Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan

VI.

ON A NEW CORNICE ROAD.

THE sunshine quickened us all, and our kuruma took the road like a flock of birds; for jinrikisha men in company run as wild geese fly, crisscross. It is an artistic habit, inculcated to court ladies in books on etiquette. To make the men travel either abreast or in Indian file is simply impossible.After a moment’s conformity, they invariably relapse into their own orderly disorder.

This morning they were in fine figure, and bowled us along to some merry tune within ; while the baby-carriages themselves jangled the bangles on their axles, making a pleasing sort of cry. The village folk turned in their steps to stare and smile as we sped past.

It was a strange-appearing street. On both sides of it in front of the houses ran an arcade, continuous but irregular, a contribution of building. Each house gave its mite in the shape of a covered portico, which fitted as well as could be expected to that of its next-door neighbor. But as the houses were not of the same size, and the ground sloped, the roofs of the porticoes varied in level. A similar terracing held good of the floors. The result was rather a federation than a strict union of interests. Indeed, the object in view was communal. For the arcades were snow galleries, I was told, to enable the inhabitants in winter to pass from one end of the village to the other, no inconsiderable distance. They visored both sides of the way, showing that then in these parts even a crossing of the street is a thing to be avoided. Indeed, by all report the drifts here in the depth of winter must be worth seeing. Even at this moment, May the 6th, there was still névé on some of the lowest foothills, and we passed more than one patch of dirt-grimed snow buttressing the highway bank. The bangles on the axles now began to have a meaning, a thing they had hitherto seemed to lack. With the snow arcades by way of introduction they spoke for themselves. Evidently they were first cousins of our sleighbells. Here, then, as cordially as with us man abhors an acoustic vacuum, and when Nature has put her icy bellglass over the noises of the field he must needs invent some jingle to wile his ears withal.

Once past the houses we came upon a strip of paddy fields that bordered the mountain slope to the very verge of the tide. Some of these stood in spots where the tilt of the land would have seemed to have precluded even the thought of such cultivation ; for a paddy field must be perfectly level, that it may be kept under water at certain seasons of the year. On a slope, therefore, a thing a paddy field never hesitates to scale, they rise in terraces, skyward. Here the drop was so great that the terraces made bastions that towered proudly on the very knife-edge of decision between the seaweed and the cliffs. A runnel tamed to a bamboo duct did them Ganymede service ; for a paddy field is perpetually thirsty.

It was the season for repairing of dykes and ditches in rice chronology, a much more complicated annal than might be thought. This initial stage of it has a certain architectural interest. Every year before planting begins the dykes have all to be remade strictly in place, for they serve for both dams and bounds to the elaborately partitioned fields. Adjacent mud is therefore carefully plastered over the remains of the old dyke, which, to the credit of the former builders, is no small fraction of it, and the work then finished off with a sculptor’s care. An easier-going peasantry might often forego renewal. Indeed, I cannot but think the farmers take a natural delight in this exalted form of mud pies ; they work away on already passable specimens with such a will. But who does quite outgrow his childish delights ? And to make of the play of childhood the work of middle life must be to foil the primal curse to the very letter. What more enchanting pastime than to wade all day in viscous mud, hearing your feet plash when you put them in, and suck as you draw them out; while the higher part of you is busied building a parapet of gluey soil, smoothing it down on the sides and top, and crowning your masterpiece with a row of sprigs along the crest? And then in the gloaming to trudge homeward, feeling that you have done a meritorious deed after all! When I come to my second childhood, I mean to turn paddy-field farmer myself.

Though the fields took to the slopes so kindly, they had a preference for plains. In the deltas, formed by the bigger streams, they expanded till they made chesswork of the whole. Laborers knee-deep in the various squares did very well for pawns. The fields, being still in their prenatal stage, were not exactly handsome. There was too much of one universal brown. This was relieved only by the nurseries of young plants, small fields here and there just showing a delicate downy growth of green, delightful to the eye. They were not long sown ; for each still lay cradled under its scarecrow, a pole planted in the centre of the rectangle with strings stretched to the four corners, and a bit of rag fluttering from the peak. The scarecrows are, no doubt, useful, since they are in general use ; but I counted seven sparrows feeding in reckless disregard of danger under the very wings of one of the contrivances.

The customs of the country seemed doomed that day to misunderstanding, whether by sparrows or by bigger birds of passage. Those which should have startled failed of effect, and those which should not have startled did. For, on turning the face of the next bluff, we came upon a hamlet apparently in the high tide of conflagration. From every roof volumes of smoke were rolling up into the sky, while men rushed to and fro excitedly outside. I was stirred myself, for there seemed scant hope of saving the place, such headway had the fire, as evidenced by the smoke, already acquired. The houses were closed ; a wise move, certainly, on the score of draft, but one that precluded a fighting of the fire. I was for jumpingfrom the jinrikisha, to see, if not to do something myself, when I was stopped by the jinrikisha men, who coolly informed me that the houses were lime-kilns.

It appeared that lime-making was a specialty of these parts, being, in fact, the alternative industry to fishing, with the littoral population ; the farming of its strip of rice fields hardly counting as a profession, since such culture is second nature with the Far Oriental. Limemaking may labor under objections, considered generically, but this method of conducting the business is susceptible of advantageous imitation. It should commend itself at once to theatrical managers for a bit of stage effect. Evidently it is harmless. No less evidently it is cheap; and in some cases it might work a double benefit. Impresarios might thus consume all the public statuary about the town to the artistic education of the community, besides producing most realistic results in the theatre.

Through the courtesy of some of the laborers I was permitted to enter a small kiln in which they were then at work. I went in cautiously, and came out with some haste, for the fumes of the burning, which quite filled the place, made me feel my intrusion too poignantly. I am willing to believe the work thoroughly enjoyable when once you become used to it. In the mean time I should choose its alternative, — the pleasures of a dirty fishing boat in a nasty seaway, — if I were unfortunate enough to make one of the population. I like to breathe without thinking of it.

