THE GARDEN OF FULFILLED DESIRE.
It is of no importance where and how I came to know Kumamoto, a young business-clerk of Tokyo. In our becoming acquainted there was nothing that is not the every-day experience of any and every white person living and travelling in Japan. From every outing I would return to my rooms in Yokohama in the dreary certainty that in a few days I would begin to receive touching postal cards, and pathetic epistles from some half-dozen, or perhaps even a full dozen young Japanese who in the praiseworthy effort to practice their English had very adroitly made my acquaintance at different points of my last trip. Because almost always such an enthusiast had proved himself at least for some time a welcome adviser, an interpreter or a moral support in the face of attempts to overcharge in some country inn, politeness required my answering at least the first letter, usually conceived in problematic English as impressively as if a correspondence were being inaugurated which could be cut short only by the death of one of us. If after half a year I had wished to keep in contact with all those who seemed to be passionately desirous of my so doing, it certainly would have been the death of me within a very short time, and my benefactors would have lost their correspondent just the same.
This argument pleased me so much with its adamantine logic that after some time I ceased to answer the letters of my travelling acquaintances altogether. But Kumamoto was a man of enterprise and unusual loyalty. The friedship which he formed for me and the desire to perfect his English led him, after three unanswered letters and postal-cards, to come from Tokyo to Yokohama and hunt me up in my lodgings. He also brought me handsome presents, and offered his services as a guide in Tokyo on days when he could absent himself from his work. They were far apart, and I accepted his friendship the more readily that he wore dark glasses. It is hard to resist eyes which are hidden behind black glasses; for two reasons it is extremely difficult. You do not see the eyes of the other person, and you see your own. So it happened that my friend Kumamoto went away contented, after we had agreed upon our first meeting in Tokyo.
I have to confess I never had reason to regret that Kumamoto wore dark glasses. I learned many interesting things from him, he took me to places where probably I could not have gone otherwise, and because for every meeting he prepared himself diligently and systematically, he always said what he had to say quickly and intelligibly, and the rest of the time I was free to make inquiries about things that had greater significance to me. Of course on the first and second meeting he showed an inclination to repeat all that he had taken the pains to learn by heart just as soon as he had finished the first recitation; but on both occasions I clenched my fists and avoiding the black glasses, thwarted his attempts with much determination till at length he comprehended and reconciled himself to the inevitable.
Then for the first time did I notice his peculiar laugh, with which, it seemed, he was wont to disguise his embarrasement, and of which he surely was not even conscious. As if by sucking in air through his closed teeth he were whistling on one of them which was hollow, . . . thus could I approximatively describe that sound; only it was not whistling at all, but rather a sort of buzzing, very quiet and very intense, gradually rising, then bubblingly dispersing and finally stopping of a sudden. I was never able to work out a permanently acceptable theory of the physical cause of that sound; for that matter, it was enough that I knew its psychical cause, and whenever Kumamoto began to buzz like a singed! moth, I knew that in some way or other I had disconcerted him and strove to avoid a similar blunder in the future.
Once it happened, however, that Kumamoto took to buzzing under circumstances which excluded my having caused him embarrassment, even unconsciously. I had gone with him to a place of his selection, but when we reached it his information proved erroneous and nothing was left to us but to retrace our steps. I was not particularly pleased with our failure, but my disappointment was not tragic. Tokyo is large, and its surprises are many. Merely turning the first corner would have sufficed! to give the foreigner hungry for impressions ample reparation, even though it were in a small, mean street, so deserted that a native would not have hoped to find in it anything of interest to his white companion. I explained my ideas on the matter to Kumamoto, and he stopped buzzing; nevertheless he did not not yet seem to be entirely at his ease, and wishing to banish his fears and to concentrate his attention on something else, I began jestingly to reproach him for never having narrated to me any uncanny stories and mysterious incidents with which every little street we passed through must be enlivened for the inner sight of a native.
»We are now in the district of Shitaya, and that neighbors on Asakusa, where you were born and have lived your life so far« I laughed, »You certainly must know the history of every stone in this part of town. Oh, you could talk if you would.«
He cast a furtive glance at me, which with him meant that he turned his dark glasses in my direction for the fraction of a second with quaint ostrich-like secretiveness, »What folly.« he exclaimed at length. “Old women’s tales. We modern people take no notice of them. It is sad enough that the masses are still submerged in them to such a degree.”
