Through the Torii

Front matter

“I do not know whether the essay is a Japanese literary form, but if it is not Mr. Noguchi has perfectly realised its possibilities, and has used it in a manner which makes our most delicate masters seem rather heavy-handed. For Mr. Noguchi, though he has lived much in England and America, and knows English literature well, has accepted nothing from the West which might spoil his native virtues. . . Himself we may describe—not necessarily exhaustively—as a mystical dandy.”—Francis Bickley in the Bookman (London).

“Noguchi’s essays leave one advanced in a conception of beauty, and enlarged in understanding; and that is not altogether familiar experience in bookreading.”—The Academy.

Other Books by Yone Noguchi

Chapter 1

The noisy time has slipped away even gracefully at Kyoto. (I see that it—the barbarian of modern type—has still a certain amount of etiquette in Japan.) Content is so natural and even becoming here (at other places it is almost outlandish and at the same time even the most expensive thing to acquire), when one passes through the dustless streets of Kyoto, where the little houses with moss-eaten dark tiles humbly beg for their temporary existence on promise not to disturb the natural harmony with the green mountains and the temples that the holy spirits built. How different from the foreign houses, red or white, seeming even to push away the old-fashioned Nature with vain splenduor of scorn. The Kyoto people, moth-spirits or butterfly-ghosts, are born for pleasure-making, and to sip the tea. I say pleasure-making, but not in the modern meaning; the modern pleasure-making is rather a forced production of criticism, therefore often oppressive and always explanatory in attitude. I say they sip the tea; I do not mean the black tea or the red tea which the Western people drink, calling it Oriental tea; but I mean that pale green tea, so mild that it does not kill the taste of boiled water. It is the high art of the tea-master to make you really taste the water beside the taste of the tea; he is very particular about the water when he is going to make the tea; I am told that his keen tongue at once differentiates the waters from a well or a stream, and he can distinguish even the season from the taste of the water, whether it be spring or autumn. He always laughs at the attempt to make tea with the ready water from a screw in the kitchen, which most unpoetically comes through the tube from a certain reservoir. We do not call you a real tea-drinker when you think you only drink the tea; you must really taste the fragrance and spirits of tender leaves of a living tea-tree, which grew by accident and fortune under a particular sunlight and rain. And, of course, more than that, you must learn how to sip the tea philosophically; I mean that you must taste, through the medium of a teacup, the general atmosphere, grey and silent. And there is no better place than Kyoto, the capital of the medieval, to drink tea as a real tea-sipper.

A few days ago I enjoyed a little play (comedy, but poetry), “Sakura Shigure,” or “The Cherry-blossom Shower,” by my friend Gekko Takayasu—the play is the love between Yoshino and Saburobei. Yoshino was a courtesan of four or five hundred years ago—of course, not in the modern sense, but a type which the Tosa school artists were happy to paint, the most famous beauty of that age whose name was known even to China, although it was the age of isolation. It is said that Li Shozan, the Chinese poet, sent her a poem written on his meeting with her in a dream. It is written in Okagami: “Her temperament was sprightly; she was wise. Her charming spirit was impressive; she was at once free in disposition, and again sympathetic in feeling.” Yoshino was a rare personality; and it was the age when dignity and freedom were well protected even for a courtesan; in truth, she was in no way different from the maiden at a palace of the Heian period. Yoshino was a character which only the Kyoto atmosphere and culture could create, and I congratulate the dramatist Takayasu, whose perfect assimilation with Kyoto made him able to produce this play. The play opens with the scene where Yoshino is leaving the house of pleasure with her lover, Saburobei, who has been disinherited by his wealthy family on her account, only to find the real meaning of life and love. The story is interesting; but I am not going to tell it, as it is not the very point for my purpose.