The charcoal used in the process came, they told me, from Noto. I felt a thrill of pride in hearing the land of my courting thus distinctively spoken of, although the mention were not by way of any remarkable merit. At least the place was honorably known beyond its own borders ; had in fact a certain prestige. For they admitted there was charcoal in their own province, but the best, they all agreed, came from their neighbor over the sea. They spoke to appreciative ears. I was only too ready to believe that the best of anything came from Noto. Did they lay my interest to the score of lime-making, I wonder, or were they in part undeceived when I asked if Noto were visible from where we were ?

It was, they said, on very clear days. Did I know Noto ? What shall a man say when questioned thus concerning that on which he has set his heart ? He cannot say yes ; shall he say no, and put himself without the pale of mere acquaintance ? There is a sense of nearness not to be justified to another, and the one to whom a man may feel most kin is not always she of whom he knows the most.

I was by way of knowing it, I said, as my eyes followed my thoughts horizonward. Was it all mirage they saw or thought to see, that faint coast line washed a little deeper blue against the sky ? I fear me so, for the lime-burners failed to make it out. The day was not clear enough, they said.

But the little heap of charcoal, at least, was real, and it had once been a tree on that farther shore. Charcoal to them, it was no longer common charcoal to me ; for, looking at it, was I not face to face with something that had once formed part of Noto, the unknown ?

VII.

OYA SHIRADZU, KO SHIRADZU.

Toward the middle of the afternoon we reached a part of the coast locally famous or infamous, for the two were one ; a stretch of some miles where the mountains made no apology for falling abruptly into the sea. Sheer for several hundred feet, the shore is here unscalable. Nor did it use to be possible to go round by land, for the cliffs are merely the ends of mountain chains, themselves utterly wild and tractless. A narrow strip of strand was the sole link between Etchiu on the one hand and Echigo on the other. The natives call the place Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu ; that is, a spot where the father no longer knows the child, nor the child the father, — so obliterating to sense of all beside is the personal danger. Refuge there is none of any kind. To have been caught here in a storm on the making tide must indeed have been to look death in the face.

Between the devil of a precipice and the deep sea, he who ventured on the passage must have hurried anxiously along the thread of sand, hoping to reach the last bend in time. As he rounds the ill-omened corner he sees he is too late; already the surf is breaking against the cliff. He turns back only to find retreat barred behind by rollers that have crept in since he passed. His very footprints have all been washed away. Caged! Like the walls of a deep-down dungeon the perpendicular cliff towers at his side, and in the pit they rim lie and the angry ocean are left alone together. Then the sea begins to play with him, creeping up catlike. Her huge paws, the breakers, buffet his face. The water is already about his feet, as he backs desperately against the rock ; and each wave comes crushing in with a cruel growl to strike — short this time. But the next breaks closer, and the next closer still. He climbs a boulder. The spray blinds him. He hears a deafening roar, feels a shock that hurls him into space, and he knows no more.

Now the place is fearful only to fancy ; for a road has been built, belting the cliffs hundreds of feet above the tide. It is a part of what is known as the new road, a name it is likely long to keep. Its sides are in places so steep that it fails of its footing, and is constantly slipping off into the sea. Such sad missteps are the occasion for bands of convicts to appear on the scene under the marshaling of a police officer, and be set to work to repair the slide by digging a little deeper into the mountain side. The convicts wear clothes of a light brickcolor, which at a distance looks somewhat like couleur de rose, while the police are dressed in sombre blue. It would seem somewhat of a satire on the facts!

The new road is not without its sensation to such as dislike looking down. Fortunately, the jinrikisha men have not the instinct of packmules to be persistently trifling with its outer edge. In addition to the void at the side, another showed every now and then in front, where a dip and a turn completely hid the road beyond. The veritable end of the world seemed to be there just ahead, close against the vacancy of space. A couple of rods more and we must step off, — indeed the end of the world for us if we had.

When the road came to face the Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu, it attacked the rise by first running away from it up a stream into the mountains ; a bit of the wisdom of the serpent that enabled it to gain much height on the bend back. Trees vaulted the way and tapestried with their leaves, between which one caught peeps at the sea, a shimmer of blue through a shimmer of green. The path was strung with peddlers and pilgrims : the latter of both sexes and all ages, under mushroom hats, with their skirts neatly tucked in at the waist, showing their leggings ; the former doing fulcrum duty to a couple of baskets swung on a pole over their shoulders. The pilgrims were on their way back from Zenkoji. Some of them would have tramped over two hundred miles on foot before they reached home again. A rich harvest they brought back, — religion, travel, and exercise, all in one, enough to keep them happy long. I know of nothing which would more persuade me to be a Buddhist than these same delightful pilgrimages. Fresh air, fresh scenes on the road, and fresh faith at the end of it. No desert caravan of penance to these Meccas, but a summer’s stroll under a summer’s sky. An end that sanctifies the means, and a means that no less justifies its end.

While we were still in the way with these pious folk we touched our midday halt, a wayside tea house notched in a corner of the road commanding a panoramic view over the sea. The place was kept by a deaf old lady and her tailless cat. The old lady’s peculiarity was personal ; the cat’s was not. No self-respecting cat in this part of Japan could possibly wear a tail. The northern branch of the family has long since discarded that really useless feline appendage. A dog in like circumstance would be sadly straitened in the expression of his emotions, but a eat is every whit a cat without a continuation.

With the deaf old lady we had, for obvious reasons, no sustained conversation. She busied herself for the most part in making dango, a kind of dumpling, but not one calculated to stir curiosity, since it is made of rice all through. These our men ate with more relish than would seem possible. Meanwhile, I sat away from the road where I could look out upon the sea over the cliffs, and the cat purred about in her offhand way, and used me incidentally as a rubbing-post. Trees fringed the picture in front, and the ribbon of road wound off through it into the distance, beaded with folk and shot with sunshine and shadow.