I exerted myself to explain to him why exactly such stories interested me. Nor did I neglect to mention Lafcadio Hearn, whom “such folly” made famous in America and England. I wished to follow many paths in order to penetrate to the soul of the people in the end; and such an intelligent young man as he, Kumamoto, surely would comprehend that some of these paths must lead through the phantom realm of the popular imagery.
He thought for a moment, slackening his pace. Then suddenly he came to a decision. “All right, then, I will take you to my house. I don’t live far. Up till now I didn’t take the liberty of inviting you because my wretched dwelling is not suitable to receive you. But today we have been disappointed and . . . I do not know where else to take you. I shall show you my garden, if you will condescend to pay me a visit.” “Your garden.” I cried in surprise, for I remembered his having complained several times of the inconveniences of his lodging, which was hemmed in on all sides by the small houses of a poor district and by various odours.
He laughed “Yes, I shall show you my Garden of Fulfilled Desire, and relate to you a trifling story which is connected with it. It is trifling, I repeat . . . nevertheless, but for it I would not be here. So much I can acknowledge regardless of my opinion on the whole matter . . .”
“What a charming name your garden has.” I wondered. “Do you know, my dear friend, that already now I am very much contented with what you call our disappointment? I have seen hundreds of temples all over Japan, but nobody ever offered to show me a Garden of Fulfilled Desire. Fulfilled desires usually disappoint; but I feel that neither your garden nor its story will disappoint me.”
We passed a veteran of the China-Japan war limping behind an ambulatory play-kitchen for children and calling the attention of the public to himself by blowing a military bugle. The searching Zaze of the poor and the poorest followed us on all sides, and every little while some one would answer my accidental glance with a bow.
“Mama ni naranu wa ukiyo no narai,” responded Kumamoto with an old Budhist proverb. “To be disappinted is usual in this miserable world.” It seemed that he was not even aware of his words, uttered in Japanese, and then, lifting his head as he came out of his thoughts, he added in English:
“You are right, fulfilled desires usually disappoint. But my father was not disappointed in his garden and therefore gave it that name.”
***
Pushing aside the sliding screen of translucent paper, so as to light up the room, my friend Kumamoto said:
“If you please, sir, this is my garden.”
I half stifled a cry of wonder; for in truth before that time I had never seen a Japanese garden more beautiful than this one, which was the property of a young business-clerk with dark glasses. It was more of a charming laandscape than a garden . . . a landscape from out of a fairy-tole, the like of which some one might be able to create in his imagination, but hardly would hope to find in reality, alive and green, as it now appeared before my eyes.
About in the centre there arose a shapely hillock, and on its slope a path wound its way upward among rocks, the natural shape of which a Japanese could appreciate better than a white person, and the arrangement of which gave the impression that they formed some sort of magical emblem. Upon the summit stood a little temple hoary with age, with a thatched roof so overgrown with moss that it looked as if it were covered with patina. Seldom had I seen pillars and beams more beautifully carved; the gable was a magnificent piece of Japanese art, and its dragons, enlivened by subdued colours, all but twisted and writhed in the sunlight. One could see into the shrine. It was disconcertingly empty, containing only a metal mirror, which was fastened upon two strings, probably streched from the floor clear to the ceiling. What symbol lay in this mirror, now so brilliant? That all our eyes see is but illusion?
My thoughts, however, roved from the temple to the oblong garden which surronded it. The surface of a little lake glistened on the right side the hillock, immediately at its base, and it was plain to me at first glance that its shape conformed to the Chinese character for the word “heart”, just as in the garden of the temple of Kameido, to which the people of Tokyo go to admire the purple splendour of the wistarias towards the end of April. “Shindji no Ike, the Pond of the Word Heart,” I remarked quietly, and it did not escape me that Kumamoto was delighted by my sagacity. In the middle of the pond was a little square island, from whose upper side two little bridges led to the shore in such wise that the extremity of the lake there resembled a shining mark above an angular capital U. Two small basins of water, at either end of the lake, completed the likeness to the Chinese ideograph in question. Well-nigh the whole of the islet was taken up by a grave, by the side of which stood a high stone lantern, chiselled out of a single piece. I had seen similar lanterns, born on the shells of tortoises,—all of one piece; this toro, however, appeared to be born by some strange sort of insect, recalling a cicada or a bee, and so realistically chiselled that, green with moss as it was, it seemed ever ready to fly or to give some kind of sign of life.
