Writers In Kyoto

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Local Prize – Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition

May 29, 2021

This year’s Local Prize was awarded to Lisa Twaronite Sone for her piece “Just the Wind”. The people of Kyoto have always been contemplative of the spirit world. This piece also gives pause and makes us think of our mortality. The judges were intrigued by the “ghost story ending”. The concept of benign, yet mischievous spirits being carried on a ghostly gust or being carried by a prevailing wind, looking down at the goings on of the city is atmospheric, spiritual, and mysterious – and very appropriate for Kyoto.

＊　＊　＊

Just the Wind

No one can see the wind, but it goes everywhere.

A boy laughs as the wind snatches his father’s hat and tosses it among the mossy gravestones, and together they chase it. Further up the hillside, the trees framing Kiyomizdera’s pillars dance and swirl.

The wind rustles the wrapper of a manju that a woman is about to bite, and she gets a mouthful of paper instead. She tries to spit it into her handkerchief but the wind plucks everything out of her hands, so she has to collect her belongings from the cobblestone street. She should know better than to eat in public like that!

A chubby baby in a stroller wails, until the wind ruffles his hair and puffs up his sleeves like billowing sails. It jangles his rattle until a smile appears between his apple cheeks.

Young tourist girls snap their parasols shut and giggle as they clutch each other for support, swaying as the wind strokes their hair and tweaks their braids. It tugs at the folds of their obi, and lifts the hems of their kimono to tickle them underneath. It whispers in their ears, and caresses the soft curves of their bare necks.

Like the wind, no one can see us, either — and we go everywhere, too. Our bodies are dust under the gravestones, so now we float above the earth we once walked. On glorious gusty days like these, we can touch the living people to our hearts’ content, and they all think it’s just the wind.

We tease them and play with them, we kiss them and embrace their warmth, for they bring back so many precious memories of our own lives long ago.

What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.


Lisa Twaronite Sone grew up in the United States and first came to Kyoto as a student in 1985. She has lived most of her adult life in Tokyo, where she worked as a journalist for several decades. She now divides her time between Tokyo and Kyoto. 

Writers in focus

Critic and professor, Tatsuo Kuriyagawa

May 25, 2021

by Yuki Yamauchi

Critic and Professor Tatsuo Kuriyagawa around 1920 (pen name Hakuson Kuriyagawa) Photo public domain

A native of Kyoto city, Tatsuo Kuriyagawa (1880-1923) honed his knowledge on Western literature, studying under Lafcadio Hearn and then Soseki Natsume at Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo). In 1904, when he graduated as the top student, Kuriyagawa began his writing career by contributing an article on W. B. Yeats, which is deemed Japan’s earliest formal theory on the poet and his works.

While he introduced Western literature systematically to readers in Japan, Kuriyagawa kept focused on what was going on in the world of Irish letters. For example, the themes of his writings in the 1910s ranged from the Irish Literary Revival to authors including G. B. Shaw. In fact, he was so conscious of the literary trend that he wrote in 1917 about Lord Dunsany, whose dramas had started to gain popularity in the U.S. in parallel with the Little Theatre Movement.

In addition, Kuriyagawa was also intrigued by love marriage – his curiosity was piqued by Soseki Natsume – though the practice of miai-kekkon (arranged marriage) was prevalent throughout Japan in his days. Kuriyagawa contributed his views on romance to the Asahi Shimbun, and the serial was turned in 1922 into a best-selling book Kindai no Ren’ai-kan (Modern Views on Love).

The Kyoto native wasn’t just a critic, however. He started to teach at the Fifth High Middle School (now Kumamoto Prefecture) in 1904 and then in the Third High Middle School (predecessor of Okayama and Kyoto universities) in 1907. His teachership culminated with the English literature department of Kyoto Imperial University in 1917, when he was appointed as an assistant professor  –  he was promoted to professor two years later. He delivered lectures to many students, among whom was drama director and filmmaker Akira Nobuchi. According to another of his students, Kuriyagawa often said in a persuasive manner, “The young are just eager to read new books, but they must pore over old ones, too.”

The well-read educator put out more than five books, and would have certainly released more publications and shared a portion of his vast expertise with a larger number of students at Kyoto Imperial University or somewhere else had it not been for the Great Kanto Earthquake, which struck Tokyo and its surrounding areas hard on Sept. 1 in 1923. The 43-year-old professor was staying with his wife Choko at his vacation home in Kamakura, but his physical disability – he had had his left leg amputated in 1915 – made it so hard to avoid the tsunami that he was washed away despite her help and breathed his last the following day.

His unexpected passing was mourned by many, including his academic colleagues and former students. Several books were posthumously published, not to mention his complete works. In 1929, when the six-volume collection was issued, there took place a ceremony of nanakaiki (a traditional Buddhist ritual to celebrate the sixth anniversary of someone’s death) at the Rakuyu Kaikan hall of Kyoto Imperial University. The deceased was commemorated by his wife (she miraculously survived the violent sea wave) as well as several Kyoto Imperial University scholars including Izuru Shinmura, author and editor of Japanese dictionary Kojien.

Kuriyagawa’s fame and achievements have slipped out of the public memory, particularly as his former students pass away, some of whom had written about him after the end of World War II. That said, Kyoto remembers Tatsuo Kuriyagawa in the form of one of his former residences which remains near Okazaki Park – the building is now used as the main store for traditional Japanese novelty retailer, Ayanokoji. Moreover, he rests in peace together with his wife in one of the graveyards of Kurodani Temple.

First page of Tatsuo Kuriyagawa’s handwritten manuscript Saikin Eishi Gairon (Introduction to Recent English Poetry). Here he referred to poets such as Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron and John Keats. [This is one of the cards that was probably passed to attendees at his nanakaiki in 1929. Set bought privately via an auction website.]