I was sorry when lunch was over and we took leave of our gentle hostesses; tabbies both of them, yet no unpleasing pair. A few more bends brought us to where the path culminated. The road had for some time lain bare to the sea and sky, but at the supreme point some fine beeches made a natural screen masking the naked face of the precipice. On the cutting above, four huge Chinese characters stood graved in the rock. “ Ya no gotoku, tō no gotoshi.” " Smooth as a whetstone, straight as an arrow,” meaning the cliff. Perhaps because of their pictorial descent, the characters did not shock one. Unlike the usual branding of nature, they seemed not out of keeping with the spot. Not far beyond, the butts of the winter’s névé, buried in dirt, banked the path.

For miles along the road the view off was superb. Nothing bordered one side of the way, and the mountain bordered the other. Far below lay the sea, stretching away into blue infinity, — a vast semicircle of ultramarine domed by a hemisphere of azure; and it was noticeable how much vaster the sea looked than the sky. We were so high above it that the hearings of its longer swells were leveled to imperceptibility, while the waves only graved the motionless surface. Here and there the rufflings of a breeze showed in darker markings, like the changes on watered silk. The most ephemeral disturbance made the most show. Dotted over the blue expanse were black spots, fishing boats ; and a steamer with a long trail of smoke showed in the offing, stationary to the eye, vet shifting its place like the shadow of a style when you forgot to look. And in long perspective on either hand stretched the battlement of cliff. Visual immensity lay there before us, in each of its three manifestations, of line, of surface, and of space.

We stood still, the better to try to take it in, — this grandeur tempered by sunshine and warmth. Do what he will, man is very much the creature of his surroundings yet. In some instant sense, the eyes fashion the feelings, and we ourselves grow broader with our horizon’s breadth. The Chaldean shepherds alone with the night had grander thoughts for the companionship, and I venture to believe that the heart of the mountaineer owes quite as much to what he is forced to look upon as to what he is compelled to do.

We tucked ourselves into our jinriki sha and started down. By virtue of going the speed increased, till the way we rolled round the curves was intoxicating. The panorama below swung to match, and we leaned in or out mechanically to trim the balance. Occasionally, as it hit some stone, the vehicle gave a lurch that startled us for a moment into sobriety, from which we straightway relapsed into exhilaration. Curious this, how the body brings about its own forgetting ; for I was conscious only of mind, and yet mind was the one part of me not in motion. I suppose much oxygen made me tipsy. If so, it is a recommendable tipple. Spirits were not unhappily named after the natural article.

It was late afternoon when we issued at last from our two days’ Thermopylæ upon the Etchiu plain. As we drew out into its expanse, the giant peaks of the Tateyama range came into view from behind their foothills, draped still in their winter ermine. It was last year yet in those upper regions of the world, but all about us below throbbed with the heartheats of the spring. At each mile, amid the ever-lengthening shadows, nature seemed to grow more sentient. Through the thick air the peaks stood out against the eastern sky, in saffron that flushed to rose and then paled to gray. The rice fields, already flooded for their first working, mirrored the glow overhead so glassily that their dykes seemed to float, in sunset illusion, a mere bar tracery of earth between the sky above and a sky beneath. Upon such lattice of a world we journeyed in mid-heaven. Stealthily the shadows gathered; and as the hour for confidences drew on, Nature took us into hers. The trees in the twilight, just breaking into leaf, stood in groups among the fields and whispered low to one another, nodding their heads; and then from out the shadow of the May evening came the croaking of the frogs. Strangely the sound fitted the hour, with its like touch of mysterious suggestion. As the twilight indefinite, it pervaded everything, yet was never anywhere. Deafening at a distance, it hushed at our approach, only to begin again behind us. Will-o’-the-wisp of the ear, infatuating because forever illusive! And the distance and the numbers blended what had perhaps been harsh into a mellow whole that filled the gloaming with a sort of voice. I began to understand why the Japanese are so fond of it that they deem it not unworthy a place in nature’s vocal pantheon but little lower than the song of the nightingale, and echo its sentiment in verse. Indeed, it seems to me that his soul must be conventionally tuned in whom this even-song of the rice fields stirs no responsive chord.

VIII.

ACROSS THE ETCHIU DELTA.

The twilight lingered, and the road threaded its tortuous course for miles through the rice plain, bordered on either hand by the dykes of the paddy fields. Every few hundred feet we passed a farmhouse screened by clipped hedgerows and bosomed in trees ; and at longer intervals we rolled through some village, the country pike becoming for the time the village street. The land was an archipelago of homestead in a sea of rice. But the trees about the dwellings so cut up the view that for the moment of passing the mind forgot it was all so flat, and came back to its ocean in surprise when the next vista opened on the sides.

Things had already become silhouettes when we dashed into lantern-lighted Mikkaichi. We took the place in form, and a fine sensation we made. What between the shouts of the runners and the clatter of the chaises, men, women, and children made haste to clear a track, snatching their little ones back, and then staring at us as we swept past. Indeed, the teams put their best feet foremost for local effect, and more than once came within an ace of running over some urchin who either would n’t or could n’t get out of the way. Fortunately no casualties occurred; for it would have been ignominious to have been arrested by the police during our first ten minutes in the town, not to speak of the sad dampening to our feelings an accident would have caused.

In this mad manner we dashed up the long main street. We were forced to take the side, for the village aqueduct or gutter—it served both purposes — monopolized the middle. At short intervals it was spanned by causeways formed of slabs of stone. Over one of these we made a final swirl and drew up before the inn. Then our shafts dropped their obeisance to the ground.

A warm welcome greeted the appeal. A crowd of servants came rushing to the front of the house with an eye to business, and a crowd of village folk with an eye to pleasure closed in behind. Between the two fires we stepped out and entered the side court, to the satisfaction of the one audience and the chagrin of the other. But it is impossible to please everybody.

