Japanese Literature Part 50

HUSBAND.--Well, then! why should I conceal it from you? I have been to pray both for your welfare and for my own at the Temple of the Five Hundred Disciples[178] in Tsukus.h.i.+.

WIFE.--Oh! how furious I am! Oh! how furious I am! as if you could have got as far as the Five Hundred Disciples!

HUSBAND.--Do, do forgive me! Do forgive me!

WIFE.--Oh! how furious I am! Oh! how furious I am!

[_The husband runs away._

Where's the unprincipled wretch off to? Is there n.o.body there? Please catch him! I won't let him escape! I won't let him escape!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 162: The reader will call to mind the extreme simplicity which distinguishes the method of representing the j.a.panese lyric dramas. In accordance with this simplicity, all the changes of place mentioned in the text are indicated merely by a slight movement to and fro of the actors upon the stage.]

[Footnote 163: It is said that in antiquity an ode commencing with the name of Mount Asaka was the first copybook put into the hands of children. The term is therefore now used as the "Pillow-word" for learning to write.]

[Footnote 164: The doctrine of retribution set forth in the above lines is a cardinal point of the Buddhist teaching; and, as the afflicted Christian seeks support in the expectation of future rewards for goodness, so will the pious Buddhist find motives for resignation in the consideration of his present sufferings as the consequence of sins committed in past stages of existence.]

[Footnote 165: A little further on, Kauzhiyu says it is a "rule" that a retainer must lay down his life for his lord. Though it would be difficult to find either in the Buddhist or in the Confucian teaching any explicit statement of such a duty, it is nevertheless true that the almost frantic loyalty of the mediaeval and modern j.a.panese was but the natural result of such teaching domiciled amid a feudal society.

We may see in this drama the whole distance that had been traversed by the j.a.panese mind since the time of the "Manyefus.h.i.+fu" poets, whose means of life and duty were so much nearer to those of the simply joyous and unmoral, though not immoral, children of nature.]

[Footnote 166: Literally, "turns his child into a dream."]

[Footnote 167: During the Middle Ages it was very usual for afflicted persons to renounce secular life, the Buddhist tonsure being the outward sign of the step thus taken.]

[Footnote 168: The Past World, the Present World, and the World to Come. According to the Buddhist teaching, the relations subsisting between parents and children are for one life only; those between husband and wife are for two lives; while those uniting a servant to his lord or a disciple to his master endure for the s.p.a.ce of three consecutive lives.]

[Footnote 169: This sentence, which so strangely reminds us of John iii., 16, is, like all the prose pa.s.sages of these dramas, a literal rendering of the j.a.panese original.]

[Footnote 170: In j.a.pan, as in England, it is usual to talk of going "up" to the capital and "down" to the country.]

[Footnote 171: A form of mortification current in the s.h.i.+ngon sect of Buddhists.]

[Footnote 172: Bodhidharma, the first Buddhist Patriarch of China, whither he came from India in A.D. 520. He is said to have remained seated in abstraction gazing at a wall for nine years, till his legs rotted off. His name is, in j.a.pan, generally a.s.sociated with the ludicrous. Thus certain legless and shapeless dolls are called after him, and snow-figures are denominated Yuki-daruma (Snow Daruma).]

[Footnote 173: Needless to say that no such text exists.]

[Footnote 174: Used for carrying parcels, and for presenting anything to, and receiving anything from, a superior. The touch of the inferior's hand would be considered rude.]

[Footnote 175: The meaning is that, as one of the two must be under the blanket in readiness for a possible visit from the wife, the servant would doubtless feel it to be contrary to their respective positions for him to take his ease outside while his master is sitting cramped up inside--a peculiarly uncomfortable position, moreover, for the teller of a long story.]

[Footnote 176: The lines are in reality a bad j.a.panese imitation of some in a poem by Li Shang-Yin.]

[Footnote 177: Proverbial expressions.]

[Footnote 178: Properly, the Five Hundred "Arhan," or personal disciples of Sakya. The island of Tsukus.h.i.+ forms the southwestern extremity of j.a.pan.]