Jinrikisha Days in Japan
way, make the only break in the long avenue. With its dividing screens drawn back, the Osawa tea-house was one long room, with only side walls and a roof, the front open to the street, and the back facing a garden where a stream dashed through a liliputian landscape, fell in a liliputian fall, and ran under liliputian bridges. At the street end was a square fireplace, sunk in the floor, with a big teakettle swinging by an iron chain from a beam of the roof, teapots sitting in the warm ashes, and bits of fowl and fish skewered on chopsticks and set up in the ashes to broil before the coals. The coolies, sitting around this kitchen, fortified their muscle and brawn with thimble cups of green tea, bowls of rice, and a few shreds of pickled fish. We, as their masters and superiors, were placed as far as possible from them, and picnicked at a table in the pretty garden. After the severe exertion of sitting still and letting the coolies draw us, we restored our wasting tissues by rich soup, meats, and all the stimulating food that might be thought more necessary to the laboring jinrikisha men.
When we started again, with all the tea-house staff singing sweet sayonaras, a glow in the east foretold the rising moon, and a huge stone torii at the end of the village loomed ghostly against the blackness of the forest. The glancing moonlight shot strange shadows across the path, and we went whirling through this lattice of light and darkness in stillness and solitude. The moon rose higher and was hidden in the leafy arch overhead, and before we realized that its faint light was fading, came flashes of lightning, the rumble of approaching thunder, and a sudden crash, as the flood of rain struck the tree-tops and poured through. The hoods of the jinrikishas were drawn up, the oil-papers fastened across us, and through pitch darkness the coolies raced along. Vivid flashes of lightning showed the thick, white sheet of rain, which gusts of wind blew into our faces, while insidious
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