Fortunately it was not so hard to please us, and certainly the inn people did their best; for they led the way to what formerly were the state apartments, that part of the house where the Daimyo of Kaga had been wont to lodge when he stopped here overnight on his journey north. Though it had fallen somewhat into disrepair, it was still the place of honor in the inn, and therefore politely put at the service of one from beyond sea. There I supped in solitary state, and there I slept right royally amid the relics of former splendor; doubting a little whether some unlaid ghost of bygone times might not come to claim his own, and oust me at black midnight by the rats, his retinue.

But nothing short of the sun called me back to consciousness and bade me open to the tiny garden, where a pair of ducks were preening their feathers after an early bath in their own little lake. On the veranda my lake already stood prepared : a brass basin upon a wooden stand, according to the custom of the country. So ducks and I dabbled and prinked in all innocence in the garden, which might well have been the garden of Eden for any hint it gave of a world beyond. It was my fate, too, to leave it after the same manner; for, breakfast over, we were once more of the road. We had a long day of it before us, for I purposed to cross the Etchiu delta, and sleep that night on the threshold of my hopes. The day, like all days that look long on the map, proved still longer on the march. Its itinerary diversified discomfort. First seventeen miles in kuruma, then a ferry, then a tramp of twelve miles along the beach through a series of sand dunes, then another ferry, and finally a second walk of seven miles and a half over some foothills to top off with. The inexpensiveness of the transport was the sole relieving feature of the day. Not, I mean, because the greater and worse half of the journey was done on our own feet, but because of the cheap charges of the chaises and even of the porters. To run at a dogtrot, trundling another in a baby-carriage, seventeen miles for twenty cents, is not, I hold, an extortionate price. Certain details of the tariff, however, are peculiar. For instance, if two men share the work by running tandem, the fare is more than doubled ; a ratio in the art of proportion surprising at first. Each man would seem to charge for being helped. The fact is, the greater speed expected of the pair more than offsets the decreased draft.

Otherwise, as I say, the day was depressing. It was not merely the tramp through the sand dunes that was regrettable, though heaven knows I would not willingly take it again. The sand had far too hospitable a trick of holding on to you at every step to be to my liking. Besides, the sun, which had come out with summer insistence, chose that particular spot for its midday siesta, and lay there at full length, while the air was preternaturally still. It was a stupidly drowsy heat that gave no fillip to the feet.

But such discomfort was merely by the way. The real trouble began at Fushiki, the town on the farther side of the second ferry. In the first place, the spot had, what is most uncommon in Japan, a very sorry look, which was depressing in itself. Secondly, its inhabitants were much too busy or much too unemployed, or both, to be able to attend to strangers at that hour of the afternoon. Consequently it was almost impossible to get any one to carry the baggage. We dispatched emissaries, however. By good luck we secured some beer, and then argued ourselves dry again on the luggage question. The emissaries were at work, we were assured, and at last some one who had been sent for was said to be coming. Still time dragged on, until finally the burden bearers turned up, and turned out to be — women.

At this I rebelled. The situation was not new, but it was none the less impossible. In out-of-the-way districts I had refused offers of the kind before. For Japanese beasts of burden run in a decreasing scale as follows, according to the poverty of the place: jinrikisha, horses, bulls, men, women. I draw my line at the last. I am well aware how absurd the objects themselves regard such a protective policy, but I cling to my prejudices. To the present proffer I was adamant. To step jauntily along in airy unencumberedness myself, while a string of women trudged wearily after, loaded with my heavy personal effects, was more than an Anglo-Saxon attitude towards the sex could stand. I would none of them, to the surprise and dismay of the inn landlord, and to the no slight wonder of the women. The discarding was not an easy piece of work. The fair ones were present at it, and I have no doubt misinterpreted the motive ; for women have a weakness for a touch of the slave-master in a man. Besides, “ hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” though it be only in the capacity of a porter. There was nothing for it, however, but to let it go at that ; for to have explained with more insistence would infallibly have deepened their suspicions of wounded vanity. But it did seem hard to be obliged to feel a brute for refusing to be one.

The landlord, thanks to my importunities, managed, after some further delay, to secure a couple of lusty lads, — relatives, I suspect, of the discarded fair ones, — and with them we eventually set out. We had not gone far, when I came to consider, unjustly, no doubt, that they journeyed too slow. I might have thought differently had I carried the chattels and they the purse. I shuddered to think what the situation would have been with women, for then even the poor solace of remonstrance would have been denied. As it was, I spent much breath in trying to hurry them, and it is pleasanter now than it was then to reflect how futilely; for I rated them roundly, while they accepted my verbal goadings with the trained stolidity of folk who were used to it.

When at last we approached the village of our destination, which bore the name of Himi, it was already dusk, and this with the long May twilight meant a late hour before we should be comfortably housed. Indeed, I had been quartered in anticipation for the last few miles, and was only awaiting arrival to enter into instant possession of my fancied estate. Not content even with pure insubstantiality, I had interviewed various people through Yejiro on the subject. First the porters had been exhaustively catechised, and then what wayfarers we chanced to meet had been buttonholed beside, with the result of much contradictory information. There seemed to be an inn which was, I will not say good, but the best, though no two informants could agree in calling it by name. One thought he remembered that the North Inn was the place to go to ; another, that he had heard the Wistaria House specially commended.

All doubts, however, were set at rest when we reached the town; for, without the slightest hesitation, every one of the houses in question refused to take us in. The unanimity was wonderful considering the lack of collusion. Yejiro and I made as many unsuccessful applications together as I could stand. Then I went and sat down on the sill of the first tea house for a base of operations, — I cannot say for my headquarters, because that is just what we could not get, — and gave myself up to melancholy. Meanwhile Yejiro ransacked the town, from which excursions he returned every few minutes with a fresh refusal, but the same excuse. It got so at last I could anticipate the excuse. The inn was full already — of assessors and their victims. The assessors had descended on the spot, it seemed, and the whole countryside had come to town to lie about the value of its land. I only wished the inhabitants might have chosen some other time for false swearing ; for it was a sad tax on my credulity.