The second scene is a cottage, wretched but artistic, as the inmates are Yoshino and her husband. I see in the background the mountains of Higashi Yama, Kiyomizu, and Toribe, to whose protection Kyoto, whom I love, clings with almost human passion. The house is wretched, but the presence of Yoshino—now housewifely, but having an unforgotten glimmer of gaiety of her past life, makes the whole atmosphere perfectly tantalising. The season is autumn (Kyoto's autumn sweet and sad); the leaves fall. And again, as the season is autumn, we have at Kyoto a frequent shower, as we see it on the stage presently; and that shower, light but very lonesome, is necessary, as it made Shoyu, father of Saburobei, of course a stranger, find his shelter under Yoshino’s roof. Yoshino welcomed him in, and offered him a cup of tea. He was taken to admiration while he looked on her way to make tea, as he was no mean tea-master. He became on the spot an unconditional admirer of his forgotton son's wife, whom he had cursed and despised without any acquaintance. I said already that you should come to Kyoto to drink tea; I say again that even at Kyoto you must drink it while listening to the voice of rain; better than that, of the autumnal shower, sad but musical, which is spiritual, therefore Oriental. It is the keynote of the tea, of the old capital of Japan, and again my friend’s play. What happens next when Shoyu finds in Yoshino a tea-drinker, and an admirable woman, too, would be, I believe, the next question you will ask me. It is prosaic to answer it, and it will end as any other comedy always ends. And it would be better to make it end as you please; that is not the real point. The main thing is the tea and the autumnal shower, the soul of poetry that is Kyoto.

You are bound to be sad sooner or later in Tokyo or any other city of modern type, where you will find yourself as a straying ghost in a human desert; there the dream would die at once as a morning glory under the sunlight. While I admit that the weariness is, in fact, the highest poetry of the Eastern nature, I will say that Tokyo’s weariness is a kind that has lost beauty and art; and the weariness at Kyoto is a kind that has soared out of them. That is the difference; but it is a great difference. As there is the poetry of weariness at Kyoto—the highest sort of Oriental poetry—it is your responsive mind that makes you at once join with great eternity and space; it is most easy there to forget time and hours. It seems to me that nothing is more out of place at Kyoto than a newspaper. When you used to know the time of day or night you have only to wait for a temple bell to ring out; you would be more happy not to be stung by the tick-tack of clock. Sanyo Rai, the eminent scholar of some sixty years ago, wrote an invitation to his friend saying that he would expect him to come “at the time when the mountain grows purple and the water clear.” Indeed, it is the very hour of autumn evening at Kyoto where Nature presents the varied aspect by which you can judge the exact time. By the mountain, Rai means Higashi Yama; by the water, of course, Kamo Gawa. It is the happy old city, this Kyoto, whose poetical heart exchanges beauty and faith with Nature. It is only here, even in Japan, that Nature is almost human, like you and me.

Chapter 2

It is difficult to take a neutral attitude towards the temples at Nikko, although indifference is said to be the “highest” of Japanese attitudes; I mean there are only two ways—like or dislike—for their barbarous splendour in gold and red lacquer deprived of the inspiration of the imagination and melancholy, definite to the limit. And it altogether depends on one’s mood; if a man’s large stomach is well filled (also his purse), their despotic wealth would not be too overwhelming, and he might even be disposed to sing their eternal beauty as the ultimate achievement of human endeavour, I believe I have been sometimes in such a state myself. But the pessimistic mind, critical even where criticism is not called for, skipping all the physical expression for the spiritual communication, will find Nikko a sad dilettantism of art, at the best a mere apology of a squandering mind; there is nothing more unhappy than wastefulness in the orld of art. It is not the real Japanese mind, I think, to build a house for the dead, as I know that it goes straight towards associating the dead with trees, mountains, water, winds, shadows, deer, ravens, foxes, wolves, and bears, and uses to leave them to the care of the sun and moon; indeed, it was the unlettered samurai mind to build such temples as I see at this Nikko, afraid to return to the gray elements and wishing to find a shelter even after death in materialism. Or it might be more true to say that it originated in the complete surrender to Buddhism; and it may not be too much to say that India begins right here from Nikko, in the same sense that Tokyo of the present age is spiritually a part of London or New York. We have only a few pages in the whole Japanese history where we are perfectly independent.