USA Prize – Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition

May 22, 2021

The USA Prize for this year’s Writing Competition was awarded to Tina deBellegarde for her poem “Sound Travels”. The judges appreciated the timely quality of this piece. For many, the telephone is now the only way to visit with friends and family members. There is a genuinely heartfelt, wistful longing to this writing. Kyoto’s sounds are portrayed in a refreshing and lively way, and the reader can imagine that they are also on the telephone, accompanying their loved one on a walk around the city.

Sound Travels

7,000 miles.
Unbridgeable this year.
I content myself with his phone calls.

His morning. My evening.
We share a yawn
as my ears follow him out his front door.

Ohayou gozaimasu.
I overhear my son say through the line.
His landlady swooshes her broom in response.

He stops at his favorite café.
Jazz competes with muffled chatter
and the squeal of steamed milk.

The wind rustles the trees.
It’s snowing sakura petals, he says.
I close my eyes to see.

A bicycle bell trills at the intersection.
Now empty of tourists.
The chirp accompanies his crossing.

Through the temple grounds.
A clang. Then two claps.
I imagine a bowed head.

He coos to a cat in a narrow alley.
It turns, then scoots ahead.
Paws on pavement silent to us both.

The kamo rushes past him.
An egret lands. It waits, watching for its dinner.
My son narrates in the silence.

Two girls walk by,
Chatting.
The high note of a giggle.

Are they flirting with him?
They press together in a whisper,
Their voices lost to the current.

My morning. His evening.
It begins to rain. He opens his umbrella.
The patter louder now as it hits the dome above his head.

I wish you could see this, he whispers.
A Maiko slips out of a building,
a package cupped in her hands.

Doors swoosh. He enters the combini.
The sing song Irasshaimase.
He pays with the drop of coins.

Konbanwa.
to his landlady once again.
I envision his silent bow.

The elevator door slides shut.
Halfway across the planet
I briefly lose the connection. Silence.

His keys jangle, his front door squeaks.
With the clang of the closing door,
We leave behind the sounds of Kyoto.

Slip, slip.
His shoes are off.
Tadaima.

Tina deBellegarde’s debut novel, Winter Witness, is nominated for the 2020 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her story “Tokyo Stranger” appears alongside stories by celebrated authors in the Mystery Writers of America anthology When a Stranger Comes to Town. Tina lives in New York and travels to Kyoto regularly to visit her son Alessandro. Please visit www.tinadebellegarde.com

Authors who belong to Writers in Kyoto

Shadow and Light

May 20, 2021

by Stephen Mansfield

(Photos by Stephen Mansfield)

In striking contrast to their ancestors, contemporary Japanese adore an excess of light, their great cities electromagnetic centers of brilliance, their nighttime living rooms flood-lit like sports stadiums.

    The rallying call of those who survived the “dark valley,” as the thirties and war years were dubbed, was akarui seikatsu, a “bright life.” Shadows, side lighting, and intermediate tones were banished, memories of the war subjected to collective amnesia and the eviscerating rays from new forms of illumination. The appreciation of muted light, as the writer Tanizaki Junichiro infers in his long 1933 essay on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, had already begun to lapse into a cult of quaintness.

    The compass of Tanizaki’s interests included interior design, and the treasures that are concealed or obscured in the shadows and dim recesses of temples. The author celebrates the merits of meager light and perishable, organic materials, noting in the case of the zashiki, the Japanese tatami mat room, that walls are made from soil and sand, in order to, “let the frail, melancholic, ephemeral light saturate the solemn composure of their earthy tones.” The writer holds that, for a true appreciation of the beauty of lacquerware, it must be observed in the dimness of half-light. Tanizaki pays keen attention to the shadows that lurk in lintels, beneath temple eaves and in alcoves, and is sensitive to minute details like the solemn, trance-like beauty of gold leaf covered doors and screens, caught in morsels of light entering a room.

    There are a number of instances in Japan, where the use and perception of light starkly differs from the West. We recall that, where Western paper reflects light, traditional Japanese paper absorbs it. This older sensibility places the brittle and functional against the soft and pliant. Author Donald Richie, posited that the study of aesthetics in the West was, “mainly concerned with theories of art, that of Japan has always been concerned with theories of taste.”

    One would have to go to considerable lengths today to experience the aesthetic sensations advocated by Tanizaki. Such exquisite moments, far removed from everyday life, might include viewing lacquerware in the glow from a votive candle, listening to the scratching of small metal particles placed at the bottom of an iron tea pot, an effect said to evoke the souring of wind in pine trees, or contemplating a Japanese garden, where the darker, more subdued spaces decelerate time, the absence of light heightening our appreciation of what little exists. One recalls that in the ghostlier scenes of Edo era Kabuki, young children were employed to follow actors on stage, illuminating their faces from below with candles, an effect that must have magnified the eerie intensity of the performance.

    The Japanese have always revered the qualities of the moon, the ability of its sylvan light to transform landscape. A millennium ago, Heian era courtiers enjoyed boating trips, drifting across garden ponds on clear, lunar nights when the constellations were crisp and visible. Floating on a sheet of reflective water would have created the pleasantly liminal illusion of existing between two dark, subtly illuminated zones. In the manner of Chinese gardens, Katsura Rikyu, a prototypical Kyoto design, has a Moon-Viewing Platform, from which the silvered planet can be seen on the surface of its pond. Clusters of rock islands and the sound of rustling trees and shrubbery would, under the effect of natural, theatrical forms of lighting devised within the boundary of the garden, have created the sensation of being out at sea on a mild, breezy night. If large enough, the surface of a pond will reflect overhead clouds and surrounding scenery, serving as a horizontal screen for a series of perpetually changing borrowed views. Water lavers and basins, placed in the darker recesses of a garden, introduce light and, in connecting the garden with the sky, provide micro glimpses of expanded space and distance.