Japanese gardens do not resemble ours in any respect; as a rule they contain no flower-beds, which in the majority of cases would disturb, if not destroy altogether, that impression of a landscape seen from afar, which is the fundamental idea of Japanese gardening, whether the garden in question be ever so extensive or ever so tiny. Nor were there flowers in the Garden of Fulfilled Desire; it seemed to have blossomed forth with strangely shaped boulders and carefully formed mounds of yellow sand, among which the path meandered like a brook, strewn with flat stones as if to afford a dry crossing. Only here and there were clumps of bamboo with leaves either pale green or almost blue, but always edged with white or yellow; some clumps were periwinkle-green, others sulphur-yellow and one group was as if bronzed. Moss in places heaped up to form odd imitations of bushes, clusters of bamboo and isolated wisps, of grass were the only living green things in the garden besides a mighty, knotty pine, without doubt a century old, which extended its rugged picturesquely gnarled limbs on the left side of the hillock.
All of this was surrounded by a bamboo fence, which accurately followed the oblong form of the garden but still gave the impression, at first glance, of a zigzag line, because the ground on the border was not level, but here gradually rising and there suddenly dropping: and this bamboo fence was a little over two inches high, a mere toy. There was no need for a higher fence for the Garden of Fulfilled Desire, for its dimensions were no greater than twelve inches by twenty, the hillock towered some eight inches, the temple was something over four inches high, the stone lantern by the grave about two inches, the clumps of bamboo were all sizes between three and five and a half inches, and the centenarian pine barely overtopped the moss-grown roof of the temple. Everything else was in the same elf-like proportions: the lake and the bridges, the path and the boulders and the tiny statues of various deities which were placed here and there . . .
It was a family tokoniwa, a miniature garden placed, according to custom, in the recess called tokonoma, which contains, besides various ornamental objects, the only pictures which hang in room, it was an unbelievably wee garden, in which just as in larger gardens out of doors, the charming impression was given that everything was really large–that hillock, temple, lake, tree–, and only seemed to be small because we were looking at it from afar and from on high, or perchance through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses. Of course, the Japanese art of gardening contributes substantially to the possibility of this enchanting illusion with its dwarfed trees. One often sees maples, pines and other trees even a hundred years old and still only a foot or so high, though with branches perfectly developed and with a gnarled trunk which at first glance betrays its venerable age. The pine in Kumamotó’s tokoniwa was not the first miracle of that art that I had beheld in Japan, but harmonized as it was with its surroundings, with which it had grown up, it seemed to me the most wonderful dwarfed tree of my experience. So majestically did it dominate over the Garden of Fulfilled Desire that it seemed to me as if it had created its space and time and did not belong to this world. In truth I would not have been surprised if suddenly on the path around the lake there had appeared proportionately tiny folk in kimonos, with microscopic smiles on their faces.
“You never showed me anything more exquisite, Mr. Kumamoto”, I cried in sincere enthusiasm. “There is not a single thing in your tokoniwa that is not a treasure of art. If your garden were a thousand times as large, it would be a thousand times less charming” I looked out of the window into the narrow and somewhat dirty little street, resounding with a hundred different sounds. “Who would suspect the existence of such a treasure in your little home, so modestly hidden among the most modest. I have half a mind to be angry at you for not having shown me your Garden of Fulfilled Desire long ago. A beautiful name, but its bearer is far more beautiful. That tree! It is certainly a hundred years old!”
My host nodded. “It is a little older,” he answered.
“But you said that your father named the garden,” I objected “I thought that he made it.”
The folding screens opened quietly and Kumamoto’s aged servant came in with tea. She knelt down and bowed in the oldfashioned way, touching the floor with her forhead. We sat down on cushions on the floor and accepted cups of tea from her.
“Yes, my father was the maker of the garden, but this tokoniwa and tree were in the possession of our family already before”, explained Kumamoto, in the sweat of his brow collecting his English for this conversation on an unexpected subject. “My great-grandfather was a famous cultivator of dwarfed trees; even poems were written in his honour, and on one of Hokusai’s wood-cuts you can see my great-grandfather with a great number of his dwarfed creations. This pine was his favorite piece of work. However, my grandfather neglected the family tokoniva, and it perished; only the tree survived. And because my father suffered the same fate of being overlooked in the family, he took a deep liking to this tree and befriended it. My honourable father, I must explain, was extremely ugly. It is painful to me to speak of this matter. It seems cruel that some one should suffer on account of his looks, but it happens often enough, I think. At any rate it happened to my father. He looked like one of the successful artificially dwarfed creations of his grandfather, my renowned great-grandfather. Between him and the old tree there arose a sort of brotherhood of feeling. When my father grew up and it was brought home to him that he would have to go through life without a companion, because he was so unsightly, he made this garden, which you see here in my room, of the sunbaked, formless earth of the tokoniwa. And he dedicated it to the gods with the humble entreaty that they take pity on his miserable loneliness . . . You see there in the corner Thousand-handed Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and near the lake Benten, the Goddess of Luck, and other deities. Why, however, my father put only the metal mirror into the shrine, I do not know. He probably had his reasons.”