Whether it is fortunate or not, my recent evolution of mind is that I have ceased to see the fact itself, and what I am glad to indulge in is the reflection of its psychological relation with other facts; how thankful I am for the gate tower carved with phoenixes and peonies, the large pagoda in red and gold, now loitering round the holy precincts of the Nikko temples, since the very fact of their existence makes, through the virtue of contrast, the cryptomerias and mountains greener, the waters and skies bluer, and besides, the human soul intenser. I am happy in my coming to Nikko in the month of May when the beauty of Nature quickens itself from the pain of passing Spring, and with the sunlight that overflows from the bosom of hope; your appreciation of Nikko would not be perfect till you see the wealth and grandeur of Nature’s greenness; it is the beauty of cryptomerias and waters rather than that of the temples. And you will feel encouraged when you observe the real fact, how even the barbarity of human work can calm down before Nature, and happier still how they can form a good friendship with one another for creating the one perfect art known as Nikko. I am glad to see the proof of power of a Japanese landscape artist who could use his art on a large scale as I see it here, not merely in a small city garden; my mind, which was slightly upset from the artistic confusion of the temples belonging to Iyeyasu the Great, soon recovered its original serenity in seeing the most beautiful arrangement of temples of Iyemitsu, the Third Shogun of Tokugawa family, with the hills and trees, quite apart from his grandfather’s; what a gentle feeling of solemnity, as old as that of a star, what a quiet and golden splendour here! The arrangement might be compared with the feminine beauty of gems most carefully set. When I looked upon the temples from the Mitarashiya, or the “House where you wash your Honourable Hands,” below, they impressed my mind as if a house of dream built by the Dragon Kings underneath the seas, that I and yow often see on the Japanese fan; I looked down, when I stood by the gate tower of the Niwo gods, over that water-fountain below, where the spirits of poesy were soon floating on the sunlight; it was natural to become a passionate adorer of the Nature of May here like Basho, who wrote in his seventeen syllable hokku:

Ah, how sublime— The green leaves, the young leaves, In the light of the sun!

I very well understand how Iyeyasu, the Supreme Highness, Lord of the East, that Great Incarnation, escaped the temple of gold and red lacquer, and wished to sleep in a hill behind, in silence, and shadow; now I am climbing up the long and high steps to make him my obeisance where a hundred large cryptomerias stand reverent as sentinels. What peace! What broke the silence was the sudden voice of water and the sutra-reading of priests; a moment ago the crows in threes, twos, and fours flew away and dropped into the unseen just like the human mortals who have only to stay here for a little while. Under my feet I found a small hairy caterpillar also climbing up the stone steps like myself. Oh! tell me who art thou? And what difference is there between us human beings and the caterpillar? Are we not caterpillar who may live little longer? But I tell you that is a difference of no particular value I met with a group of Western tourists in the middle of the steps, who hurried down; they set my mind thinking on the anti-Christian terrorism of Iyeyasu and other princes, the Japanese Neroes, awful and glorious. It is not strange that they are shaking hands in sleep with the Westerners whom they hated with all their hearts?

The words of my friend when I bade farewell to him in New York suddenly returned to me when now the weather has changed, and even rain has begun to fall; my friend artist who had stayed and sketched here long ago said to me: “There were many idols of the Jizo god, the guardian deity of children, standing by the Daiyagawa River of Nikko; I loved them, particularly one called the Father or Mother, from its large size, whom I sketched most humbly. You see that Nantai Mountain appears and disappears as if mist or mirage, right behind these idols; the place is poetical, But they seemed to be having a disagreeable time of it, all overgrown as they were with moss, and even with the dirty pieces of paper stuck by all sorts of pilgrims as a sign of their call. Once when I hurried down from Chuzenji and passed by them, I caught rain and wind; alas! those kind deities were tembly wet, like myself. I pitied them; I cannot forget their sad sight even to-day; however, the Jizo idol under the rain is a good subject of art. There are few countries where rain falls as in Japan. The dear idols must be wet under the rain even now while you and I talk right here.”