    In Europe, one comes across indoor gardens engorged with tropical plants and trees within conservatoires and orangeries, but a defining requirement of landscape design is that it is open to sky and air. Available sunlight is skillfully manipulated by Japanese gardeners so that, even on an overcast day, its greenery is presented to best advantage. Traditionally graduated greenery, with countless, intermittent tones and hues, was preferred to brilliant flowerbeds and over-assertive blooms. The raked lines inscribed in the sand or gravel of stone gardens, patterns known as samon, create interplay between light and shadow. Purportedly representing waves and currents, shadows form in the furrows between the raised lines, adding depth and emphasizing the organic unevenness of the surface. Gravel provides a non-distractive surface for meditation, but also acts as a light reflector.

    If there is a contemporary tendency to try and improve on nature, to tinkle and tweak, this also applies to the appropriation of shadow and light. Is it really necessary, we wonder, to illuminate cherry blossoms and bracts of wisteria with cumbersome, intrusive lamps? Where stars and moonlight once sufficed, we now have batteries of light, supposedly intensifying the experience. In the past, the moon, oil lamps and candles placed in the chambers of stone lanterns, were enough. For largely commercial reasons rather than aesthetic ones, many gardens today are equipped with artificial lights, including clusters of LED lamps and bulbs, which replicate day light rather than the natural, infinitely more nuanced illumination of nocturnal gardens lit by a shifting interplay of moon and cloud. The misconception here is that brilliant lighting reveals gardens in their entirety, when in fact, its effect is to eviscerate their essence. Although some gardens use portable luminaires in the manner of old roji andon, the washi paper lamps once used to subtlely illuminate the stepping stones of tea gardens, artificial lighting all too often results in the unsightly daytime presence of lamp fixtures and electric cords proximate with gravel borders and rocks. When the opaque fills with light, the exquisite inscrutability of shadows becoming transparent, mystery and depth vaporize. Conversely, too much natural sunlight can harden and burn the features of a garden, exposing unsightly aspects, such as scorched moss, weeds, and poorly maintained groundcover. Across this over-exposed planar grid, inky blocks of shadow are banished to the rear or edges of gardens. In such instances, only intermediary, dappled light will moderate the polarization of darkness and light.

    Whether as supplicants at sacred sites, modern pilgrims on spiritual quests, or in the simple role of nature lovers, we instinctively return to shadows, to graduated light. Stress and anxiety levels are known to drop, our spirits soothed and calmed by the sight of striated light passing through foliage, or filtering through shrubbery and greenery just after rainfall, an effect known as komorebi in Japanese.

    Another word, komyo, refers to light emerging from the Buddha, which in turn symbolizes wisdom and compassion. In Shigemori Mirei’s design for his Kyoto landscape, Hashin-tei (Garden of the Moonlight on Waves), three rock compositions, known as a sanzon-seki, represent Gautama Buddha, Amida Buddha, and Yakushi-nyorai, the Buddha of Healing. These are geometrically yoked with stones placed throughout the garden, each representing rays of light emanating from the three deities.

    Like the Buddha stones, light and shadow in the unmediated Japanese garden, settle into their allotted spaces. It’s almost as if the garden is designed in equal measure to trap and liberate light, to bring us into emotional and spiritual alignment with their diurnal gyrations.     

    Shadows and light, like us, are sentient.

Zoom with Tuttle

May 16, 2021

Insights into Tuttle Publishing with Eric Oey
by Felicity Tillack

A convivial Zoom session with the head of Tuttle, following on from a previous session earlier in the year with the head of Stone Bridge Press

On Saturday, the 8th of May, WiK presented a special Zoom event with Eric Oey, head of the publishing company Tuttle. 

Eric Oey in pre-Covid times

Oey gave WiK members an insight into the history of this company, and his family’s long-time connection to the book and antiquarian world. Tuttle, from its origins in post war Japan, buying books for Western university libraries, is now a well-established company with a back catalogue of books chosen for the long-term. Their English translation of This is a Cat by Natsumi Soseki was first published in 1972, and is still one of their best sellers.

Tuttle is very open to proposals for new work and translation, and Oey went through the categories of popular genres so that WiK members could better understand which book pitches would have a higher chance of success. Language texts, origami, gardens, self-help (ikigai), illustrated folk tales and ‘cool Japan’ were among current best sellers.

Along the way Oey gave some fascinating statistics. During the pandemic printed books have seen a 30% increase, while ebooks have peaked and are now in decline in terms of their market share. Roughly 50% of book sales are through amazon, making it a necessary evil. Altogether there are 5000 books published each week, and Tuttle itself is producing 150-200 books a year.

At the end of the session, members were left with a much clearer idea of the publishing world, particularly in their niche of Japanese based writing and translations.

Thank you Eric Oey for an informative and hopefully fruitful session with Writers in Kyoto.

Presenter Eric Oey second row, second from the left

Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition Results

May 15, 2021

Warm greetings to all from Writers in Kyoto. The middle of May has finally arrived! It gives me great pleasure, as WiK Competition Organiser, to announce the Winners of the Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition.

This year we received submissions from writers of various nationalities, based in twenty-one countries throughout the world. We would like to offer our heartfelt appreciation to all participants, and we are honored to be one thread connecting the globe to Japan’s ancient capital. It is touching to see that so many keep the spirit of Kyoto in their hearts and minds, despite the current circumstances which make travel difficult. Many submissions did touch on this point.