We did indeed get one offer, which I duly went to inspect, but the outside of the house satisfied me. At last I adopted extreme measures. I sent Yejiro off to the police station. This move produced its effect.

Even at home, from having contrived to keep on the sunny side of law and order, my feelings toward the police are friendly enough for all practical purposes ; but in no land have I such an affectionate regard for the constabulary as in Japan. Members of the force there, if the term be applicable to a set of students spectacled from over-study, whose strength is entirely moral, never get you into trouble, and usually get you out of it. One of their chief charms to the traveler lies in their open-sesame effect upon obdurate landlords. In this trick they are wonderfully successful.

Having given ourselves up to the police, therefore, we were already by way of being lodged, and that quickly. So, indeed, it proved. In the time to go and come Yejiro reappeared with an officer in civilian’s clothes, who first made profuse apologies for presenting himself in undress, — but it seemed he was off duty at the moment, — and then led the way a stone’s throw round the corner ; and in five minutes I was sitting as snugly as you please in a capital room in an inn’s third story, sipping tea and peeking at sugarplums, a distinctly honored guest.

Here fate put in a touch of satire; for it now appeared that all our trouble was quite gratuitous. Most surprisingly, the innkeepers’ story on this occasion proved to be entirely true, a possibility I had never entertained for a second; and, furthermore, it appeared that our present inn was the one in which I had been offered rooms, but had refused, disliking its exterior.

Such is the reward for acting on general principles.

IX.

OVER THE ARAVAMA PASS.

The morning that was to give me my self-promised land crept on tiptoe into the room in the third story, and touched me where I slept; and on pushing the shōji apart and looking out, I beheld as fair a day as heart could wish. A faint misty vapor, like a bridal veil, was just lifting from off the face of things, and letting the sky show through in blue-eyed depths. It was a morning of desire, bashful for its youth as yet, but graced with a depth of atmosphere sure to expand into a full, warm, perfect noon ; and I hastened to be out and become a part of it.

Three jinrikishas stood waiting our coming at the door, and amidst a pelting of sayonara from the whole household, we dashed off as proudly as possible down the main street of the town, to the admiration of many lookers-on. The air, laden with moisture, left kisses on our cheeks as we hurried by, while the sunshine fell in long scarfs of gauzy shimmer over the shoulders of the eastern hills. The men in the shafts felt the fillip of it all, and encouraged one another with lusty cries, a light-heartedness that lent them heels. Even the peasants in the fields seemed to wish us well, as they looked up from their work to grin good-humoredly.

We value most what we attain with difficulty. It was on this principle, no doubt, that the road considerately proceeded to give out. It degenerated, indeed, very rapidly after losing sight of the town, and soon was no more than a collection of holes strung on ruts, that made travel in perambulators tiring alike to body and soul. At last, after five miles of floundering, it gave up all pretense at a wheelway, and deposited us at a wayside tea house at the foot of a little valley, — the first step, indeed, up the Arayama pass. Low hills had closed in on the right, shutting off the sea, and the ridge dividing Noto from Etchiu rose in higher lines upon the left.

Here we hired porters, securing them from the neighboring fields ; for they were primarily peasants, and were porters only as we were tramps, by virtue of the country. Porterage being the sole means of transport, they came to carry our things as they would have carried their own, in skeleton hods strapped to their backs. In this they did not differ from the Japanese custom generally; but in one point they showed a strange advance over their fellows. They were wonderfully methodical folk. They paid no heed to our hurry, and instead of shouldering the baggage they proceeded to weigh it, each manload by itself, on a steelyard of wood six feet long; the results they then worked out conscientiously on an abacus, after which I paid accordingly. Truly an equitable adjustment between man and man, at which I lost only the time it took. Then we started.

From the tea house the path rose steadily enough for so uneducated a way, leaving the valley to contract into an open glen. The day, in the mean time, came out as it had promised, full and warm, — fine basking weather, as a certain snake in the path seemed to think. So, I judge, did the porters. If it be the pace that kills, these simple folk must be a long-lived race. They certainly were very careful not to hurry themselves. Had they been hired for life, so thrifty a husbanding of their strength would have been most gratifying to witness; unluckily they were mine only for the job. They moved, one foot after the other, with a mechanical precision exhausting even to look at. To keep with them was practically impossible for an ordinary pedestrian. Nothing short of a woman shopping could worthily have matched their pace. In sight their speed was snail-like; out of it they would appear to have stopped, so far did they fall behind. Once I thought they had turned back.

The path we were following was the less traveled of the only two possible entrances into Noto by land. It was a side or postern gate to the place, over a gap on the northern end of a mountain wall; the main approach lying along its other flank. For a high range of uninhabited hills nearly dams the peninsula across, falling on the right side straight into the sea, but leaving on the other a lowland ligature that binds Noto to Kaga. To get from Kaga into Etchiu, the range has to be crossed lower down. Our dip in the chain was called the Arayama tōge, or Rough Mountain pass, and was perhaps fifteen hundred feet high, but pleasingly modeled in its lines after one ten times its height.

Half-way up the tug of the last furlong, where the ascent became steep enough for zigzags, I turned to look back. Down away from me fell the valley, slipping by reason of its own slope out into the great Etchiu plain. Here and there showed bits of the path in corkscrew, from my personal standpoint all perfectly porterless. Over the low hills, to the left, lay the sea, the crescent of its great beach sweeping grandly round into the indistinguishable distance. Back of it stretched the Etchiu plain; but beyond that, nothing. The mountains that should have bounded it were lost to sight in the spring haze.

