Charles H. Sylvester - "Journeys Through Bookland"

Robert Mac Micking - "Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines"

Robert Bloomfield - "The Farmer's Boy"

Raymond King Cummings - "Wandl the Invader"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan

L >> Lafcadio Hearn >> Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan




A window shaped like a heart peeps out upon the garden, a wonderful
little garden with a tiny pond and miniature bridges and dwarf trees,
like the landscape of a tea-cup; also some shapely stones of course, and
some graceful stone-lanterns, or toro, such as are placed in the courts
of temples. And beyond these, through the warm dusk, I see lights,
coloured lights, the lanterns of the Bonku, suspended before each home
to welcome the coming of beloved ghosts; for by the antique calendar,
according to which in this antique place the reckoning of time is still
made, this is the first night of the Festival of the Dead.

As in all the other little country villages where I have been stopping,
I find the people here kind to me with a kindness and a courtesy
unimaginable, indescribable, unknown in any other country, and even in
Japan itself only in the interior. Their simple politeness is not an
art; their goodness is absolutely unconscious goodness; both come
straight from the heart. And before I have been two hours among these
people, their treatment of me, coupled with the sense of my utter
inability to repay such kindness, causes a wicked wish to come into my
mind. I wish these charming folk would do me some unexpected wrong,
something surprisingly evil, something atrociously unkind, so that I
should not be obliged to regret them, which I feel sure I must begin to
do as soon as I go away.

While the aged landlord conducts me to the bath, where he insists upon
washing me himself as if I were a child, the wife prepares for us a
charming little repast of rice, eggs, vegetables, and sweetmeats. She is
painfully in doubt about her ability to please me, even after I have
eaten enough for two men, and apologises too much for not being able to
offer me more.

There is no fish,' she says, 'for to-day is the first day of the Bonku,
the Festival of the Dead; being the thirteenth day of the month. On the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth of the month nobody may eat fish.
But on the morning of the sixteenth day, the fishermen go out to catch
fish; and everybody who has both parents living may eat of it. But if
one has lost one's father or mother then one must not eat fish, even
upon the sixteenth day.'

While the good soul is thus explaining I become aware of a strange
remote sound from without, a sound I recognise through memory of
tropical dances, a measured clapping of hands. But this clapping is very
soft and at long intervals. And at still longer intervals there comes to
us a heavy muffled booming, the tap of a great drum, a temple drum.

'Oh! we must go to see it,' cries Akira; 'it is the Bon-odori, the Dance
of the Festival of the Dead. And you will see the Bon-odori danced here
as it is never danced in cities--the Bon-odori of ancient days. For
customs have not changed here; but in the cities all is changed.'

So I hasten out, wearing only, like the people about me, one of those
light wide-sleeved summer robes--yukata--which are furnished to male
guests at all Japanese hotels; but the air is so warm that even thus
lightly clad, I find myself slightly perspiring. And the night is divine
-still, clear, vaster than nights of Europe, with a big white moon
flinging down queer shadows of tilted eaves and horned gables and
delightful silhouettes of robed Japanese. A little boy, the grandson of
our host, leads the way with a crimson paper lantern; and the sonorous
echoing of geta, the koro-koro of wooden sandals, fills all the street,
for many are going whither we are going, to see the dance.

A little while we proceed along the main street; then, traversing a
narrow passage between two houses, we find ourselves in a great open
space flooded by moonlight. This is the dancing-place; but the dance has
ceased for a time. Looking about me, I perceive that we are in the court
of an ancient Buddhist temple. The temple building itself remains
intact, a low long peaked silhouette against the starlight; but it is
void and dark and unhallowed now; it has been turned, they tell me, into
a schoolhouse. The priests are gone; the great bell is gone; the Buddhas
and the Bodhisattvas have vanished, all save one--a broken-handed Jizo
of stone, smiling with eyelids closed, under the moon.

In the centre of the court is a framework of bamboo supporting a great
drum; and about it benches have been arranged, benches from the
schoolhouse, on which villagers are resting. There is a hum of voices,
voices of people speaking very low, as if expecting something solemn;
and cries of children betimes, and soft laughter of girls. And far
behind the court, beyond a low hedge of sombre evergreen shrubs, I see
soft white lights and a host of tall grey shapes throwing long shadows;
and I know that the lights are the white lanterns of the dead (those
hung in cemeteries only), and that the grey shapes are shapes of tombs.