While it was very difficult for the judges to settle on their final decision, the winners of the Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition are as follows (with judges’ comments):

FIRST PRIZE:
“Kyoto Time” by Stephen Benfey
This piece is full of rich, dramatic imagery which depicts an older, quieter, slower Kyoto. The main character, Shizuka, embodies this aspect of the city herself: multilayered, silent yet containing music and laughter, and also untouchable by the time that speeds by. The author builds tension and pulls us into the scene with these visual details and subject matter that is both unusual and fresh, also containing an air of uncertainty about Shizuka’s true intentions on her daily walk to the nearby shrine.

SECOND PRIZE:
“Love on a Low Flame” by Amanda Huggins
The longing for a lover is expressed in this seasonal cycle, depicting the passage of time and days growing colder until their return. These thoughts might also occupy one during the Obon season, regarding the metaphysical presence of a cherished one visiting for a short time every year. The final phrase “tadaima” reverberates winningly in the poem, as if someone truly has come home. The poem has immediacy and apt phrase after apt phrase were noted.

THIRD PRIZE:
“Restaurant Boer” by Hans Brinckmann
This was a lovely and generous narrative, full of interesting details about the first Dutch restaurant in Kyoto, and told with humor and warmth. The judges felt that the author was right there, telling us his personal story. While there were cultural factors in the enterprise which caused confusion, it was a delight to see that there was a happy ending after all. It is the imagery of the bridge at the end that makes this brief tale so engaging. A restaurant may have gone by the wayside only to make way for a lifelong partnership.

LOCAL PRIZE:
“Just the Wind” by Lisa Twaronite Sone
The people of Kyoto have always been contemplative of the spirit world. This piece gives pause and makes us think of our mortality in general. The judges liked how this piece suddenly becomes a ghost story at the end. The concept of benign, yet mischievous spirits being carried on a ghostly gust or being carried by a prevailing wind, looking down at the goings on of the city is atmospheric, spiritual, and mysterious – very appropriate for Kyoto.

USA PRIZE:
“Sound Travels” by Tina deBellegarde
The judges appreciated the timely quality of this piece, as it is now difficult to enter the country due to the pandemic. For many, the telephone is now the only way to visit with friends and family members. There is a genuinely heartfelt, wistful longing to this writing. Kyoto’s sounds are very refreshing and lively, and the reader can imagine that they are also on the telephone, accompanying their loved one on a walk to the convenience store and other places around the city.


HONORABLE MENTIONS:
“Soul” by Nader Sammouri
“A Drop and a Temple Inside” by Tiziano Fratus
“A Pig Walks the Philosophers’ Road” by Edward Barnfield

Congratulations to all! I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to this year’s judges for their seamless cooperation and hard work.

For the official announcement and submission details of our next WiK Competition (#7), please be sure to check our website in the middle of November. Top prizes include a cash prize of 30,000JPY, local crafts, eligibility for inclusion in an upcoming WiK Anthology, and more! If you have not yet participated in our annual competition, we welcome you to do so in the future.

Warmly,
Karen Lee Tawarayama
WiK Competition Organiser



Authors who belong to Writers in Kyoto

Calligraphing The Heart Sutra

May 10, 2021

by Rona Conti

Beginning to learn calligraphy

Tiny characters float within my vision as my fellow students are dedicatedly focused on writing the familiar to them but foreign to me. It is my first year of studying calligraphy. I love to watch Shimizu-san writing the most exquisite kana or onna-de (literally, woman’s hand), but know that I’ll never be able to emulate her elegant delicate work of haiku and poems.  Nor will I write tiny characters on sheets of handmade paper like the focused Japanese students. I ask Kobayashi Sensei what they are writing. “Hannya Shingyo, she says. Complicated.” I look it up and find the Heart Sutra.

Sensei tells me that if I wish to learn to write the Heart Sutra, I must begin with large Kanji so that I can learn the characters, then gradually write smaller and smaller characters, like a pebble in a pond, but in reverse. There are 260 of them. I begin with her o-tehon (study sample) and find the work beyond challenging. There is tension in my hand. The characters are complex. If I make one mistake, I must begin again from the very first character. I will not know whether or not I have made a mistake until she corrects it.  

Quite surprisingly, over time I am able to approach smaller and smaller versions. I realize that the smaller characters require the same amount of push and pull as the larger ones. One has to push down very gently, then harder to achieve a character of some distinction. The flow leads to characters not mechanical looking but with different thicknesses and tiny lines of connection. It is this push and pull with intricacy which must be present in order to have feeling and not tension show in the work. As it is said, “The Brush does not lie”.

The first time I write the entire Heart Sutra in its proper small size it takes me six hours. And all of this time I do not understand what I am writing. My legs fall asleep, no break until a full line is complete, I continue. I read in English what I am able to find about the meaning of what I am writing. Please know that this is in 2001. Alex Kerr has yet to write and publish The Heart Sutra.

Beginning to copy the full Heart Sutra from a sample by Kobayashi Sensei

A dear Japanese friend tells me that there is a temple where once a month devout Buddhists write the Heart Sutra, hear a lecture and finish with tea and sweets (my favorite). We go with my Sensei. Mihoko-san takes us early and introduces us to the Head Monk. I am embarrassed by my poor Japanese, but he is welcoming and smiling and says that he is very pleased to have a foreigner in his temple.

In the ornate room where the service takes place, we are given printed examples of three different sutras and paper upon which to write them. We bring our papers to our seats, and I am surprised that there are light boxes at each desk. Sensei is also surprised. She tells me that she has never gone to a temple to write the Heart Sutra. We both begin without tracing over the o-tehon as the other participants are doing. Far too soon a bell rings. Time is up. Everyone else has finished. Sensei is, of course, far ahead of me, but neither of us has come close to finishing.

