The railway train with its sly befuddling through the luxury of speed has picked the traveller’s wallet. Cooped behind a smudged window, how can he sense the personality of the town he enters? One should stand in isolation on the heights above a city, and then follow down some path until within the streets one is absorbed by the throbbing life. (Hobo Jack,ipse dixit. And is this not true?)
To appreciate Kama-Suwa’s surcharge of culture, prosperity, and importance, the reader should think of a small city in Kansas (one of those temperate, prosperous, ideal cities of which one has a vividly exact idea without the proof or disproof from having visited it). I say this, knowing only the standardized impression of those ideal cities, but often a common, standardized impression may be more expeditious, not to say more valuable, or even more truthful, to communicate a comparison than the truth itself.Thus, by such a comparison let Kama-Suwa be known.
The Kama-Suwa streets are filled with good citizens; the shops are superior, the town has “as fine a school system as you could find anywhere”; the temple is “well supported”; and there are not any very poor people. Also the town has famous hot springs and famous views. In the age when Nature was distributing her gifts she favoured Suwa with excessive partiality, in anticipation, perhaps, of the future births of to-day’s appreciative, virtuous, honest, and industrious Kama-Suwans.
We had had a good report of a certain inn in the town and, after we reached the path around the shore, Hori went ahead on the bicycle to prepare the way. The machine’s parts were working together with remarkable smoothness that day, perhaps because its superfluous temper had been cooled down through its having been left out in a short, hard beating rain while we were taking refuge under a tree. We promised Hori to hurry, but we did not. The mountains overhanging the lake were responsible in the beginning for our forgetting our word, but we augmented that beginning by finding some cause for a violent argument, one of those tempestuousdiscussions which gain their heat from the insidious conceding of small points. An obstinate, unyielding opponent who stays put is a far more satisfactory antagonist. We were well into the town before we discovered that we were hemmed in by houses. The interruption which opened our eyes was a polite pulling at our sleeves. One waylayer, out of the many who had surrounded us, had cast away in despair the usual Japanese respect for not touching the person.
Why our entry had created such excess of excitement we could not imagine. We had grownblaséin our role of being interesting exhibits. One may even grow so accustomed to having an interest taken in every detail that a lack of acknowledgment of curiosity seems the abnormal. This time mere curiosity did not appear to be the factor. Each waylayer was trying to speak. In the confusion I could not catch one familiar word. I knew most of the names that are sometimes cried at foreigners in the port cities, but there was nothing hostile in the present attack. As a sedative I tried to ask the way to the inn but my simple question increased the babel. We had no answer that we could understand. We had been smiling and bearing the mystery, and there was no choice but to continue so doing. Everyshopkeeper in the street was apparently out now, helping to gesticulate if not to add words. We had continued walking and we came to an open space. All the brown hands simultaneously pointed in a dramatic sweep across a swampy field. On the roof of a large, new building stood Kenjiro Hori. He had changed into akimonowhich he was modestly trying to hold around him in the freshening breeze and at the same time to wave a huge white sheet with all the energy of his other wiry arm.
When we reached the door Hori had come down from the roof. He was very expeditious in his instructions to the servants and our shoes were off and we were in our room before we had a chance to ask a question.
“Now that we’resettled——” Hori began with a slight accent on the “settled.” He then hesitated.
“Yes?” we inquired.
“Oh, I was just going to ask whether you wouldn’t rather dry your clothes and take a bath before we go exploring around the town.”
As O-Owre-san had been answering that question by hanging up his wet clothes and getting into a cottonkimono, it did not seem to require argument.
“Is the bath ready?” he asked.
“It’s always ready—natural hot springs,” Hori answered.
I stacked up some cushions and stretched out in comfort along the balcony. I sipped tea and smoked until I was sure O-Owre-san would not be returning for something forgotten. I had been suspecting that Hori’s nonchalance had clay feet.
“O-Hori-san,” I asked, “what did you say was the name of this inn?”
O-Owre-san was always off to the bath as soon as his feet were inside an inn. This time I had marvelled that the habit was so strong that he could put off attempting to solve the mystery of our reception, especially as Hori’s naïve casualness suggested that he knew the kernel of the mystery.
“It’s a new inn. Very good, don’t you think?” Hori answered my question.
“What is the secret?” I demanded. It was evidently very dark and if the facts had to be modified in the telling, I thought that perhaps they might come forth less modified for me than for O-Owre-san. The other inn had been one of our few planned quests. “Why didn’t we go to the other inn?”
It may have been most unfair to use such adirect method of questioning, especially the distressing, bee-line “hurry-up.” I was trading upon my being a foreigner from a land without the tradition of the proper ceremony of questions.
Yes, Hori had visited the inn of which we had had the superior report. It was a most superior place. He paused. Then he vouchsafed the information that it was expensive. That was indeed a serious objection. He thought that the bill there might have come to three, four, or even fiveyena day. That explanation should have been final enough for me. It was, in fact. I would have accepted it. I merely happened to ask whether he had looked at the rooms.
“Yes,” said he, and then he suddenly threw discretion away. “And what do you think?They had rocking-chairs and American bureaus in the rooms.”