When I reached my hotel and sat myself on the cushion, and after a while began to smoke, my mind roamed leisurely from the idols under the rains to the man wet through by the rains of failure; and now it reflected on this and that, and then it recalled that and this. Oh, how can I forget the very words of that reporter of one Francisco paper who mystified, startled, and shocked me, well, by his ignorance or wisdom seven years ago? I said to him on being asked why I returned home that I was going to hunt after the Nirvana; he looked up with a half-humorous smile and said, “That's so! But let me ask you with pardon, are you not rather too late in the season for that?”

It seems that it is too late now even in Japan to get the Nirvana, as that San Francisco reporter said. How can I get it, the capital-lettered Nirvana, even at Nikko, when I could not find it in London and New York? I laughed on my silliness of thought that I might be able, if place were changed, to discover it. Nikko Oh, my soul, I wonder when it will wiser grow?

Chapter 3

Psychologically speaking, the city of Tokyo, like the Japanese civilization, which is often unmoral, if not immoral, is a wanton growth, not a true development from the inner force of impulse; its immensity in size, and perhaps in humanity too, is not the consciousness of sure development, but more or less in the nature of an accidental phenomenon. It appeared like a mushroom without any particular reason; the wonder is that it has stayed, and grown bigger and bigger. It fairly well represents the Japanese mind in its incapacity for spiritual concentration ; if it have any charm (it has, in fact, many and many charms, often fantastic and always bewildering) it should lie in its ignoring of definite purpose, or its utter lack of purpose. It is almost too free to be called democratic; it has no discrimination. (My friend critic, that unique N. Y., scorns Tokyo as the human beehive of mobbishness.) Many millions of Japanese, dark in skin, short in stature, live here looking as if the increasing summer clouds had fallen on the ground, now parting and anon gathering again with a sort of mystery of Oriental fatalism; the first and last impression is a weariness not altogether unpleasant, ghostly at the beginning and tantalisingly human afterward. That weariness originates in the confusion, physical and spiritual, to speak symbolically, the strange mess of red, blue, yellow, green, and what not. (Fame be eternal of Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige, those colour magicians of art, the true exponents of Japanese life!)

This Tokyo was at the first the town of samurai of two swords, of mind more bent on learning how to die than how to live, proper to say, founded by Iyeyasu Tokugawa, the mighty prince of the Tokugawa feudalism, four hundred year ago, whose want of artistic education made it quite natural for him not to see the poetical side of city-building; he allowed every whim and imagination of the people to take their own free course. This neglect, more fortunate than otherwise, produced a great variety in colour and humanity that system and wisdom never could create, that were at once paradoxical, but highly interesting. It is for ever the man’s city, if we can call Kyoto the city of women for the sake of comparison; in consequence, it is apt to be naked, bizarre and often arrogant, but there is no other city like Tokyo, which is honest and simple. As a piece of the art the city is sadly unfinished; in its unfinishedness we fee! a charm, as I said before, the charm of weariness that rather breaks, in spite of itself, an artistic unity. Consciousness of perfection is unknown to the city; while it is quick and bright on the one hand, it is, on the other, verily lazy and uncivilised, like the Japanese temperament itself. I can count, on the spot, many a street which raises an apologetic look, as if they did not approve their own existence even themselves; it is quite natural, I say, as it is the city as a whole, withuot a definite purpose.