Suddenly a girl rises from her seat, and taps the huge drum once. It is
the signal for the Dance of Souls.

5

Out of the shadow of the temple a processional line of dancers files
into the moonlight and as suddenly halts--all young women or girls,
clad in their choicest attire; the tallest leads; her comrades follow in
order of stature; little maids of ten or twelve years compose the end of
the procession. Figures lightly poised as birds--figures that somehow
recall the dreams of shapes circling about certain antique vases; those
charming Japanese robes, close-clinging about the knees, might seem, but
for the great fantastic drooping sleeves, and the curious broad girdles
confining them, designed after the drawing of some Greek or Etruscan
artist. And, at another tap of the drum, there begins a performance
impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal--a
dance, an astonishment.

All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the
sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a
strange floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance. Then the
right foot is drawn back, with a repetition of the waving of hands and
the mysterious bow. Then all advance the left foot and repeat the
previous movements, half-turning to the left. Then all take two gliding
paces forward, with a single simultaneous soft clap of the hands, and
the first performance is reiterated, alternately to right and left; all
the sandalled feet gliding together, all the supple hands waving
together, all the pliant bodies bowing and swaying together. And so
slowly, weirdly, the processional movement changes into a great round,
circling about the moonlit court and around the voiceless crowd of
spectators. [5]

And always the white hands sinuously wave together, as if weaving
spells, alternately without and within the round, now with palms upward,
now with palms downward; and all the elfish sleeves hover duskily
together, with a shadowing as of wings; and all the feet poise together
with such a rhythm of complex motion, that, in watching it, one feels a
sensation of hypnotism--as while striving to watch a flowing and
shimmering of water.

And this soporous allurement is intensified by a dead hush. No one
speaks, not even a spectator. And, in the long intervals between the
soft clapping of hands, one hears only the shrilling of the crickets in
the trees, and the shu-shu of sandals, lightly stirring the dust. Unto
what, I ask myself, may this be likened? Unto nothing; yet it suggests
some fancy of somnambulism--dreamers, who dream themselves flying,
dreaming upon their feet.

And there comes to me the thought that I am looking at something
immemorially old, something belonging to the unrecorded beginnings of
this Oriental life, perhaps to the crepuscular Kamiyo itself, to the
magical Age of the Gods; a symbolism of motion whereof the meaning has
been forgotten for innumerable years. Yet more and more unreal the
spectacle appears, with its silent smilings, with its silent bowings, as
if obeisance to watchers invisible; and I find myself wondering whether,
were I to utter but a whisper, all would not vanish for ever save the
grey mouldering court and the desolate temple, and the broken statue of
Jizo, smiling always the same mysterious smile I see upon the faces of
the dancers.

Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within
the circle of a charm. And verily this is enchantment; I am bewitched,
bewitched by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of
feet, above all by the flitting of the marvellous sleeves--
apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats.
No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the
consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitation
of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place there
creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted. But no!
these gracious, silent, waving, weaving shapes are not of the Shadowy
Folk, for whose coming the white fires were kindled: a strain of song,
full of sweet, clear quavering, like the call of a bird, gushes from
some girlish mouth, and fifty soft voices join the chant:

Sorota soroimashita odorikoga sorota, Soroikite, kita hare yukata.

'Uniform to view [as ears of young rice ripening in the field] all clad
alike in summer festal robes, the company of dancers have assembled.'

Again only the shrilling of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the
gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence,
with mesmeric lentor--with a strange grace, which, by its very navetU,
seems old as the encircling hills.

Those who sleep the sleep of centuries out there, under the grey stones
where the white lanterns are, and their fathers, and the fathers of
their fathers' fathers, and the unknown generations behind them, buried
in cemeteries of which the place has been forgotten for a thousand
years, doubtless looked upon a scene like this. Nay! the dust stirred by
those young feet was human life, and so smiled and so sang under this
self-same moon, 'with woven paces, and with waving hands.'