Poor Hori! He had been having to listen to us inveigh in American exaggeration against the infamous inroads of modernity. I cannot imagine that he took our chants of hatred against innovations actually at their word value, but he had had much reason to become weary and bored from their repetition. He implied that his reason for leaving the other inn was for our aesthetic protection, but be it said he was wise in his ownprotection. There is not much doubt that if we had reached the presence of those rooms there would have been another merry-to-do of wild epithets against machine-made American export furniture bespoiling native simplicity for him to listen to. The tourist animal is truly a snobbish beast, and natives should occasionally be given dispensations for outright murder.
Once I was chatting over tall iced lemon squashes with a Japanese physician. In a surge of confidence, and also in burning curiosity, he told me about his trip to America. He had learned his English in Japan. While visiting a family whom he had known in his homeland, he met one of America’s daughters who asked him to call. He was somewhat startled by the invitation but he remembered that he was not in the Orient. He described the conversation to me in awed phrases.
“She had a box of chocolates. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I am mad about chocolates, simply crazy.’
“I thought,” he explained, “that she was confessing to a craving appetite and wished my assistance and advice. I imagined, then, that I knew the reason of my invitation. I was a physician from a foreign land and, as I mustsoon return to my own country, her secret with me would be as good as buried. I explained that I could do nothing for her without the full confidence of her father and mother. She took this natural suggestion as if it were meant to be humorous. When she had stopped laughing she told me that the Japanese are perfect dears and horribly cute. Then she asked me if I didn’t love—what was it she asked me that I loved? I forget. You see we Japanese have few words to express the affections and use those sparingly. And now,” he leaned eagerly forward, “I want to ask you whether that young lady was charming?”
I tried to evade by asking him what was his idea of charming.
“That’s just what I don’t know. I was told that she was beautiful and charming. I could see that she was beautiful. Then I asked people what charming meant. They all told me something different.”
“You can’t define charming,” I hazarded. “It’s something different from a mere attribute. Foreigners always say that Japanese women are charming.”
“Then she wasn’t charming,” he decided judicially.
Several times I have been so rash as to try to explain to men of other nations how much an ordinary American conversation should be discounted. I fear that they did not accept my formula but held to the extremes, either continuing to take us literally or not believing us at all.
After Hori had discovered the untoward action of the first inn in adding rocking-chairs and bureaus to its equipment, he hurried down the street and warned the shopkeepers whom he could find to stop any two wanderingseiyo-jinsand direct their attention to the new inn. They must have been impressed that the affair was one of moment.
We heard O-Owre-san, the feared critic of varnished, golden-oak-pine bureaus, coming up the stairs. A striped, bluekimonomade in Japanese standard length somehow does not suggest dignity when worn by a more than six-foot foreigner with a beard, but O-Owre-san came so solemnly across the mats in his bare feet that his ominous repression created its own aura of dignity. Something had happened, but he was not inviting questions.
Hori started in turn for his bath. I remained on my cushions. I sat and sipped my tea.O-Owre-san sat and sipped his tea. Hori with his secret of the rocking-chair inn had not been impregnable to questions. O-Owre-san was too dangerously calm. I waited.
He began by alluding to the excellence of the rooms we had. They were excellent, the best in the inn, being a part of an extra cupola story and giving a splendid view across the lake. Then he restated the known fact that the baths were served by natural hot springs. “The water comes pouring in through bamboo pipes,” he said.
“Well,” I spoke for the first time, “and then what happened?”
The honourableseiyo-jindrank another cup of tea.
“I got into the wrong bath,” he said.
It was news that there could be any such thing as a wrong bath in a Japanese inn.
“You see,” he continued, “the baths for the guests of the inn are just under us, but I didn’t notice them when I walked by. When I got to the other end of the hall I found a large bath room. Those are the public baths, but I didn’t know that then. There were several big tubs with the water tumbling in all the time from the pipes. There was nobody else there nor a sign of anybody. I made myself at home and wasfloating in one of the tubs when suddenly I heard a monstrous chattering out in the hall and then right into the room walked twenty girls. Maybe there were twice that many. I don’t know. Well, I’ve called upon my practical philosophy to recognize the extenuating virtues of—ah—the natural simplicity of the traditional exposure of the Japanese bath—so to speak—its insecurity—as it were—but—but—h’m—yes—but this was too much.”
I shouted.
He glared.
“I was just thinking——” I tried to say.
“I can see you are just thinking,” he interrupted, “and I know what you are thinking. You are thinking what a great story this will be to tell when we get home. Believe me, if you ever do——”
“How could you ever imagine such treachery?” I wedged in.
“Well, and then what was I to do?” he demanded. “I couldn’t jump out and run and I couldn’t stay in that boiling water until I was cooked. I relied upon some instinct of feminine chivalry to give me a chance, but——”
I tried to be sympathetically consoling. “A very, very trying situation.”
“Huh! They were all stepping in and they just naturally crowded me out. Of course they paid absolutely no attention——”
Hori’s step was on the stair. He came in and sat down and poured a cup of tea. Then he stretched out on his back and gazed innocently at the ceiling. “O-Doctor-san,” he said, “you’ve settled a disputed point in Kama-Suwa and everybody’s much obliged.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, there’s been an argument for a long time whetherseiyo-jinsare white all over——”