I think that “New Japan” (what a skeptic shallow sound it has!) has little to do with the real Japan of human beauty, because it was created largely by the advertisement, for which we paid the most exorbitant price to get the mere name of that; in short, we bought it with ready cash. Therefore it is no wonder that it is so perfectly strange to many of us. I hear a whisper too often at some street corner: “Is it really our Japan?” I know that old true Japan, every inch of it, was the very handiwork of the people in general, while “New Japan,” “the rising country of first class in the world,” as it was proudly written by a newspaper man, as I can imagine, who wears a single eyeglass straight from London, was created by a few hundred men, we might say, the Westerners born in Japan, whose hopeless ignorance of the old civilization of their old country, strange to say, helped them up to fill the highest place in the public estimate. They were almost reckless to bring everything from abroad, good or bad; we did not mind trying it under one condition, that we might change it for another if it was not fitting. We discovered profitably Shakespeare and even Ibsen lately; and it seems to me that a copy, doubtless, of the American edition of “How to Build a City” fell one day in the hands of the Mayor of Tokyo, who proclaimed in the voice of a prophet that the city should be rebuilt in the very fashion nobody, at least in the Orient, ever dreamed. Figuratively speaking, we were changing our kimono of old brocade, precious with tradition, for a plain sack-coat, perhaps made in Chicago. The municipality has been for the last two or three years spending an enormous amount of money for the sudden enlarging of the streets, and the hasty building of houses of brick or stone, of white or red; but I wonder why our Japanese city should be one and the same with that of the West. And again I wonder if it was her weakness or strength that she accepted the foreign things so easily. It makes me reflect what right she has, however, to object to the foreign invasion, as she had no definite purpose as a city originally. And is it the only way to put the Western morality in the old heart of the city? Can she ever become really civilised?

Chapter 4

It has become my habit on way to college once a week, where my weakness betrays itself under the quite respectable name of interpreter of English poets, ancient or modern, to invite my own soul even for awhile where the shadows of pine-trees thicken along the path of breezes in Shiba Park; it makes my wandering in the holy houses of sleep of the great feudal princes the most natural thing. I clearly remember how afraid I was in my boyhood days, whenever I happened to pass by them, of being hailed by the dark, undiscerning voice of Death. Oh, my friends and philosophers in all lands, is it a matter of thankfulness as to-day even to fall in love with its sweetness, and to reflect on its golden-hearted generosity and accidentally to despise Life? I say here at either the sacred house of the Sixth Prince or that of the Second Prince that one cannot help loving Death when he sees night before himself such an inspiring house of sleep of green, red, yellow, of the gold and lacquer, of the colours unmixed and simple, soaring out of this and that wealth of life, the colours that have reached the final essence, and power of Nature. Although it might be a modern fashion to speak of symbolism, I flatly refuse to look through its looking-glass of confused quality, on the phoenixes, paradise-birds, lotuses, peonies, lions, and ocean waves which decorate the inside of the temple, where the years of incense and prayer have darkened and mystified the general atmosphere. Our old artists had a strength in their jealous guarding of beauty for beauty’s sake; they felt but not theorised; therefore, in such a beauty of confusion as I see in these holy temples, there is the most clear simplicity, the beauty of the last judgment. Indeed, I wish to know if there is any house better fitting for sleep and rest than the temples of spirit in my beloved Shiba Park.

The beauty of Death is in its utter rejection of profusion; it is the desire of intensity itself which only belongs to the steadfastness and silence of a star; oh, what a determination it declares! It is perfect; its epical perfection arises from the point that it will never return towards Life; its grandeur is in the pride that it shall never associate itself with life’s clatter. Oh, Death is triumph! It is the great aspect of Japanese romance of the fighting age to make the moment of death as beautiful as possible; I can count a hundred names of heroes and fighters whom we remember only from the account of their beautiful death, not of their beautiful lives, on whom stories and dramas have been gorgeously written. And it was the civilisation of the Tokugawa feudalism, the age of peace, to make us look upon Death with artistic adoration and poetical respect. We read so much in our Japanese history of the powers and works of that Tokugawa family, which lasted with untired energy until only forty years ago; oh, where to-day can the strong proof of its existence be traced? Is it not, I wonder, only a “name written on water”? But the great reverence towards Death that it encouraged will be still observed like the sun or moon in the holy temples at Nikko or Shiba Park, the creations of art it realised during the long three hundred years. True to say, art lives longer than life and the world.