Suddenly a deep male chant breaks the hush. Two giants have joined the
round, and now lead it, two superb young mountain peasants nearly nude,
towering head and shoulders above the whole of the assembly. Their
kimono are rolled about their waistilike girdles, leaving their bronzed
limbs and torsos naked to the warm air; they wear nothing else save
their immense straw hats, and white tabi, donned expressly for the
festival. Never before among these people saw I such men, such thews;
but their smiling beardless faces are comely and kindly as those of
Japanese boys. They seem brothers, so like in frame, in movement, in the
timbre of their voices, as they intone the same song:

No demo yama demo ko wa umiokeyo, Sen ryo kura yori ko ga takara.

'Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters
nothing: more than a treasure of one thousand ryo, a baby precious is.'

And Jizo the lover of children's ghosts, smiles across the silence.

Souls close to nature's Soul are these; artless and touching their
thought, like the worship of that Kishibojin to whom wives pray. And
after the silence, the sweet thin voices of the women answer:

Oomu otoko ni sowa sanu oya Wa, Qyade gozaranu ko no kataki.

The parents who will not allow their girl to be united with her lover;
they are not the parents, but the enemies of their child.'

And song follows song; and the round ever becomes larger; and the hours
pass unfelt, unheard, while the moon wheels slowly down the blue steeps
of the night.

A deep low boom rolls suddenly across the court, the rich tone of some
temple bell telling the twelfth hour. Instantly the witchcraft ends,
like the wonder of some dream broken by a sound; the chanting ceases;
the round dissolves in an outburst of happy laughter, and chatting, and
softly-vowelled callings of flower-names which are names of girls, and
farewell cries of 'Sayonara!' as dancers and spectators alike betake
themselves homeward, with a great koro-koro of getas.

And I, moving with the throng, in the bewildered manner of one suddenly
roused from sleep, know myself ungrateful. These silvery-laughing folk
who now toddle along beside me upon their noisy little clogs, stepping
very fast to get a peep at my foreign face, these but a moment ago were
visions of archaic grace, illusions of necromancy, delightful phantoms;
and I feel a vague resentment against them for thus materialising into
simple country-girls.

6

Lying down to rest, I ask myself the reason of the singular emotion
inspired by that simple peasant-chorus. Utterly impossible to recall the
air, with its fantastic intervals and fractional tones--as well attempt
to fix in memory the purlings of a bird; but the indefinable charm of it
lingers with me still.

Melodies of Europe awaken within us feelings we can utter, sensations
familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations behind us.
But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant totally unlike
anything in Western melody,--impossible even to write in those tones
which are the ideographs of our music-tongue?

And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be
something infinitely more old than I--something not of only one place
or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the
universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught
spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in
some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes--all trillings of
summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land.



Chapter Seven The Chief City of the Province of the Gods

1

THE first of the noises of a Matsue day comes to the sleeper like the
throbbing of a slow, enormous pulse exactly under his ear. It is a
great, soft, dull buffet of sound--like a heartbeat in its regularity,
in its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as
to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous
pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice--a sort of colossal wooden
mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a
pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the
naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back
by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its
fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is
the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land.

Then the boom of the great bell of Tokoji the Zenshu temple, shakes over
the town; then come melancholy echoes of drumming from the tiny little
temple of Jizo in the street Zaimokucho, near my house, signalling the
Buddhist hour of morning prayer. And finally the cries of the earliest
itinerant venders begin--'Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!'--the sellers of
daikon and other strange vegetables. 'Moyaya-moya!'--the plaintive call
of the women who sell little thin slips of kindling-wood for the
lighting of charcoal fires.

2

Roused thus by these earliest sounds of the city's wakening life, I
slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning
over a soft green cloud of spring foliage rising from the river-bounded
garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its
farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ohashigawa, opening
into the grand Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a
dim grey frame of peaks. Just opposite to me, across the stream, the
blue-pointed Japanese dwellings have their to [1] all closed; they are
still shut up like boxes, for it is not yet sunrise, although it is day.