Having filled our cups for the second time, the aged servant hobbled out backwards, bowed profoundly between the sliding doors, muttering apologies, and disappeared. We were alone.
“Superstitious reasons”, added Kumamoto and laughed with a buzzing sound.” You understand that of course I look at it all from a different point of view!”
I could not help getting angry and interrupted him rather unceremoniously:
“My dear friend, what does any point of view matter to me when we are concerned with a thing of beauty and a story attached to it? I shall be very grateful to you if you will relate everything to me regardless of the colour of my skin and of the date of this day.”
And so Kumamoto told the rest of the story without further apologies, but as disjointedly as if he were tearing each word from the bottom of his heart.
***
Although my host did not mention again with a single word the uncomeliness of his father, I could imagine more and more vividly, looking at him and at the tree, the almost grotesque ungliness which seemed to have condemned Kumamoto senior to painful loneliness. Not that Kumamoto junior was ugly; except for the fact that his eyes bulged in a strange way behind his black glasses, he was a rather handsome young man with a clear complexion, lips of almost feminine delicacy, and a forehead, nose, chin, and ears that had all the characterestics of a refined race, as had likewise his sensitive, small, and shapely hands. Nevertheless there was something in his features which one could imagine transposed into the pathetic ugliness that doubtless had been the allotment of his father.
For during twenty years, the tokoniwa remained a garden of unfulfilled desire and Kumamotó’s father went his way in life alone, oppressed by solitude. He made offerings to the gods before the tiny temple he had built and whose thatched roof was already mossgrown with age; he carefully attended to the garden and to his friend the tree; but so far he had received not even the slightest sign which could strengthen his hope for the fulfillment of his desire. He was almost forty years old, and his ugliness must have grown ever more grotesque, but his hope remained steadfast, amounting almost to certainty. “I must confess,” said Kumamoto haltingly, “that his neighbors always looked upon my father as a little . . . queer.”
The recluse yearly set out upon pilgrimages to renowned temples of the deities to whom his little garden was dedicated, and to whom he looked for the final fulfillment of his longing for love, for a gentle companion in life, which hitherto had brought him so little warmth and happiness. And on one of those pilgrimages he found in the midst of a sacred grove on the steps leading to a temple a dying cicada.
It was the summer cicada which the Japanese call minminzemi and whose voice, the humble folk say, sounds like the chanting of a bonze in temple services. In Japan from spring till fall nature is full of the penetrating and often unspeakably sweet sounds of various species of cicadas or semi; this cicada however, which lying on its back and twirling around in a circle, buzzed on the hot temple-steps, filled the heart of the melancholy pilgrom with pity and sorrow. Its high note shook despairingly, like the weeping of someone who is dying painfully and unwillingly; and the recluse, touched to the bottom of his heart, picked up the cicada, trying to ascertain its injury and wondering whether he could not save it merely by placing it somewhere in the shade on the bark of a tree. But every time the cicada fell back on the ground, turned over on its back and renewed its lamentations.
And the man of the lonely heart took pity on the tortured insect, brought it home and made for it a soft nest in his garden of desire so far unfulfilled. It was already clear to him that, whether by a bird’s beak or through some other unfortunate accident, the poor cicada had been blinded; its big bulging eyes were covered by a sort of milky film; but it seemed to be its ingwa, that is the consequence of its acts in some previous incarnation, that it should not die as yet, and therefore the injured cicada had been dropped by the bird or in some other manner placed in the way of the man who befriended it. Day by day its moaning decreased and finally it regained the use of its legs, though it still occasionally fell over as if from weakness. It began to move about the garden, and the little temple on the hillock and the trunk of the dwarfed pine were its favorite haunts.
