Part 22

"I was anxious to see something of a class so singularly situated and specialized; and I had the good fortune to meet a Japanese gentleman who, although belonging to the highest class of Matsue, was kind enough to agree to accompany me to their village, where he had never been himself. On the way thither he told me many curious things about the yama-no-mono. In feudal times these people had been kindly treated by the samurai; and they were often allowed or invited to enter the courts of samurai dwellings to sing and dance, for which performances they were paid. The songs and the dances with which they were able to entertain even those aristocratic families were known to no other people, and were called Daikoku-mai. Singing the Daikoku-mai was, in fact, the special hereditary art of the yama-no-mono, and represented their highest comprehension of aesthetic and emotional matters. In former times they could not obtain admittance to a respectable theatre; and, like the hachiya, had theatres of their own. It would be interesting, my friend added, to learn the origin of their songs and their dances; for their songs are not in their own special dialect, but in pure Japanese. And that they should have been able to preserve this oral literature without deterioration is especially remarkable from the fact that the yama-no-mono were never taught to read or write. They could not even avail themselves of those new educational opportunities which the era of Meiji has given to the masses; prejudice is still far too strong to allow of their children being happy in a public school. A small special school might be possible, though there would perhaps be no small difficulty in obtaining willing teachers(1).

"The hollow in which the village stands is immediately behind the Buddhist cemetery of Tokoji. The settlement has its own Shinto temple. I was extremely surprised at the aspect of the place; for I had expected to see a good deal of ugliness and filth. On the contrary, I saw a multitude of neat dwellings, with pretty gardens about them, and pictures on the walls of the rooms. There were many trees; the village was green with shrubs and plants, and picturesque to an extreme degree; for, owing to the irregularity of the ground, the tiny streets climbed up and down hill at all sorts of angles,--the loftiest street being fifty or sixty feet above the lowermost. A large public bath-house and a public laundry bore evidence that the yama-no-mono liked clean linen as well as their heimin neighbors on the other side of the hill.

"A crowd soon gathered to look at the strangers who had come to their village,--a rare event for them. The faces I saw seemed much like the faces of the heimin, except that I fancied the ugly ones were uglier, making the pretty ones appear more pretty by contrast. There were one or two sinister faces, recalling faces of gypsies that I had seen; while some little girls, on the other hand, had remarkably pleasing features. There were no exchanges of civilities, as upon meeting heimin; a Japanese of the better class would as soon think of taking off his hat to a yama-no-mono as a West-Indian planter would think of bowing to a negro. The yama-no-mono themselves usually show by their attitude that they expect no forms. None of the men saluted us; but some of the women, on being kindly addressed, made obeisance. Other women, weaving coarse straw sandals (an inferior quality of zori), would answer only 'yes' or 'no' to questions, and seemed to be suspicious of us. My friend called my attention to the fact that the women were dressed differently from Japanese women of the ordinary classes. For example, even among the very poorest heimin there are certain accepted laws of costume; there are certain colors which may or may not be worn, according to age. But even elderly women among these people wear obi of bright red or variegated hues, and kimono of a showy tint.

"Those of the women seen in the city street, selling or buying, are the elders only. The younger stay at home. The elderly women always go into town with large baskets of a peculiar shape, by which the fact that they are yama-no-mono is at once known. Numbers of these baskets were visible, principally at the doors of the smaller dwellings. They are carried on the back, and are used to contain all that the yama-no-mono buy,--old paper, old wearing apparel, bottles, broken glass, and scrap-metal.