But oh, the charm of the vision--those first ghostly love-colours of a
morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself resolved into a visible
exhalation! Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake
verge--long nebulous bands, such as you may have seen in old Japanese
picture-books, and must have deemed only artistic whimsicalities unless
you had previously looked upon the real phenomena. All the bases of the
mountains are veiled by them, and they stretch athwart the loftier peaks
at different heights like immeasurable lengths of gauze (this singular
appearance the Japanese term 'shelving'), [2] so that the lake appears
incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a
beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with
it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume, and visionary
strips of hill-ranges figure as league-long causeways stretching out of
sight--an exquisite chaos, ever-changing aspect as the delicate fogs
rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun's yellow rim comes into sight,
fine thin lines of warmer tone--spectral violets and opalines-shoot
across the flood, treetops take tender fire, and the unpainted faades
of high edifices across the water change their wood-colour to vapoury
gold through the delicious haze.

Looking sunward, up the long Ohashigawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden
bridge, one high-pooped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most
fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw--a dream of Orient seas, so
idealised by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost that
catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly semi-
diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light.

3

And now from the river-front touching my garden there rises to me a
sound of clapping of hand,--one, two, three, four claps,--but the
owner of the hands is screened from view by the shrubbery. At the same
time, however, I see men and women descending the stone steps of the
wharves on the opposite side of the Ohashigawa, all with little blue
towels tucked into their girdles. They wash their faces and hands and
rinse their mouths--the customary ablution preliminary to Shinto
prayer. Then they turn their faces to the sunrise and clap their hands
four times and pray. From the long high white bridge come other
clappings, like echoes, and others again from far light graceful craft,
curved like new moons--extraordinary boats, in which I see bare-limbed
fishermen standing with foreheads bowed to the golden East. Now the
clappings multiply--multiply at last into an almost continuous
volleying of sharp sounds. For all the population are saluting the
rising sun, O-Hi-San, the Lady of Fire--Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami, the
Lady of the Great Light. [3] 'Konnichi-Sama! Hail this day to thee,
divinest Day-Maker! Thanks unutterable unto thee, for this thy sweet
light, making beautiful the world!' So, doubt-less, the thought, if not
the utterance, of countless hearts. Some turn to the sun only, clapping
their hands; yet many turn also to the West, to holy Kitzuki, the
immemorial shrine and not a few turn their faces successively to all the
points of heaven, murmuring the names of a hundred gods; and others,
again, after having saluted the Lady of Fire, look toward high Ichibata,
toward the place of the great temple of Yakushi Nyorai, who giveth sight
to the blind--not clapping their hands as in Shinto worship, but only
rubbing the palms softly together after the Buddhist manner. But all--
for in this most antique province of Japan all Buddhists are Shintoists
likewise--utter the archaic words of Shinto prayer: 'Harai tamai kiyome
tamai to Kami imi tami.'

Prayer to the most ancient gods who reigned before the coming of the
Buddha, and who still reign here in their own Izumo-land,--in the Land
of Reed Plains, in the Place of the Issuing of Clouds; prayer to the
deities of primal chaos and primeval sea and of the beginnings of the
world--strange gods with long weird names, kindred of U-hiji-ni-no-
Kami, the First Mud-Lord, kindred of Su-hiji-ni-no-Kanii, the First
Sand-Lady; prayer to those who came after them--the gods of strength
and beauty, the world-fashioners, makers of the mountains and the isles,
ancestors of those sovereigns whose lineage still is named 'The Sun's
Succession'; prayer to the Three Thousand Gods 'residing within the
provinces,' and to the Eight Hundred Myriads who dwell in the azure
Takamano-hara--in the blue Plain of High Heaven. 'Nippon-koku-chu-
yaoyorozu-no-Kami-gami-sama!'

4

'Ho--ke-kyo!'

My uguisu is awake at last, and utters his morning prayer. You do not
know what an uguisu is? An uguisu is a holy little bird that professes
Buddhism. All uguisu have professed Buddhism from time immemorial; all
uguisu preach alike to men the excellence of the divine Sutra.

'Ho--ke-kyo!'

In the Japanese tongue, Ho-ke-kyo; in Sanscrit, Saddharma Pundarika: 'The
Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law,' the divine book of the Nichiren
sect. Very brief, indeed, is my little feathered Buddhist's confession
of faith--only the sacred name reiterated over and over again like a
litany, with liquid bursts of twittering between.