Mechanically my eyes followed into the languid blue, when suddenly they chanced upon a little cloud, for cloud I took it to be. Yet something about it struck me as strange, and scanning it more closely, by this most natural kind of second sight, I marked the unmistakable glisten of snow. It was a snow peak towering there in isolated majesty. As I gazed it grew on me with ineffable grandeur, sparkling with a faint saffron glamour of its own. Shifting my look a little, I saw another and then another of the visions, like puffs of steam, rising above the plain. Half apparitions, below a certain line, the snow line, they vanished into air; for between them and the solid earth there looked to be blue sky. The haze of distance, on this soft May day, hid their lower slopes, and left the peaks to tower alone into the void. They were the giants of the Tateyama range, standing there over against me inaccessibly superb.

A pair of tea houses, rivals, crowned the summit of the pass, which, like most Japanese passes, was a mere knife-edge of earth. With a quickened pulse, if a slackened gait, I topped the crest, walked — straight past the twin tea houses and their importunities to stop — another half dozen paces to the brink, and in one sweep looked down over a thousand feet on the western side. Noto, eyelashed by the branches of a tree just breaking into leaf, lay open to me below.

After the first glow of attainment, this initial view was, I will confess, disillusioning. Instead of what unfettered fancy had led me to expect, I saw only a lot of terraced vice fields backed by ranges of low hills; for all the world a parquet in brown and green tiles. And yet, as the wish to excuse prompted me to think, was this not, after all, as it should be ? For I was looking but at the entrance to the land, its outer hallway, as it were; Nanao, its capital, its inland sea, all its beyond, was still shut from me by the nearer hills; and, feeling thus at liberty to be amused, I forthwith saw it as a satire on panoramas generally.

Panoramic views are painfully plain. They must needs be mappy at best, for your own elevation flattens all below it to one topographic level. Field and woodland, town or lake, show by their colors only as if they stood in print; and you might as well lay any good atlas on the floor and survey it from the lofty height of a footstool. Such being the inevitable, it was refreshing to see the thing in caricature. No pains, evidently, had been spared by the inhabitants to make their map realistic. There the geometric lines all stood in ludicrous insistence; any child could have drawn the thing as mechanically.

The two tea houses were well patronized by wayfarers of both sexes resting after their climb. Some simply sipped tea, chatting; others made a regular meal of the opportunity. The greater number sat, as we did, on the sill, for the bother of taking off their straw sandals. Our landlady was the model of what a landlady should be; for it was apparently a feminine establishment. If there was a man attached to it, he kept himself discreetly in the background. She was a kind, sympathetic soul, with a word for every one, and a deliberateness of action as effective as it was efficient. And in the midst of it all she kept up a refrain of welcomes and good-bys, as new comers appeared or old comers left. The unavoidable preliminary exercise and the crisp air whetted all our appetites, so I doubt not she drove a thriving trade, although to Western ideas of value her charges were infinitesimally small.

Midday halts for lunch are godsends to tramps who travel with porters. They compel the porters to catch up, and give the hirer opportunity to say things which at least relieve him, if they do no good. I had begun to fear ours would deprive me of this pleasure, and indeed had got so far on in my meal as to care little whether they did or not, when automatically they appeared. Fortunately they needed but a short rest, and as the descent on the Noto side was much steeper than on the other, half an hour’s walk brought us to the level of kuruma once more.

A bit of lane almost English in look, bowered in trees and winding delightfully like some human stream, led us to a tea house. While we were ordering chaises a lot of children gathered to inspect us, thus kindly giving us our first view of the natives. They looked more open-eyed than Japanese generally, but such effect may have been due to wonder. At all events, the stare, if it was a stare, seemed like a silent sort of welcome.

Leaving the children still gazing after us, we bowled away toward Nanao, and in the course of time caught our first glimpse of it from the upper end of a sweep of meadows. It sat by the water’s edge, at the head of a landlocked bay, the nearer arm of the inland sea; and an apology for shipping rode in the offing. It appeared to be a very fair-sized town, and altogether a more lively place than I had thought to find. Clearly, its life was as engrossing to it as if no wall of hills notching the sky shut out the world beyond. Having heard, however, that a watering-place called Wakura was the sight of the province, and learning now that it was but six miles further, we decided, as it was yet early in the afternoon, to push on, and take the capital later. We did take it later, very much later the next night than was pleasing.

Wakura, indeed, was the one thing in Noto, except the charcoal, which had an ultra-Notorious reputation. Rumors of it had reached us as far away as Shinshiu, and with every fresh inquiry we made as we advanced the rumors had gathered strength. Our informers spoke of it with the vague respect accorded hearsay honor. Clearly, it was no place to pass by.

The road to it from Nanao was not noteworthy save for two things,—one officially commended to sight-seers, the other not. The first was a curious water-worn rock upon the edge of the bay ; some waif of a boulder, doubtless, since it stuck up quite alone out of the sand. A shrine perched atop, and a larger temple encircled it below, to which its fantastic cuttings served as gateway and garden. The uncommended sight was a neighboring paddy field, in which a company of frogs, caught trespassing, stood impaled on sticks a foot high, as awful warnings to their kind. Beyond this the way passed through a string of clay cuttings following the coast, and in good time rolled us into the midst of a collection of barnlike buildings which it seemed was Wakura.

The season for the baths had not yet begun, so that the number of people at the hotels was still quite small. Not so the catalogue of complaints for which they were visited. The list appalled me as I sat on the threshold of my prospective lodging, listening to the innkeeper’s encomiums on the virtues of the waters. He expatiated eloquently on both the quantity and quality of the cures, quite unsuspicious that at each fresh recommendation he was, in my eyes, depreciating his own wares. Did he hope that among such a handsome choice of diseases I might at least have one ? I was very near to beating a hasty retreat on the spot. For the accommodation in Japanese inns is of a distressingly communistic character at best; and although at present there were few patients in the place, the germs presumably were still there, on the lookout for a victim.

