circle of light the dancing figure of a woman with arms outstreched, holding in her hand the sacred suzu, a golden, burning shadow, looking like the heart of a flame. An unspeakably delicate and mystic figure, the nudity of which was only a suggestion, enveloped in fire . . .
“But this is surely impossible . . . “I finally managed to whisper; but as yet I could not take my eyes off from that charming, mysterious vision. It seemed to me as if in the screen a loophole had been opened into glowing depths of time and space, so to say, and that in a little while I would see before me in life-size that charming O-Take whose soul had been conjured into the magic mirror; that from out of the abyss from which we assume there is no return my companion was calling back her whom doubtlessly he himself loved and whose secret he had learned in some inexplicable manner. A strange excitement came upon me, and extraordinary agitation.
But at that instant the sun went down, the golden circle disappeared from the wall, and the vision seemed to me still more unbelievable. I turned to the engineer with a mute question. He handed me the mirror. There was nothing noteworthy on its face, except that it was slightly convex. I looked into it and saw my own awe-stricken face. I turned it over; the back was ungainly, uneven, and covered with patina, as I had observed before. It was clear to me that I would look in vain to the mirror for an explanation of that mysterious phenomenon, evidently belying the laws of nature.
“May I trust my eyes, may I believe that I really saw what I saw? Or did it only seem to me?” I said at length in an avowedly quivering voice. I was undeniably excited, and it seemed unnecessary to conceal my excitement.
He laughed. “If you had read what Professors Ayrton and Perry wrote about the magic mirrors of Japan in the Transactions of the Royal Society, if I remember rightly in volume twenty-six, or the article by the same authors in the twenty-second volume of the Philosophical Magazine, you would not be so amazed, though even then you would have the right to be somewhat mystified in the first moment, not with the reflection of the face of this mirror, but much more with its back. By the way, I remember the numbers of those two volumes because naturally I myself sought to explain the mystery, being interested in this matter.”
“I beg of you, do not torture me any longer and explain to me what seems to be inexplicable.”
We sat down again on the flcor and he poured out tea for me, which the old servant had brought in the meantime. “Some of our old metal mirrors display interesting phenomena in the reflection they cast. Sunlight reflected from the face of such a mirror throws on a wall a luminous picture of the design executed in relief on its back. This in itself is surely a strange occurrence, and such mirrors fully deserved to be called magic. Metal, untransparent matter,—but the mirror casts on the wall the picture of its back, inaccessible to the sunlight. But Ayrton and Perry discovered what to our old mirror-makers was of course no secret. The phenomenon originates in the fact that the curvature of the surface of the mirror is greater above the flat part of the back than above the relief. The mirror, of course, was cast with a flat face, and was made slightly convex before polishing by being scratched with a special iron tool and rubbed thoroughly with mercury. The first process caused the convexity of the face, the second increased it; the effect of both these processes was greater on the thinner parts of the mirror than on those above the embossed parts of the back. Thus originated the convexity, scarcely perceptible to the casual glance but sufficient to give a reflection in sunlight with a luminous picture of the design on the back of the mirror. Do you understand?”
I reached for the mirror. “I understand, I understand it all after your explanation,” I cried impatiently, “but I do not understand how then your magic mirror can reflect a dancing figure when on its back there is nothing but this rough surface!” I trembled with fear lest his final explanation should be too matter of fact.
Silently he drew a metal rod out of the hibachi, the bronze vessel with live coals, and significantly tapped the mirror with it. It sounded hollow. And then I understood:
The back of the mirror was on the inside, and the unsightly covering was but a protection.
“Even in this there is a sort of deeper meaning, which escapes you,” my host added and sighed involuntarily, lifting to his lips a tiny tea-bowl. And I noticed that his hand quivered.
***
Towards the close of my sojourn in Japan I read in the newspapers about the mysterious death of my friend the engineer, whom I met several times after our becoming acquainted upon the occasions of his rare visits to Yokohama and Tokyo. The happening caused considerable excitement and so gradually all that it was possible to ascertain in the case was made public.
The young engineer had just married a highly educated young girl of a Tokyo family held in great respect. The very first morning, before his wife was out of bed, he left the room under some pretext or other; he was in entirely good spirits, in a happy frame of mind, it seems. At least to that effect were the affirmations of the servants, who saw him leave the house and hurry across the courtyard to the stone building for the storage of valuable objects, the go-down which adjoins every more pretentious house in Japan. When he did not return for a long time the young wife was finally filled with dire forebodings, dressed hastily and went after him. Two servants were with her when in the “go-down” she found her husband lying upon his face, already growing cold. He rested on an ancient mirror which had pierced his throat with sharp, metal bamboo leaflets forming the handle. His face was drawn in horror but on his lips there dwelt a happy smile.
According to the autopsy he was stricken by paralysis of the brain; but strange to say, there were some symptoms of death by strangling, which was of course out of the question. And because the marks on the throat looked as if caused by some monstrous strangling grasp, it was rumored among the superstitious folk and the factory workers that the engineer had died a violent death, and that his murderer was Iki-ryó, the embodied hate of somebody whom he had wronged, either willingly or unconsciously, or who at least had come to believe that he had been wronged. However, no one thought of stopping to notice that old mirror, and the less did any one think of turning its polished surface to the sun, which would have called forth in the reflection the fairy-like vision of O-Take, the temple dancer.
