Japan

It was bound to come, and we knew it; it was only a question of time. But then we had braved the law so far so well, we had almost come to believe that we should escape altogether. I mean the fatal detection by the police that we were violating my passport. That document had already outrun the statute of limitations, and left me no better than an outlaw. For practical purposes my character was gone, and being thus self-convicted I might be arrested at any moment!

We were now come more than half-way from sea to sea, and we were still in the thick of Europeanization. So far we had traveled in the track of the comic. For if Japan seems odd for what it is, it seems odder for what it is no longer.

We had made arrangements overnight for a boat, not without difficulty, and in the morning we started in kuruma for the point of embarkation. We were eager to be off upon our voyage, else we should have strolled afoot down the long meadow slope, such invitation lay in it, the dew sparkling on the grass blades, the freshly tilled earth scenting the air, and the larks rising like rockets up into the sky and bursting into song as they went. It seemed the essence of spring, and we had a mile or more of it all before we reached the brink of the canon.

My quest still carrying me westward along the line of the new railway, I took the train again, and in the compartment of the carriage I found two other travelers. They were a typical Japanese couple in middle life, and in something above middle circumstances. He affected European clothes in part, while she still clung to the costume of her ancestors. Both were smoking, - she her little pipe, and he the fashionable cigarette. Their mutual relations were those of substance to shadow. She followed him inevitably, and he trod on her feelings regardless of them.

It was a ten minutes' walk, the next morning, from the inn down to the boat: an everwinding path along a succession of terraces studded with trees just breaking into leaf, and dotted with cottages, whose folk gave us good-day as we passed. The site of the village sloped to the south, its cheek full turned to the sunshine that stole down and kissed it as it lay. On this lovely May morning, amid the slumbering air, it made as amorous a bit of springtide as the heart could wish. In front of us, in vignette, stretched the stream, half a mile of it to where it turned the corner.

The sunshine quickened us all, and our kuruma took the road like a flock of birds; for jinrikisha men in company run as wild geese fly, crisscross. It is an artistic habit, inculcated to court ladies in books on etiquette. To make the men travel either abreast or in Indian file, is simply impossible. After a moment's conformity, they invariably relapse into their own orderly disorder.

The Plain of Wakamatsu - Light Costume - The Takata Crowd - A Congress of Schoolmasters - Timidity of a Crowd - Bad Roads - Vicious Horses - Mountain Scenery - A Picturesque Inn - Swallowing a Fish-bone - Poverty and Suicide - An Inn-kitchen - England Unknown! - My Breakfast Disappears.

KURUMATOGE, June 30.

Good-tempered Intoxication - The Effect of Sunshine - A tedious Altercation - Evening Occupations - Noisy Talk - Social Gathering - Unfair Comparisons.

SHIRASAWA, July 29.

A Parting Gift - A Delicacy - Generosity - A Seaside Village - Pipichari's Advice - A Drunken Revel - Ito's Prophecies - The Kocho's Illness - Patent Medicines.

SARUFUTO, YEZO, August 27.

First View of Japan - A Vision of Fujisan - Japanese Sampans - "Pullman Cars" - Undignified Locomotion - Paper Money - The Drawbacks of Japanese Travelling.

ORIENTAL HOTEL, YOKOHAMA, May 21.