After a few days the lone man remembered that his ward was also alone, and that perhaps its song would be less mournful if it had near it another being which could understand it better than a person, and could bring it more comfort. His conscience smote him and he hurried to buy a tiny bamboo cage with another captive cicada. He had never kept captive cicadas and locusts in cages, as many people do, so as selfishly to enjoy their song of longing for freedom, for the perfume of nature; and upon his return home he set free the captive cicada in his tiny garden.
And a miracle happened: finding herself at liberty, the cicada did not forsake the garden and her crippled companion. Her body rustled quietly, almost inaudibly, when she came near the blind semi, and he answered her gently; it seemed as if those two had much to say to one another. And then when on a branch of the old pine the newly arrived cicada lifted her rejoicing, charming voice in song, a still more wonderful thing happened. As if in answer to this voice, the two strings in the shrine, upon which the metal mirror was fastened, reverberated like from out of a dream, delicately and dreamily, but unmistakably. It was as if the gods had spoken; and the solitary man for the first time in his life almost understood how one feels when one is happy.
For several weeks both semi were his companions and the friends of the old pine; and during that time he did not feel lonely or sad, listening for long hours to the song of both cicadas, who always kept together so devotedly that when looking at them he could not help giving way to his old longing, which now asserted itself with redoubled force. And it seemed to him that the strings in the little temple had responded not only to the song of the newly acquired semi, but also to the secret voice of his heart . . . to that voice of whose existence only the gods knew. But when one morning the song of the cicadas did not greet the rising sun, the solitary man felt how gradually his body was growing cold till he thought that his martyred heart would stop its beating. He was in mortal terror of the unchangeable reality and hoped against hope that perhaps after all he was mistaken, and that presently there would resound from the garden those charming tones which had brightened so many an hour for him; not until midday, brought to the verge of despair by the dead silence of the garden and not even conscious of the sounds from the street, did he take courage to go to the tokonoma, the recess, and look at his tokoniwa, deserted by the cicadas.
But though his horror of the deathly stillness proved to be well-founded, he discovered that after all he was mistaken. The cicadas had not forsaken him. Upon the unruffled surface of the little lake there floated fragments of the wings and one leg of one of his semi, which had fallen victim to some sort of murderous attack, and inside the little temple behind the metal mirror he perceived the other minminzemi lying on its back, stiff and motionless. Carefully he took out the dead cicada, and at once recognized it as the blind one that he had saved and taken home on his pilgrimage to Kwannon the Merciful. His soul was filled with sorrow, and when he had buried the bodily remains of both his friends on the islet in the lake, he chiselled out of stone a beautiful lantern for the grave, putting into it all his art, which was not inconsiderable. For just as his grandfather had been famous for his garden masterpieces, he also was held in great respect among the artisans of Tokyo for his miniature carvings in ivory, wood and stone.
During the night after the day when he placed the lantern on the grave of the two semi, the solitary man had a strange dream. He dreamt about the garden which he had fostered for twenty years, not, however as a tiny toy but as a landscape through which he himself walked. The pine raised by his grandfather towered to a formidable height the various statues which in the course of the twenty years he had placed here and there overtopped his own stature, and even the bamboo fence surrounding the garden seemed to him extraordinarily massive and high. His creations, before so tiny, now revealed his art to him in a new light, and he began to feel equal to a work of fullgrown art of which he before had thought himself incapable. The temple on the mountain beckoned to him from the distance majestically; not even the magnificent buildings of sacred Nikko had made such an impression on him as now his own work. All at once it seemed to him that the tokoniwa had been a dream and that this was reality; but in that case he would be a great artist, and great artists are always beautiful because from out of their eyes there shines the creative power of gods. His chest broadened, his stature grew in height. He went up the path to the temple that was his work, feeling sure something had come into his life that would change it completely. But upon reaching the shrine, he stopped in wonder. From out of its twilight, in which the metal mirror glittered like a precious stone, there emerged a blind old man of a noble and venerable appearance. His looks seemed familiar to him, and his voice still more so. “This temple is your heart and my heart”, said the aged man, smiling kindly. “Listen to your heart, that it may not speak in vain.” At that moment the lone man awoke; but it was still long before morning, and he fell asleep before he could fix his dream in his memory.
The days dragged by slowly. He had become used to working near his garden, and the song of the semi had put him into the mood for work, had made his fingers more joyful, his imagination more supple; even now he would sit for hours by the tokoniwa, but his fingers were heavy and his brain heavier still. He often caught himself gazing fixedly into empty space, and vaguely it seemed to him that he was trying hard to remember something, something beautiful, which would change his life from its very foundations. He believed that his desire would be fulfilled in the end; perhaps it was to be regretted that he gave himself up to vain illusions, but it was his fate, and could not be change future incarnations perhaps his desire would be directed wae; higher and more perfect planes, but now he longed for love, for a wife.