I often think how poor our Japanese life might have been if we had not developed, by accident or wisdom, this great reverence towards Death, without whose auspices many beautiful shapes of art, I am sure, would never have existed; the stone lantern for instance, to mention a thing particularly near my mind when I loiter alone in the sacred ground of the Second Shogun, in the wide open yard perfectly covered by pebbles in the first entrance-gate, where hundreds of large stone lanterns stand most respectfully in rows; quite proper for the feudal age, those lone sentinels. When the toro or stone lantern leaves the holy place of spirit for the garden, matter-of-fact and plebeian, it soon assumes the front of pure art; but how can it forget the place where it was born? We at once read its religious aloofness under the democratic mask. To see it squatting solemn and sad with the pine-trees makes me imagine an ancient monk in meditation, cross-legged, not yet awakened to the holy understanding of truth and light; is there not the attitude of a prophet crying in the wilderness in its straight, tall shape upon the large moss lawn? I myself have never been able to take it merely as a creation of art since my tender age when my boy's imagination took its flicker of light under the depth of darkness to be a guiding lamp for my sister's dead soul hastening towards Hades in her little steps; it was a rainy night when she died in her ninth year. I cannot separate my memory of her from the stone lantern; again, I cannot disassociate the stone lantern with the black night and autumnal rain under whose silence the lantern sadly burned, indeed, like a spirit eternal and divine.

In the first place, whenever I think of the general effect of the reverence of Death upon our national life, I deem the love of cleanliness the greatest of it; when I say that it really grew in the Tokugawa age, I have in my mind the thought that the reverence towards Death reached its full development then. When the custom of keeping the household shrine came strictly to be observed, the love of cleanliness soon promulgated itself as an important duty; and the thought of sharing the same roof with the spirit or ghost makes you, as the next thing, wiser, not to act foolishly or talk scandalously. The appreciation of greyness and silence is born from that reverence of Death; as you live with the dead souls in one house, Death ceases to be fearful and menacing, and becomes beautiful and suggestive like the whisper of a breeze or the stir of incense. Death is then more real than life, like that incense or breeze; again so is silence more real than voice.

Chapter 5

The valley, a snug basin forgotten by consciousness, was filled with the autumnal sunlight of gold, which shone up to the tremendous face of Daibutsu (famous holiness at Kamakura) who, like thought touched by emotion, appeared as if vibrating; Nature there was in the last stage of all evolution, having her energy and strength vaporized into repose. The trees, flowers and grasses in the sacred ground calmed down, to speak somewhat hyperbolically, into the state of Nirvana. The thought that I was a sea-tossed boat even with all oars broken, formed itself then in my mind; it was natural I felt at once that it was the only place, at least in Japan, where my sea-wounded heart would soon be healed by the virtue of my own prayer, and by the air mist-purple, filling the valley most voluptously. I cannot forget my impression when I heard there the evening bell ring out and the voice of sutra-reading from the temple, and how I lost my human heart and pride, becoming a faint soul, a streak of scent or a wisp of sigh; I was a song itself which grew out from my confession, Such was my first impression on finding myself in Daibutsu’s ground, the haven of peace and heavenly love all by itself, soon after I returned home from my long foreign sojourn, that is quite many years ago now; but it seems it was only yesterday that I, like a thousand waves hurrying towards the Yuigahama shore of Kamakura, buried to Daibutsu with my own soul of wave-like song of prayer; can our human souls ever be more than the wave of the sea?