Incense continues to fill the room as I listen to the prayers and see the son of the priest lead them. He is barefoot and moves with ease and precision. His body movements show the epitome of someone on the path to awakening. Then we all tuck our Heart Sutras beside the statue of Buddha with a donation. Afterwards we have tea and sweets.

The Head Priest disappears and returns with a book in English. It is about Soto Zen, the sect of Buddhism which the temple follows. It has a list of places in the United States where one can be a practitioner of Soto Zen. I keep the book as instructed. Two years later I return it with gratitude to the priest’s astonishment.

I continue to attend the once a month gathering at the temple. I am also invited by Sensei to join the monthly writing of the Heart Sutra in her studio. This is a surprise to me, both the invitation and the fact that the students do this once a month. The quiet, the incense, the concentration is all consuming, intense, and rewarding, except when Sensei checks our work. Each student worries about mistakes. Usually, I am the only person to have made one, yet I am enraptured with my studies and wish I had more time on my cultural visa. At the close of my studies I know that I must return at some point to Japan.

My friend, Mihoko-san, gives me a book with instructions for writing the Heart Sutra. At the back there is a list of temples where one can write it. They are in many places in Japan, some very distant. I am living in Gunma-machi, a very small town near Maebashi and Takasaki. Of the temples listed, some have regular monthly gatherings, others have made by appointment opportunities, and others require an introduction and recommendation by a Japanese in order to be permitted to write the sutra in the temple.

I plan my trip according to the temple calendars, ending with a visit to Koya-san, a place about which I have read with great anticipation. I bring my brush, sumi ink, paper for the Heart Sutra and a small suzuri inkstone, and, of course, a dictionary just in case it is needed. Though I have never studied the language formally, my Japanese has improved.

My first stop is easy, a large gathering of attendees who simultaneously work on the Heart Sutra. We pass our efforts together with a donation to the monk. I slip quietly out of the room so that I can explore the temple grounds.

Two more temple visits follow in much the same manner. Then, my next stop is one which requires an introduction and reservation. I arrive promptly and am ushered into a beautiful calming room with a Buddha altar and shoji (movable screens) which are open and give a view of an equally calming and exquisite garden. I am given not the Heart Sutra but rather a sutra written in that particular temple. I do my best but am unnerved when the Priest comes into the room to watch me, not once but repeatedly. When I have finished, he again comes into the room to tell me how pleased he is to see a foreigner making a special trip to write a sutra. I thank him and bow and know that it is my time to leave.

My next stop, the planned culmination, is Koya-san. I make a reservation to stay for three days at one of the subtemples. I am enthralled and surrounded by spirituality. Founded by Kukai in 816AD as the headquarters of the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism, it is the last stop or the very first on the 88 Temple Tour of Shikoku. It will be the first and last stop for me. (Years later I will walk a small portion of the 88 Temple Tour where often pilgrims are chanting The Heart Sutra.)

I have made arrangements to stay in a temple. The monks could not be more gracious, telling me that I am welcome to join the morning Fire Ceremony at 6 am. Surrounded by calm and meditation, warmth and the company of just a few participants, I feel honored to be allowed to observe and participate.

Feeling relaxed, I am ready to begin my mission. There is a university at Koya-san, where I expect to find the place for writing the Heart Sutra. I am guided to the room and rather shocked to see that it is a classroom. On some tables there are copies of the Heart Sutra which one can trace with a brush pen. There is no Buddha present, and the atmosphere reminds me of grade school with desks to match. I am incredibly disappointed. The room is deserted. No room to write with ink, I trace as homage and feel adrift. I find the bookstore where I buy a CD, ‘Chants of Koya-san’, with, of course, the Heart Sutra.

Upon returning to my lodgings, I am asked about my experience. I want to say, very politely and humbly, that there was no altar and no place to offer one’s effort to Buddha, nor enough space to set out my suzuri and other materials. I show the monk my ‘Four Treasures’; paper, brush, inkstick and ink stone. The paper is specially made to write out The Heart Sutra. I show the CD I bought. The monk is very gracious and surprised. Once again, I am ruing my poor Japanese. There is so much I wish to say. He intuits my disappointment. He says that I can write the Heart Sutra in a room reserved for large gatherings but with space to write in front of an altar. It is the perfect setting. I am alone in a huge room with the altar at one end and a ping-pong table at the other, perhaps alluding to my see-sawing emotions.

Each day I attend the Fire Ceremony in the morning, explore Koya-san, and write the Heart Sutra. Not knowing that there is a limit of three days for staying, I ask if I may stay for four more days. I am granted permission. I am enthralled with Koya-san, and there is so much to see

On the fifth day I am suddenly thunderstruck and self-critical. I realize that I have been given such a special opportunity, and I am egotistical and full of myself.  Just because I write the Heart Sutra with brush and sumi ink instead of tracing with a brush pen gives me no more stature than others. If anything, I am lacking in spirituality. I am a foreigner and copying my Sensei’s guide. This realization does not take anything away from my sojourn, but it is a reminder that I am a student trying to learn and superiority is an incorrect path.

I have to return to Gunma-machi and, regrettably, end my year of calligraphy study.  I am filled with emotion at the conclusion of my time in Japan. I am already thinking about how I will be able to return. My fellow students, at my Sayonara Party, present a fan with their farewell words. I have written a poem to Sensei, and my dearest friend Mihoko-san translates it. I read it at the farewell party. Sensei and I are both teary eyed.

Sayonara fan given to Rona with each student’s thoughts

My time to say goodbye has come. In the future I will live in Japan for extended periods of time to continue my studies. The Heart Sutra is more than calligraphy. It is a spiritual practice.