'Ho--ke-kyo!'

Only this one phrase, but how deliciously he utters it! With what slow
amorous ecstasy he dwells upon its golden syllables! It hath been
written: 'He who shall keep, read, teach, or write this Sutra shall
obtain eight hundred good qualities of the Eye. He shall see the whole
Triple Universe down to the great hell Aviki, and up to the extremity of
existence. He shall obtain twelve hundred good qualities of the Ear. He
shall hear all sounds in the Triple Universe,--sounds of gods, goblins,
demons, and beings not human.'

'Ho--ke-kyo!'

A single word only. But it is also written: 'He who shall joyfully
accept but a single word from this Sutra, incalculably greater shall be
his merit than the merit of one who should supply all beings in the four
hundred thousand Asankhyeyas of worlds with all the necessaries for
happiness.'

'Ho--ke-kyo!'

Always he makes a reverent little pause after uttering it and before
shrilling out his ecstatic warble--his bird-hymn of praise. First the
warble; then a pause of about five seconds; then a slow, sweet, solemn
utterance of the holy name in a tone as of meditative wonder; then
another pause; then another wild, rich, passionate warble. Could you see
him, you would marvel how so powerful and penetrating a soprano could
ripple from so minute a throat; for he is one of the very tiniest of all
feathered singers, yet his chant can be heard far across the broad
river, and children going to school pause daily on the bridge, a whole
cho away, to listen to his song. And uncomely withal: a neutral-tinted
mite, almost lost in his immense box-cage of hinoki wood, darkened with
paper screens over its little wire-grated windows, for he loves the
gloom.

Delicate he is and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be
laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at
precisely the same hour each day. It demands all possible care and
attention merely to keep him alive. He is precious, nevertheless. 'Far
and from the uttermost coasts is the price of him,' so rare he is.
Indeed, I could not have afforded to buy him. He was sent to me by one
of the sweetest ladies in Japan, daughter of the governor of Izumo,
who, thinking the foreign teacher might feel lonesome during a brief
illness, made him the exquisite gift of this dainty creature.

5

The clapping of hands has ceased; the toil of the day begins;
continually louder and louder the pattering of geta over the bridge. It
is a sound never to be forgotten, this pattering of geta over the Ohashi
-rapid, merry, musical, like the sound of an enormous dance; and a
dance it veritably is. The whole population is moving on tiptoe, and the
multitudinous twinkling of feet over the verge of the sunlit roadway is
an astonishment. All those feet are small, symmetrical--light as the
feet of figures painted on Greek vases--and the step is always taken
toes first; indeed, with geta it could be taken no other way, for the
heel touches neither the geta nor the ground, and the foot is tilted
forward by the wedge-shaped wooden sole. Merely to stand upon a pair of
geta is difficult for one unaccustomed to their use, yet you see
Japanese children running at full speed in geta with soles at least
three inches high, held to the foot only by a forestrap fastened between
the great toe and the other toes, and they never trip and the geta never
falls off. Still more curious is the spectacle of men walking in bokkuri
or takageta, a wooden sole with wooden supports at least five inches
high fitted underneath it so as to make the whole structure seem the
lacquered model of a wooden bench. But the wearers stride as freely as
if they had nothing upon their feet.

Now children begin to appear, hurrying to school. The undulation of the
wide sleeves of their pretty speckled robes, as they run, looks
precisely like a fluttering of extraordinary butterflies. The junks
spread their great white or yellow wings, and the funnels of the little
steamers which have been slumbering all night by the wharves begin to
smoke.

One of the tiny lake steamers lying at the opposite wharf has just
opened its steam-throat to utter the most unimaginable, piercing,
desperate, furious howl. When that cry is heard everybody laughs. The
other little steamboats utter only plaintive mooings, but unto this
particular vessel--newly built and launched by a rival company--there
has been given a voice expressive to the most amazing degree of reckless
hostility and savage defiance. The good people of Matsue, upon hearing
its voice for the first time, gave it forthwith a new and just name--
Okami-Maru. 'Maru' signifies a steamship. 'Okami' signifies a wolf.

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