"A woman at last ventured to invite us to her house, to look at some old colored prints she wished to sell. Thither we went, and were as nicely received as in a heimin residence. The pictures --including a number of drawings by Hiroshige--proved to be worth buying; and my friend then asked if we could have the pleasure of hearing the Daikoku-mai. To my great satisfaction the proposal was well received; and on our agreeing to pay a trifle to each singer, a small band of neat-looking young girls, whom we had not seen before, made their appearance, and prepared to sing, while an old woman made ready to dance. Both the old woman and the girls provided themselves with curious instruments for the performance. Three girls had instruments shaped like mallets, made of paper and bamboo: these were intended to represent the hammer of Dai-koku(2); they were held in the left hand, a fan being waved in the right. Other girls were provided with a kind of castanets,--two flat pieces of hard dark wood, connected by a string. Six girls formed in a line before the house. The old woman took her place facing the girls, holding in her hands two little sticks, one stick being notched along a part of its length. By drawing it across the other stick, a curious rattling noise was made.

"My friend pointed out to me that the singers formed two distinct parties, of three each. Those bearing the hammer and fan were the Daikoku band: they were to sing the ballads. Those with the castanets were the Ebisu party and formed the chorus.

"The old woman rubbed her little sticks together, and from the throats of the Daikoku band there rang out a clear, sweet burst of song, quite different from anything I had heard before in Japan, while the tapping of the castanets kept exact time to the syllabification of the words, which were very rapidly uttered. When the first three girls had sung a certain number of lines, the voices of the other three joined in, producing a very pleasant though untrained harmony; and all sang the burden together. Then the Daikoku party began another verse; and, after a certain interval, the chorus was again sung. In the meanwhile the old woman was dancing a very fantastic dance which provoked laughter from the crowd, occasionally chanting a few comic words.

"The song was not comic, however; it was a very pathetic ballad entitled 'Yaoya O-Shichi.' Yaoya O-Shichi was a beautiful girl, who set fire to her own house in order to obtain another meeting with her lover, an acolyte in a temple where she expected that her family would be obliged to take refuge after the fire. But being detected and convicted of arson, she was condemned by the severe law of that age to be burnt alive. The sentence was carried into effect; but the youth and beauty of the victim, and the motive of her offense, evoked a sympathy in the popular heart which found later expression in song and, drama.

"None of the performers, except the old woman, lifted the feet from the ground while singing--but all swayed their bodies in time to the melody. The singing lasted more than one hour, during which the voices never failed in their quality; and yet, so far from being weary of it, and although I could not understand a word uttered, I felt very sorry when it was all over. And with the pleasure received there came to the foreign listener also a strong sense of sympathy for the young singers, victims of a prejudice so ancient that its origin is no longer known."

(1) Since the time this letter to the Mail was written, a primary school has been established for the yama-no-mono, through the benevolence of Matsue citizens superior to prejudice. The undertaking did not escape severe local criticism, but it seems to have proved successful.

(2) Daikoku is the popular God of Wealth. Ebisu is the patron of labor. See, for the history of these deities, an article (translated) entitled "The Seven Gods of Happiness," by Carlo Puini, vol. iii. Transactions of the Asiatic Society. See, also, for an account of their place in Shinto worship, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. 1.

The foregoing extracts from my letter to the "Mail" tell the history of my interest in the Daikoku-mai. At a later time I was able to procure, through the kindness of my friend Nishida Sentaro, of Matsue, written copies of three of the ballads as sung by the yama-no-mono; and translations of these were afterwards made for me. I now venture to offer my prose renderings of the ballads,--based on the translations referred to,--as examples of folk-song not devoid of interest. An absolutely literal rendering, executed with the utmost care, and amply supplied with explanatory notes, would be, of course, more worthy the attention of a learned society. Such a version would, however, require a knowledge of Japanese which I do not possess, as well as much time and patient labor. Were the texts in themselves of value sufficient to justify a scholarly translation, I should not have attempted any translation at all; but I felt convinced that their interest was of a sort which could not be much diminished by a free and easy treatment. From any purely literary point of view, the texts are disappointing, exhibiting no great power of imagination, and nothing really worthy to be called poetical art. While reading such verses, we find ourselves very far away indeed from the veritable poetry of Japan,--from those compositions which, with a few chosen syllables only, can either create a perfect colored picture in the mind, or bestir the finest sensations of memory with marvelous penetrative delicacy. The Daikoku-mai are extremely crude; and their long popularity has been due, I fancy, rather to the very interesting manner of singing them than to any quality which could permit us to compare them with the old English ballads.