Immediate comfort, however, getting the better of problematical risk, I went in. The room allotted me lay on the ground floor, just off the garden ; and I had not been there many minutes before I became aware, as one does, that I was being stared at. The culprit instantly pretended, with a very sheepish air, to be only taking a walk. He was the vanguard of an army of the curious. The people in the next room were much exercised over the new arrival, and did all that decency allowed to catch a glimpse of me; for which in time they were rewarded. Visitors lodged farther off took aimless strolls to the verandas, and looked at me when they thought I was not looking at them. All envied the servants, who outdid Abra by coming when I called nobody, and then lingering to talk. Altogether I was more of a notoriety than I ever hope to be again; especially as any European would have done them as well. My public would have been greater, as I afterwards learned, if Yejiro had not been holding rival court in the kitchen.

Between us we were given a good deal of local information. One bit failed to cause me unmitigated delight. We were not, it appeared, the first foreigners to set foot in Wakura. Two Europeans had, in a quite uncalled-for way, descended upon the place the summer before, up to which time, indeed, the spot had been virgin to Caucasians. Lured by the fame of the springs, these men had come from Kanazawa in Kaga, where they were engaged in teaching chemistry, to make a test of the waters. I believe they discovered nothing startling. I could have predicted as much had they consulted me beforehand. They neglected to do so, and the result was they came, saw, and conquered what little novelty the place had. I was quite chagrined. It simply showed how betrodden in these latter days the world is. There is not so much as a remote corner of it but falls under one of two heads : those places worth seeing which have already been seen, and those that have not been seen, but are not worth seeing. Wakura Onsen struck me as falling into the latter halves of both categories.

While discussing my solitary dinner I was informed by Yejiro that some one wished to speak with me, and, on admitting to be at home, the local prefect was ushered in. He came ostensibly to visé my passport, a duty usually quite satisfactorily performed by any policeman. The excuse was transparent. He really came that he might see for himself the foreigner whom rumor had reported to have arrived. As a passport on his part he presented me with some pride the bit of autobiography that he had himself once been in Tōkyō ; a fact which in his mind instantly made us a kind of brothers, and raised us both into a common region of superiority to our surroundings. He asked affectionately after the place, and I answered as if it had been the one thought in both our hearts. It was a pleasing little comedy, as each of us was conscious of its consciousness by the other. Altogether we were very friendly.

Between two such Tōkyōites it was, of course, the merest formality to visé a passport, but being one imposed by law he kindly ran his eye over mine. As it omitted to describe my personal appearance in the usual carefully minute manner, as face oval, nose ordinary, complexion medium, and so forth, identification from mere looks was not striking. So he had to take me on trust for what I purported to be, an assumption which did not disconcert him in the least. With writing materials which he drew from his sleeve, he registered me then and there, and, the demands of the law thus complied with to the letter, left me, amid renewed civilities, to sleep the sleep of the just.

X.

AN INLAND SEA.

They had told us overnight that a small steamer plied every other day through Noto’s unfamed inland sea, leaving the capital early in the morning, and touching shortly after at Wakura. As good luck would have it, the morrow happened not to be any other day, so we embraced the opportunity to embark in her ourselves. On her, it would be more accurate to say, for she proved such a mite that her cabin was barely possible, and anything but desirable. By squatting down and craning my neck I peered in at the entrance, a feat which was difficult enough. She was, in truth, not much bigger than a ship’s gig; but she had a soul out of all proportion to her size. The way it throbbed and strained and set her whole little frame quivering with excitement made me think every moment that she was about to explode. The fact that she was manned exclusively by Japanese did not entirely reassure me.

There was an apology for a deck forward, to which, when we were well under way, I clambered over the other passengers. I was just sitting down there to enjoy a comfortable pipe when I was startlingly requested by a voice from a caboose behind to move off, as I was obscuring the view of the man at the wheel. After that I perched on the gunwale.

We steamed merrily out into the middle of the bay. The water was slumberously smooth, and under the tawny haze of the morning it shone with the sheen of burnished brass. From the gentle ploughing of our bow it rolled lazily to one side, as if in truth it were molten metal. Land, at varying picturesque distances, lay on all sides of us. In some directions the shore was not more than a mile and a half off ; in others the eye wandered down a vista of water framed by low headlands for ten miles or more. But the atmosphere gave the dominant thought, a strange, slumber-like seclusion. So rich and golden, it shut this little corner of the world in a sort of happy valley of its own, and the smoke from my pipe drifted dreamily astern, a natural incense to the spirits of the spot.

The passengers suggested anything, from a public picnic to an early exploration party. There were men, women, and children of all ages and kinds, some stowed away in the cabin behind, some gathered in groups amidships ; and those in the cabin thought small fry of those on deck. The cabin was considered the place of honor, because the company made one pay a higher price for the privilege of its discomfort. Altogether it was a very pretty epitome of a voyage.

Just as the steamer people were preparing for their first landing, there detached itself from the background of trees along the shore the most singular aquatic structure I think I have ever seen. It looked like the skeleton of some antediluvian wigwam which a prehistoric roc had subsequently chosen for a nest. Four poles planted in the water inclined to one another at such an angle that they crossed three quarters of the way up. The projecting quarters held in clutch a large wicker basket like the car of a balloon. Peering above the car was a man’s head. As the occupant below slowly turned the head to keep an eye on us, it suggested, amid its web of poles, some mammoth spider lying in wait for its prey.

It was a matter of some wonder at first how the man got there, until the motion of the steamer turned the side and disclosed a set of cross-poles lashed between two of the uprights, forming a rude sort of ladder. Curiosity, satisfied on this primary point, still asked how he got there. As this was a riddle to me, I propounded it to Yejiro, who only shook his head, and propounded it to somebody else, — a compliment to the inquiry, certainly, if not to my choice of inquirers. This somebody else told him the man was fishing. Except for the immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like it in my life.