Inaka reflections

May 5, 2021

Reading Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan
by Chad Kohalyk

In a small city in western Canada — which one might call inaka by dint of the high ratio of giant pickup trucks and the 95% white demographics — a group of immigrant moms from Japan, most married to Canadians, decided to band together. Their goal: expose their children to their heritage Japanese culture and language. My spouse is active in this group and I attended often with our children. Each month the group gathers to sing songs, practice writing hiragana, and celebrate the Japanese holiday of the season. At these gatherings one can appreciate the diversity of Japan.

Celebrating tradition is rooted in the local. Yet in faraway Canada, the Japanese community is made up of people from Hokkaido to Okinawa. What at first the moms thought would be simply showing their kids the culture of “Japan”, soon became a discussion of how to accommodate all the local variations in tradition.

Witnessing this diversity is one of the reasons we moved our family to the remote island of Ikijima for a year. We wanted our kids to experience a different Japan than Kyoto — which my family calls “home.” Living a rural island life has certainly been a learning experience for each of us. I never knew the crucial relationship between wind speed and the amount of bread on the shelves at the shop. Weather is a constant concern on a remote island. While Iki is a self-sufficient place, growing its own rice (as well as tobacco and barley for shōchū) it depends on the mainland for packaged foods, like the pastries on display in one of our two convenience stores. When the weather acts up, as it often does, ships and planes are cancelled and mainland sundries like the national daily newspapers are delayed. There is a sort of “bank run” on the shops as everyone rushes out to get the last bread products for the next couple of days.

Another surprise was how people in the countryside are trying to reverse the nation’s population decline. The elementary school my children attend has just 48 students (who share only about four surnames!). Most come from families of three to five children, and there is a remarkable number of twins on Ikijima. Considering there is no movie theatre here, and most shops are closed by six, I suppose it makes sense. The root of the depopulation problem is that once kids finish high school they must go to the mainland to continue their education. Over there they find work opportunities and they almost never come back.

Thus, I was curious to pick up the new anthology Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan to see what other foreigners have learned living in “the sticks.” The book is a collection of eighteen essays from provincial areas of Japan. In the introduction editor John Grant Ross points out that 91% of the population of Japan live in urban areas. Thus, the stories are from a disappearing Japan. This makes them all the more valuable as records of the diversity of experience in Japan. Contributors vary from visitors, to JETs, to “lifers” in the countryside. Many of the essays are about discoveries made in the less-travelled areas of Japan, rather than the day-to-day experience of making a life there. However, some writers have married into local families and are raising kids in the inaka, which makes the book more than a travelogue.

Declining and aging populations, closing businesses and the loss of local traditions and knowledge are common themes across many of the essays. These are the realities of the inaka in Japan, a forewarning for other countries undergoing massive urbanization, centralization, and standardization as prescribed by influential cities.

Living on Ikijima I gravitated towards the chapters in Inaka featuring islands, especially those of Kyushu. Considering Japan is made up of 6,852 islands (though only 421 are inhabited), one could likely dedicate a whole series of books to island experiences. Remote island inaka is different from the countryside on mainland Japan — a simple fact of geography. In her chapter on Tanegashima, Silvia Lawrence writes about her experience of a tsunami warning:

No one seemed to be organizing an evacuation, which suggested we weren’t in any danger, but then again on a flat island reaching just ten kilometres across at its very widest point, where would we even go?

The remote islands closest to the Asian mainland have played an important role as ancient bridges to the archipelago, predating the cultural splendour of the “old capital” of Kyoto. Austin Gilkeson hikes through the wild nature of Tsushima, near Korea, that is also a hike through Japanese history, from the birth of the mythical first emperor to the country’s first defeat of a western power. Gilkeson describes Tsushima’s annual Arirang Festival, a testament to Kyushu’s long standing relationship with the Korean Peninsula, not all of which is antagonistic. 

Loneliness is a common theme. The two Kyushu chapters were written by ALTs, who by the nature of their jobs often struggle with integrating into local communities. Despite feelings of isolation both authors extended their stay, their essays expressing how much they value their time in the inaka.

Feelings of loneliness are not just the domain of isolated foreigners. Amy Chavez’s chapter features interviews from longtime residents of Shiraishi, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea with a population of 450. The island was home to 2300 at one time. Her essay is part of a larger project documenting the island’s oral history through interviews with elders. We learn about some innovative fishing methods, but also the painful feelings of being left behind, surrounded by empty houses. Chavez reflects:

I consider for a moment what it must be like to live alone in a house of memories but no one else to share them with.

These island chapters, as well as others in the book, show both the delights and difficulties of the Japanese countryside. It is an additional window into the “real” Japan beyond the oversaturated filters of Instagram, another modern weapon of uniformity.

Near the end of the book Mei Ling Chiam visits a tea plantation in Shizuoka where farmers are trying to build an appreciation for single-origin tea, a retaliation against the overwhelming modern corporate strategy of “blended teas” which standardizes flavours for “brand identity” and mitigates financial risks in production.

The cup of tea I was drinking now would not be the same as the next. Even with the same production method, the taste of a tea varies… To me, this variety makes every tea worth tasting, because you never know what you’ll discover about it. The distinctiveness is something to be cherished.

Similarly, each chapter of Inaka highlights the variety of experience in Japan. Even while addressing some common challenges of rural life, the essays are easy reading. Inaka is not a dour tome of political and economic analysis (although such a book would be very valuable at this juncture). Rather, you can feel free to skip around here and there, and enjoy each chapter’s unique flavour.

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For the amazon page of Inaka, click here.

