The chanting sounded first near the verandah; but it gradually grew fainter and farther. What ceases suddenly produces a feeling of suddenness; but it leaves little room for sentiment. A voice that speaks peremptorily resolution rouses also a feeling of peremptoriness and resolution in others. But confronted by a phenomenon that had no definite limit but went on thinning and thinning until it would imperceptibly disappear altogether, you could not help feeling that you must mince up the minute and split the second, your sense of helplessness and hopelessness momentarily deepening. The chant sounded dying like a dying man, becoming more and more feeble like an outgoing light; and in that song that distracted the heart as if with the approaching end, there was a tune that spoke for all the sorrows of the Spring of the whole world.
I listened to the song, holding myself down in the bed; but as it went farther and farther, I felt, I must chase it, despite the consciousness that it was luring me out by the ear. The thinner it grew the more I felt that I should let my ear only fly after it. Just at the moment I thought, however hard I might listen, my ears would hear no more, I could constrain myself no longer and unconsciously I slipped out of my bed. The same moment I opened the shoji,18 and stood out in the verandah, with the lower half of my body bathing in the moonlight and a tree throwing its waving shadow on my night clothes. These details did not occur to me, however, at the instant I opened the shoji.
But that dying sound? I looked in the direction toward which my ear was running. There I espied a shadowy form in the moonlight as it were, with its back to a tree, which, if in bloom, might be an aronia. The misty dark thing flanked right, stepping on the shadow of blossoms on the ground, even before it had left on me a clear impression that “it must be it.” A corner of the roof, thrown on the ground, of a room adjoining mine, seemed to move lithely, and the next moment shut out from view a tall figure of a woman.
I was lost to myself for many moments, as I stood thinly clad in my night gown, with my hand on the screen. The minute I returned to myself, I was made keenly conscious that a night of Spring in the mountain was decidedly chilly. As it was, I did not hesitate to permit myself to creep back into the bed from which I had crept out, and started on another train of thought. I took out my watch from under the pillow and found it pointing at ten past one. I put the watch back under the pillow, and returned to my thoughts. “It cannot be a spook,” I thought. If not an apparition, it must be a human being, and if a human being, it must be a woman. She might have been the O-Jo-san of this house. If so, it seemed rather defying propriety that a young woman, who had taken a divorce of her husband should, at that hour of night, be out in the garden, that ran into the mountain. In any case, sleep had become impossible, that watch of mine under the pillow ticking me to irrepressible wakefulness. The tiny ticking of my watch had never before troubled me; but on this particular night it seemed to say “No sleep for you tonight, but think, think, think.” It was outrageously extraordinary.
A frightful thing will make poetry when you regard it merely as the form itself of frightfulness; just as a weird eerie sight may be worked into a picture, if you treat it as something horrid in itself, independent of you. Likewise a disappointed love makes an excellent theme of art when gentleness, sympathy, worries and, indeed, even the very overflow of pains, it occasions, are turned objectively into visions before you, divorced from the actual torments felt in your heart. Nay, some people imagine that they are disappointed in love in order to enjoy the pleasure of agonising themselves. Ordinary mortals laugh at them as idiotic, as lunatic; but they are no more unbalanced, from the point of view of having their own artistic ground to stand on, than those who go into the ecstacy of living in a world of their own by creating scenery that nowhere exists.
Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common people, idiots, lunatics—whatever be their qualification in their daily life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit subjects for their canvas or for their pen. But they betray not even a shadow of grievance when they tell others of their experiences. They not only narrate gleefully the things they enjoyed and were delighted with, but are enthusiastic over events that once tortured them but now come back as sweet memories. Not that they mean to deceive themselves and others; but the truth is that when out on the road they see and feel as ordinary mortals do, but they become poets when they talk of their past. And this accounts for their inconsistencies. He may be called an artist, then, who lives in a triangle, built by knocking off a corner called common sense of the four-angled world.
Be it in nature or in the world of man, artists thus discover countless gems and stones of inestimable