Such, however, was the fact. The wigwam was connected by strings to the entrance of a sort of weir, and the man who crouched in the basket was on the lookout for large fish, of a kind called bora. As soon as one of them strayed into the mouth of the net, the man pulled the string which closed the opening. The height of his observatory above the level of the water enabled him to see through it to the necessary depth. I am a trifle hazy over the exact details of the apparatus, as I never saw a fish inquisitive enough to go in ; but I submit the existence of the fishermen in proof that it works.

Having deposited such wights as wished to go ashore, — for the place was of no pretension, — our steam fish once more turned its tail and darted us through some narrows into another bay. It must have been a favorite one with bora, as its shores were dotted with fishlookouts. The observatories stood a few stone-throws out in deepish water, at presumably favorable points, and never very near one another, so as not to interfere with a possible catch. Some were inhabited, some not.

This bay was further remarkable for a solar halo which I chanced to see on glancing up at the sun. I suppose it was the singular quality of the light that first caused me to look overhead; for a thin veil of cloud had drawn over the blue and tempered the sunshine peculiarly. Of course one is familiar with caricatures of the thing in meteorological books ; but the phenomenon itself is not so common, and the effect was uncanny. At the first glance it seemed a bit of Noto witchery, that strangely luminous circle around the sun. To admire the moon thus bonneted, as the Japanese say, is common enough, and befits the hour; but to have the halo of the night hung aloft in broad day is to crown sober noon with enchantment.

The sheet of water was sparsely dotted with sail. One little craft in particular I remember, whose course bore her straight down upon us. She dilated slowly out of the distance, and then passed so close I might have tossed a flower aboard of her. So steady her motion she seemed oblivious to our presence, as she glided demurely by at relatively doubled speed.

Only after we had passed did she show signs of noticing us at all; for, meeting our wake, the coquette, she suddenly began dropping us courtesies in good-by.

XI.

ANAMIDZU.

We seemed bound that day to meet freaks in fishing-tackle. The next one to turn up was a kind of crinoline. This strange thing confronted us as we disembarked at Anamidzu. Anamidzu was the last port in the inland sea. After touching here the steamer passed out into the Sea of Japan, and tied up for the night at a small port on the eastern side of the nose of the peninsula.

As the town lay away from the shore up what looked like a canal, we were transferred to a small boat to be rowed in. Just as we reached the beginnings of the canal we saw squatting on the bank an old crone, contemplating, it seemed, the forlorn remains of a hoopskirt which dangled from a pole before her, half in and half out of water. The chief difference between this and the more common article of commerce was merely one of degree, since here the ribs, by quite meeting at the top, entirely suppressed the waist. Their lower extremities were hid in the water, and were, I was informed, baited with hooks.

The old lady’s attitude was one of inimitable apathy; nor did she so much as blink at us, as we passed. A little farther up, on the opposite bank, sat a similar bit of still life. A third beyond completed the picture. These good dames bordered the brink like so many meditative frogs. Though I saw them for the first time in the flesh, I recognized them at once. Here were the identical fisherfolk who have sat for centuries in the paintings of Tsunenobu, not a whit more immovable in kakemono than in real life. I almost looked to find the master’s seal somewhere in the corner of the landscape.

The worthy souls were, I was told, inkyōs ; a social, or rather unsocial state, which in their case may be rendered unwidowed dowagers, since, in company with their husbands, they had renounced all their social titles and estates. Their daughters-in-law now did the domestic drudgery, while they devoted their days thus to sport.

Whether it were the dames, or the canal, or, more likely still, some touch of atmosphere, I was reminded of Holland. Indeed, I know not what the special occasion was. It is a strange fabric we are so busy weaving out of sensations. Let something accidentally pick up an old thread, and behold, without rhyme or reason, we are treated to a whole piece of past experience. Stranger yet when but the background is brought back ; for we were unconscious of the warp while the details were weaving in. Yet reproduce it and all the woof starts suddenly to sight. For atmosphere, like a perfume, does ghostly service to the past.

There is something less mediate in my remembrance of Anamidzu. The place has to me a memory of its own that hangs about the room made mine for an hour. It was certainly a pretty room ; surprisingly so, for such an outof-the-way spot. I dare say it was only that to my fellow-voyager of the steamer, hurrying homeward to Wakamatsu. I could hear him in the next apartment making merry over his midday meal. To him the place stood for the last stage on the journey home. But to me it meant more. It marked both the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end ; for I had fixed upon this spot for my turning-point.

It was high noon in my day of travel, like the high noon there outside the open shōji. The siesta of sensation had come. Thus far, the coming events had cast their shadows before, and I had followed ; now they had touched their zenith here in mid-Noto. Henceforth I should see them moving back again toward the east. The dazzling sunshine without pointed the shade within, making even the room seem more shadowy than it was. I began to feel creeping over me that strange touch of sadness that attends the supreme moment of success, though fulfillment be so trifling a thing as a journey’s bourne. Great or little, real or fancied, the feeling is the same in kind. The mind is strangely like the eye. Satisfy some emotion it has been dwelling on, and the relaxed nerves at once make you conscious of the complementary tint.

Then other inns in Japan came up regretfully across the blue distance of the intervening years, — midday halts, where an hour of daydream lay sandwiched in between two half days of tramp. I thought of the companions now so far away. Having heard the tune in a minor key, these came in as chords of some ampler variation, making a kind of symphony of sentiment, where I was brought back ever and anon to the simple motif. And the tea-house maidens entered and went out again like mutes, in my mind’s scene.

I doubt not the country beyond is all very commonplace, but it might be an Eldorado, from the gilding fancy gave it then. I was told the hills were not high, and that eighteen miles on foot would land the traveler at Wakamatsu on the Sea of Japan, fronting Korea, but seeing only the sea, and I feel tolerably sure there is nothing there to repay the tramp. When a back has bewitched you in the street, it is a fatal folly to try to see the face. You will only be disillusioned if you do.

Percival Lowell .