Writers in focus

Kaguya Himeko (Kimura)

May 2, 2021

An original story by Marianne Kimura

Mr. Nomura had a habit of taking his bicycle and visiting Buddhist temples around Kyoto on fine Sunday afternoons.

He had been to Shodenji before, a perfect little jewel of a Buddhist temple, famous for its simple charcoal brush painting of ten monks walking up and down an invisible crescent-shaped hill. Their black robes are ragged and wind-blown, their legs and feet bare and large straw hats covered their heads.

Shodenji was traditionally a monks’ training ground and it follows the Buddhist school of Rinzai Zen, with its emphasis on kensho, which is defined as “seeing one’s true nature”. Wisdom is to be gained within the activities of daily life.

So the walks and training grounds, up and down the hills around Shodenji, had been places for monks to spend their daily lives attaining wisdom as they went about their tasks.

But on that fateful day in the middle of September, he had decided to take a stroll around the temple’s bamboo forest, set slightly to the east of the main hall.

But when Mr. Nomura got to the top of the hill where the bamboo forest spread out unevenly off a dirt path, he froze in his tracks.

A tiny barefoot girl dressed in a red kimono as if for her 7-5-3 ceremony, was dancing in graceful, wheeling circles around the bamboo trees.

She was not nearly tall enough to be a three-year old.

She was the height, Mr. Nomura thought, of a one-year old, if that, and slender and graceful as a sasa leaf.

Mr. Nomura wondered if she was a robot being filmed for an ad. Her red kimono and the green trees in the dappled September sunshine made a stunning contrast, and Mr. Nomura looked around for a movie crew, but he saw only a few finches and sparrows fluttering about.

Suddenly, the girl spotted him. She stopped dancing and stared directly and gravely at him. Life flickered in the dark pupils of her eyes, not machinery at all.

She walked shyly up to him and stretched her tiny arms up.

“Watashi no otousan ni natte kudasai!” Please be my daddy!

She spoke perfect, elegant Japanese.

Mr. Nomura’s heart warmed to the idea. He and Mrs. Nomura had no children though they had wanted them long ago.

Now, although he and Junko were both nearing their sixties came the fleeting thought:

Finally, a baby! How pleased Junko will be!

Dutifully, he hushed his mind.

This is not your child.

He picked her up and carried her up the wide stone path that led to the main hall. She was as light as a young cat and nestled with perfect poise in the crook of his elbow.

At the entrance to the main hall, Mr. Nomura peered into the dark tatami-mat ante-room on the right.

An aged, bald monk in a dark brown robe slid open the glass window.

“Excuse me”, said Mr. Nomura, feeling odd as he held up the girl, “but is this your child?”

“No”, said the monk. Then after a short, uncomfortable pause he asked “Isn’t she yours?”

“Well, actually, no,” said Mr. Nomura, “I found her in your bamboo forest just now.”

“Well, in that case……”, the monk started to advise.

“I’m hungry, daddy! Let’s go home!” interrupted the little girl, tightly hugging Mr. Nomura around his neck and wailing, “Kukki tabetai!” I wanna eat some cookies.

“…maybe call the Child Welfare Department”, finished the monk looking confused, his voice trailing off as he slid the glass window shut.

Mr. Nomura carefully carried the child down the hill. When they reached his bicycle, he set her down, and took off his blue cotton twill jacket to make a cushion in the front bicycle basket. Then he lifted her in. It was a perfect fit. She sat with her legs slightly bent at the knees and smiled, looking happy and comfortable.

He reasoned that he ought to at least take her home and feed her before calling the Child Welfare Department.

Mr. Nomura rode slowly and carefully so as not to jolt his tiny and adorable passenger. When they got home, dusk had fallen and a large full moon was rising over Mt. Hiei to the east.

He opened the front door.

With Himeko still wrapped in his arms, he called out, “Tadaima”.

Junko Nomura, sitting at the kitchen table and working a kanji crossword puzzle, looked up in surprise. The girl stretched out her hands to the woman.

“Okaasan!” Mama. She spoke contentedly, as if recognizing Mrs. Nomura from somewhere else long ago and far away.

Mr. Nomura explained how he’d found her in the bamboo forest of Shodenji.

“We’ll have to call the Child Welfare Department tomorrow”, he said, “but it must be closed now on Sunday evening. Besides, she’s hungry.”

“Yes”, said Mrs. Nomura, smiling, “By the way, what is her name?”

“Himeko”, said the little girl primly.

“She is a princess, a hime!” exclaimed Mr. Nomura, a little giddily.

Soon the family was eating a lovely dinner of rice, miso soup and grilled tai, red snapper.

Omedetai. Congratulations.

Mrs. Nomura had bought the red snapper earlier that day.

She laughed. “It’s juugoya!”

The full moon of September, the Harvest Moon.

“How lucky!” exclaimed Mr. Nomura.

The next morning, Mr. Nomura phoned the Child Welfare Department and a middle-aged female caseworker arrived and moments later drove a bawling, sobbing Himeko away in a small white Kyoto city government-issue car.

That afternoon, there was a call.

“She keeps insisting that she is your daughter”, said the caseworker to Mr. Nomura, “also, we have no record of any missing child fitting her description anywhere in Kyoto or Japan. To tell you the truth, she refuses to eat or drink a thing and she does nothing but cry, so for her own safety, we would like you to keep her for a few weeks if you don’t mind.”

Overjoyed at this news, the Nomuras were told that they would be given, after six months, provisional permission to adopt Himeko, as long as no one came forward and claimed her.

The Nomuras adopted Himeko and on that day also she received a legal birth certificate. It was estimated that her age, based on her verbal and intellectual abilities, was around three or four. The Kyoto city government set her birthday as September 15, the date Mr. Nomura had found her in the bamboo forest. With this legal birth certificate, she was added to the family registry and thus allowed to start kindergarten.

