My Hostess Is A Widow With A Family, A Good-Natured, Bustling
Woman, With A Great Love Of Talk.
All day her house is open all
round, having literally no walls.
The roof and solitary upper room
are supported on posts, and my ladder almost touches the kitchen
fire. During the day-time the large matted area under the roof has
no divisions, and groups of travellers and magos lie about, for
every one who has toiled up either side of Kurumatoge takes a cup
of "tea with eating," and the house-mistress is busy the whole day.
A big well is near the fire. Of course there is no furniture; but
a shelf runs under the roof, on which there is a Buddhist god-
house, with two black idols in it, one of them being that much-
worshipped divinity, Daikoku, the god of wealth. Besides a rack
for kitchen utensils, there is only a stand on which are six large
brown dishes with food for sale - salt shell-fish, in a black
liquid, dried trout impaled on sticks, sea slugs in soy, a paste
made of pounded roots, and green cakes made of the slimy river
confervae, pressed and dried - all ill-favoured and unsavoury
viands. This afternoon a man without clothes was treading flour
paste on a mat, a traveller in a blue silk robe was lying on the
floor smoking, and five women in loose attire, with elaborate
chignons and blackened teeth, were squatting round the fire. At
the house-mistress's request I wrote a eulogistic description of
the view from her house, and read it in English, Ito translating
it, to the very great satisfaction of the assemblage. Then I was
asked to write on four fans. The woman has never heard of England.
It is not "a name to conjure with" in these wilds. Neither has she
heard of America. She knows of Russia as a great power, and, of
course, of China, but there her knowledge ends, though she has been
at Tokiyo and Kiyoto.
July 1. - I was just falling asleep last night, in spite of
mosquitoes and fleas, when I was roused by much talking and loud
outcries of poultry; and Ito, carrying a screaming, refractory hen,
and a man and woman whom he had with difficulty bribed to part with
it, appeared by my bed. I feebly said I would have it boiled for
breakfast, but when Ito called me this morning he told me with a
most rueful face that just as he was going to kill it it had
escaped to the woods! In order to understand my feelings you must
have experienced what it is not to have tasted fish, flesh, or
fowl, for ten days! The alternative was eggs and some of the paste
which the man was treading yesterday on the mat cut into strips and
boiled! It was coarse flour and buckwheat, so, you see, I have
learned not to be particular!
I. L. B.
LETTER XIV
An Infamous Road - Monotonous Greenery - Abysmal Dirt - Low Lives - The
Tsugawa Yadoya - Politeness - A Shipping Port - A Barbarian Devil.
TSUGAWA, July 2.
Yesterday's journey was one of the most severe I have yet had, for
in ten hours of hard travelling I only accomplished fifteen miles.
The road from Kurumatoge westwards is so infamous that the stages
are sometimes little more than a mile. Yet it is by it, so far at
least as the Tsugawa river, that the produce and manufactures of
the rich plain of Aidzu, with its numerous towns, and of a very
large interior district, must find an outlet at Niigata. In
defiance of all modern ideas, it goes straight up and straight down
hill, at a gradient that I should be afraid to hazard a guess at,
and at present it is a perfect quagmire, into which great stones
have been thrown, some of which have subsided edgewise, and others
have disappeared altogether. It is the very worst road I ever rode
over, and that is saying a good deal! Kurumatoge was the last of
seventeen mountain-passes, over 2000 feet high, which I have
crossed since leaving Nikko. Between it and Tsugawa the scenery,
though on a smaller scale, is of much the same character as
hitherto - hills wooded to their tops, cleft by ravines which open
out occasionally to divulge more distant ranges, all smothered in
greenery, which, when I am ill-pleased, I am inclined to call "rank
vegetation." Oh that an abrupt scaur, or a strip of flaming
desert, or something salient and brilliant, would break in, however
discordantly, upon this monotony of green!
The villages of that district must, I think, have reached the
lowest abyss of filthiness in Hozawa and Saikaiyama. Fowls, dogs,
horses, and people herded together in sheds black with wood smoke,
and manure heaps drained into the wells. No young boy wore any
clothing. Few of the men wore anything but the maro, the women
were unclothed to their waists and such clothing as they had was
very dirty, and held together by mere force of habit. The adults
were covered with inflamed bites of insects, and the children with
skin-disease. Their houses were dirty, and, as they squatted on
their heels, or lay face downwards, they looked little better than
savages. Their appearance and the want of delicacy of their habits
are simply abominable, and in the latter respect they contrast to
great disadvantage with several savage peoples that I have been
among. If I had kept to Nikko, Hakone, Miyanoshita, and similar
places visited by foreigners with less time, I should have formed a
very different impression. Is their spiritual condition, I often
wonder, much higher than their physical one? They are courteous,
kindly, industrious, and free from gross crimes; but, from the
conversations that I have had with Japanese, and from much that I
see, I judge that their standard of foundational morality is very
low, and that life is neither truthful nor pure.
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