Lafcadio Hearn's Japan Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself resolved into a visible exhalation. Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapor 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 façades of high edifices across the water change their wood-color to vapory gold through the delicious haze.
    Looking sunward, up the long Ō hashigawa, 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 idealized by the vapor 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.
    III
    And now from the river-front touching my garden there rises to me a sound of clapping of hands,—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 Ō hashigawa, all with little blue towels tucked into their girdles. They wash their faces and hands and rinse their mouths,—the customary ablution preliminary to Shint ō 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, Amaterasu-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, doubtless, 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 Shint ō 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 Shint ō ists likewise—utter the archaic words of Shint ō 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