There was usually no delay, but this bridegroom was a bashful youth, only seventeen, and they had to go for him. Sister said that in those few minutes of waiting, she, for the first time, was frightened. Then she heard swift footsteps and the next moment the little reed screen was jerked open. She ought to have sat quietly, with her eyes cast modestly down, but she was startled and gave one quick glance upward. In that instant’s time she saw a pale, pockmarked face with a broad low brow and close-pressed lips.
Down went the screen and, without a second’s pause, “clap! clap!” came a nervous slap of the fan above her head.
The palanquin was lifted and carried to the door. Sister, within, sat strangely calm, for in that instant of lifted screen her fright had slipped away—forever.
The door was reached. The palanquin was lowered to the ground. Sister was helped out, and as she entered her life home, two old voices completed the wedding-song with the words of welcome:
“On the sea
A boat with lifted sail
Rides toward the rising moon.
On the waves of the flowing tide it comes.
The shadow of the past lies far behind,
And the boat sails nearer—nearer
To the shore called Happy Life.”
IX
The Story of a Marionette
On the first day of Ura Bon, when I was twelve years old, Ishi brought a new ornament for my hair and placed it just in front of my big, stand-up bowknot. It was a silver shield set in a mass of small, loose silver flowers, and looked very beautiful against the shiny black background.
“It was sent to you by Honourable Edo Grandmother,” she said. “She had it made from melted ancient coins, and it is very wonderful.”
I turned my face in the direction of Tokyo and bowed a silent “Thank you” to the kind invisible donor. Just who Honourable Edo Grandmother was I did not know. Each year, ever since I could remember, I had received a beautiful gift from her for our midsummer festival of Ura Bon, and, in a vague way, I was conscious that our family had some close connection with her; but I gave it no thought. All little girls had grandmothers. Some had two and some still more. Of course, grandmothers on the mother’s side lived elsewhere, but it was not unusual for a father to have both his mother and grandmother living in his home. Old people were always welcome, their presence giving dignity to the family. The house of a son who had the care of three generations of parents was called “the honoured seat of the aged.”
Ura Bon—(A Welcome to Souls Returned)—was our festival to celebrate the annual visit of O Shorai Sama, a term used to represent the combined spirits of all our ancestors. It was the most dearly loved of our festivals, for we believed that our ancestors never lost their loving interest in us, and this yearly visit kept fresh in all our hearts a cheerful and affectionate nearness to the dear ones gone.
In preparing for the arrival of O Shorai Sama the only standards were cleanliness and simplicity; everything being done in an odd primitive fashion, not elaborated, even in the slightest degree, from Bon festivals of the most ancient time.
For several days everyone had been busy. Jiya and another man had trimmed the trees and hedges, had swept all the ground, even under the house, and had carefully washed off the stepping stones in the garden. The floor mats were taken out and whipped dustless with bamboo switches, Kin and Toshi, in the meantime, making the air resound with the pata-pata-pata of paper dusters against the shoji, and the long-drawn-out see-wee-is-shi of steaming hot padded cloths pushed up and down the polished porch floors. All the woodwork in the house—the broad ceiling boards, the hundreds of tiny white bars crossing the paper doors, the carved ventilators, and the mirror-like post and platform of the tokonomas—was wiped off with hot water; then every little broken place in the rice-paper shoji was mended, and finally the entire house, from thatch to the under-floor icebox, was as fresh and clean as rainwater falling from the sky.
Mother brought from the godown a rare old kakemono, one of Father’s treasures, and after it was hung Kin placed beneath it our handsomest bronze vase holding a big loose bunch of the seven grasses of autumn—althea, pampas, convolvulus, wild pink, and three kinds of asters, purple, yellow, and white. These are mostly flowers, but Japanese designate all plants that grow from the ground in slender, blade-like leaves, as grasses.
The shrine was, of course, the most important of all, as it was there the spirit guest lived during the days of the visit. Jiya had gone to the pond before dawn to get lotus blossoms, for it is only with the first rays of sunrise that the “puff” comes, which opens the pale green buds into snowy beauty. Before he returned, the shrine had been emptied and cleaned, and the bronze Buddha reverentially dusted and returned to his place on the gilded lotus. The tablet holding the ancestors’ names, and Father’s picture, which Mother always kept in the shrine, were wiped off carefully, the brass openwork “everlasting light” lantern filled afresh with rapeseed oil, the incense burner, the candle stands, the sacred books, and our rosaries, all arranged in place, and the ugly fish-mouth wooden drum, which is typical of woman’s submissive position, rubbed until the worn place on the