He would be so absorbed in these thoughts that he did not hear the hum of life in the little street beneath his windows; but one day something happened that at once brought him back to this world. Suddenly the strings resounded in the shrine of the temple which he had carved for his garden; they sighed a response just as they had done when the newly-arrived cicada had lifted its song in the Garden of Desire . . . For a moment the lone man was struck motionless with wonder, and he felt as if his heart must burst with a great gladness, with unendurable happiness. Of a sudden the dream of not long ago returned to his memory and he comprehended who the old man had been and what his mysterious words had meant. He realized that from this very moment his was the Garden of Fulfilled Desire, and that down there under his window in the little street she was passing whose voice had called forth the response from the strings of the little temple, strings which day and night remained dumb to thousands of voices and sounds continually penetrating from the outside into the quiet room. He knew that he had only to arise to see her whom ingwa had predestined for him, for nothing happens in this world that has not its cause in the acts, thoughts and longings of past incarnations, long since fallen to dust and ashes. This voice reverberating in this common street found a sweet echo in his heart. Perhaps they had been promised to each other at some long, long past time, and through no fault of their own did not attain the happiness for which they longed; and through long suffering having bought the right to meet again in some future incarnation, now at last they were to find the fulfillment of their desire.
“Amma kamishimo go hyaku mon,” sounded for the third time in the little street, the melodic and melancholy signal of the masseuse, the signal by which thousands of masseurs and masseuses all over Japan offer their services for the inconsiderable sum of five hundred mon or five sen. But all those thousands–tens of thousands–are stone-blind. Every one of those who sing or whistle the signal makes his way carefully through the middle of the street, feeling his way with a cane so as not to come upon an unexpected obstacle. Young and old, men and women, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, all of them are plunged in darkness from which there is no return.
He understood that she who was predestined to be his wife would never see his ugliness, that for her his voice would be his face; and getting up he called the young masseuse who was passing by his house, called her with a trembling, joyful voice. And she stopped, pressing her hand to her heart, and slowly turned to him her pale, sadly beautiful face.
My friend Kumamotto was silent for a while, and I was not sure whether he were gazing at the Garden of Fulfilled Desire or into space.
“They say my mother was extraordinarily beautiful,” he added hurriedly, somewhat shamefacedly but still proudly. “She came from a noble family which was reduced to poverty by the abolishment of the feudal system. Her father, a samurai through and through, went into business, but fared badly; and his youngest child, who became blind at a tender age for lack of medical care, was trained to be a masseuse and helped support her helpless parents.”
His words were interrupted by the signal of a passing masseuse. It looked as if without being conscious of it he were listening whether also this voice would not force a sigh from the strings in the little temple of the tokoniwa. The next moment he shuddered and continued with a tired voice:
“For ten years my honorable parents lived together in great happiness and perfect contentment. Then I was born their first and last child. For my mother did not survive my birth” . . .
He took off his glasses and began to clean them vigorously, breathing on them again and again. I saw him without them for the first time and could not help noticing his bulging, filmy, bloodshot eyes, reminding me of the eyes of some sort of large insect. It was to be seen that he had inherited from his mother his weak, abnormal sight.
“My father died only last year,” added Kumamoto, putting on his glasses again, but not yet turning towards me.” Throughout his whole life eccentric, towards the last he became childish. It was his mania to buy semi and set them free. And daily he spent long and happy hours here, by his Garden of Fulfilled Desire. He died sitting, with a smile on his face.”
The clattering of countless pairs of wooden sandals, the occasional cries of children, voices of adults, the tinkling of the bells of newspaper deliverers running by, the signal of the blind masseuse waning around the corner, and a hundred other sounds confusedly echoed into the quiet room.
“That is all, sir,” my host whispered with a sigh.
“I thank you with all my heart, Mr. Kumamoto,” I said, and then, noticing his gloomy expression, I added playfully: “But is that really all? Own up to it, my dear friend, that even you sometimes wait for the string to resound once more.”
But my host answered only with his embarrassed; buzzing laugh; and then at last I became aware of the familiarity of the sound, which up to that time I could not succeed in describing to myself:
Thus and not otherwise it was that in the Japanese landscape sounded the song of the cicadas.