The legends upon which these chants were based still exist in many other forms, including dramatic compositions. I need scarcely refer to the vast number of artistic suggestions which they have given, but I may observe that their influence in this regard has not yet passed away. Only a few months ago, I saw a number of pretty cotton prints, fresh from the mill, picturing Oguri-Hangwan making the horse Onikage stand upon a chessboard. Whether the versions of the ballads I obtained in Izumo were composed there or elsewhere I am quite unable to say; but the stories of Shuntoku-maru, Oguri-Hangwan, and Yaoya O-Shichi are certainly well known in every part of Japan.

Together with these prose translations, I submit to the Society the original texts, to which are appended some notes of interest about the local customs connected with the singing of the Daikoku-mai, about the symbols used by the dancers, and about the comic phrases chanted at intervals during the performances,--phrases of which the coarse humor sometimes forbids any rendering.

All the ballads are written in the same measure, exemplified by the first four lines of "Yaoya O-Shichi."

Koe ni yoru ne no, aki no skika Tsuma yori miwoba kogasu nari Go-nin musume no sanno de Iro mo kawasanu Edo-zakura.

The chorus, or hayashi, does not seem to be sung at the end of a fixed number of lines, but rather at the termination of certain parts of the recitative. There is also no fixed limit to the number of singers in either band: these may be very many or very few. I think that the curious Izumo way of singing the burden--so that the vowel sounds in the word iya uttered by one band, and in the word sorei uttered by the other, are made to blend together --might be worth the attention of some one interested in Japanese folk-music. Indeed, I am convinced that a very delightful and wholly unexplored field of study offers itself in Japan to the student of folk-music and popular chants. The songs of the Honen-odori, or harvest dances, with their curious choruses; the chants of the Bon-odori, which differ in every district; the strange snatches of song, often sweet and weird, that one hears from the rice-fields or the mountain slopes in remote provinces, have qualities totally different from those we are accustomed to associate with the idea of Japanese music,--a charm indisputable even for Western ears, because not less in harmony with the nature inspiring it than the song of a bird or the shrilling of cicadae. To reproduce such melodies, with their extraordinary fractional tones, would be no easy task, but I cannot help believing that the result would fully repay the labor. Not only do they represent a very ancient, perhaps primitive musical sense: they represent also something essentially characteristic of the race; and there is surely much to be learned in regard to race-emotion from the comparative study of folk-music.

The fact, however, that few of those peculiarities which give so strange a charm to the old peasant-chants are noticeable in the Izumo manner of singing the Daikoku-mai would perhaps indicate that the latter are comparatively modern.

THE BALLAD OF SHUNTOKU-MARU

Ara!--Joyfully young Daikoko and Ebisu enter dancing

Shall we tell a tale, or shall we utter felicitations? A tale: then of what is it best that we should tell? Since we are bidden to your august house to relate a story, we shall relate the story of Shuntoku.

Surely there once lived, in the Province of Kawachi, a very rich man called Nobuyoshi. And his eldest son was called Shuntoku-maru.

When Shuntoku-maru, that eldest son, was only three years old, his mother died. And when he was five years old, there was given to him a stepmother.

When he was seven years old, his stepmother gave birth to a son who was called Otowaka-maru. And the two brothers grew up together.

When Shuntoku became sixteen years old, he went to Kyoto, to the temple of Tenjin-Sama, to make offerings to the god.

There he saw a thousand people going to the temple, and a thousand returning, and a thousand remaining: there was a gathering of three thousand persons(1).

Through that multitude the youngest daughter of a rich man called Hagiyama was being carried to the temple in a kago(2). Shuntoku also was traveling in a kago; and the two kago moved side by side along the way.

Gazing on the girl, Shuntoku fell in love with her. And the two exchanged looks and letters of love.