She ate very well – muffins, chocolates, apple pie, potato chips and mochi rice cakes among many other food — and within three months reached a normal size for a girl of her age.

Years passed like the clap of a pair of hands, and it became time for elementary school.

Mr. Nomura was later to remember Himeko’s school years as the happiest years of his life. She made friends easily, got good grades and enjoyed writing calligraphy.

Himeko liked the pet rabbits, two lank males named Kuro and Poppo, kept in large wire cages outside the school buildings, and always volunteered to feed them.

“Why only the rabbits, dear?” asked Mrs. Nomura. The school also had several pet chickens and even an elderly little she-goat.

But Himeko only smiled mysteriously.

As the years passed and Himeko started high school, she became known for her beauty, her intelligence and her modesty. In her last year of high school, she took the entrance examination for Kyoto University and received the highest marks ever recorded since the school was founded in the Meiji era.

She chose astronomy as her major and proceeded to ace every class, startling the professors with her insights and capability.

She cut a graceful, almost ethereal figure on campus and seemed almost to glide down the paths, rather than walking in an ordinary human manner. Her skin glowed with the pale almost luminous light of starry skies.

Her lustrous long black hair she wore loose like a maiden in a Heian court.

Many students at Kyodai were captivated by her elegant bearing and shy yet somehow regal, almost antique manners.

There was something so watchable about her that she was even scouted as a model, but she rebuffed the agency.

Kousuke Kitamura was the young scion of a wealthy Osaka family which was a majority stock owner of one of the sogo shoshas, the massive, politically well-connected conglomerates with subsidiaries that handle banking, finance, oil, petrochemicals, real estate and construction.

One day, after their class on Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, he summoned up his courage and hesitantly asked her out.

Himeko listened to his stammering plea with a strange impersonal half-smile. Kousuke had to fight with himself not to drown in the pellucid midnight depths of her dark eyes, turned on him without warmth but mesmerizing all the same.

Was she a snake woman? Was she a witch? Was she a yokai?

As well as admiration, these kinds of fantastic rumors followed Himeko around: little jokes and off-hand comments. Kousuke set no store by these. He imagined they were forged by those jealous of Himeko’s brilliant academic talent and haunting beauty.

In the end, she hesitantly nodded “yes” to the date and her lovely features even relaxed into a little prim and encouraging smile.

Kousuke, beaming, was over the moon.

They went to the Kyoto University Museum, which had an exhibit of prints by Hiroshige.

“Did you like it?” Kousuke asked Himeko afterwards.

“Yes”, she said, “did you?”

“Well, sort of. Nature in those days was beautiful, but it is unrealistic to live like that, in wooden shacks with no electricity. Walking everywhere on foot must have been exhausting too. And I doubt those straw cloaks kept people dry.”

“I think that lifestyle was perfect. I’d prefer it vastly”, said Himeko sadly, “as real, honest beauty is always to be preferred.”

“Really?” gasped Kousuke. He had to admit he was disappointed to hear it. She seemed to him to be a bit crazy.

Maybe she was a yokai after all?

“Truth is beauty and beauty, truth”, she intoned, a bit cryptically.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“….anyway, how do you know the straw cloaks don’t work unless you try them?” she asked.

Irritated, Kousuke contemplated not asking her out on another date, but it was her own beauty which proved irresistible to him, even when he set it against the convenience of the lifestyle provided by concrete, plastic and petroleum, the very products his family dealt in.

And so he did ask her out again, after their next Astrobiology class.

With a cold and remote look, she put him off with an obvious excuse: “I’m too busy”.

It was around this time that an incredible thing happened.

Simon Tusk, the famous IT entrepreneur, had sent a robot to Mars a few years back, in order to do preparatory exploration for purposes of human colonization of the Red Planet.

Now the space capsule containing the robot landed, flawlessly, at the Tusk Space Center in Arizona and its special titanium specimen collection boxes were retrieved from the capsule’s hull and opened.

In one box, Tusk’s scientists found a mysterious faintly rose-colored gauzy filmy ghostly swaying thing. It reminded everyone of seaweed, but more numinous, nearly transparent.

It almost seemed to be alive.

One scientist tried peering at the pink filmy thing through a special optical lens and cried out incredulously.

Others tried the lens as well and were equally amazed. The pink filmy ghostly thing had resolved into a tiny person, about 30 centimeters high. Tusk’s scientists had discovered the Earth’s first space alien.

Incredibly, seen through the lens, the alien (it seemed to be a “he”) was dressed like a ninja, in a dark indigo close-fitting outfit, and could communicate in perfect Japanese.

The space alien told them that his main colony was actually on the moon, but he had been sent on a solo mission to look for their lost princess. Only he had gotten lost, and ended up trapped in a deep Martian crater, until Tusk’s robot had collected him

The media was informed and sensational headlines on the space alien dominated the news for weeks.

Scholars of culture and history wrote learned papers speculating on the connection between Japan, a country with ninjas, and the moon. One revisionist historian was quoted as saying “it would be more accurate to say that the famous ‘Rising Sun’ flag is instead depicting the ‘Rising Full Moon’” and gave many convincing reasons for his thesis.

In Tokyo, a rascally reporter asked the Japanese Prime Minister, “Does the flag portray the sun or the moon, sir?” and the Prime Minister skillfully evaded the question by saying both were found in the sky.

On the Twittersphere, #SunorMoon trended for weeks.

Meanwhile, back in Kyoto, Himeko was becoming more and more lost to the world. She spent hours reading the news about the mysterious alien, stopped attending classes, and refused to talk to anyone except Mr. and Mrs. Nomura.

They were over 80 and quite frail. Still, they were worried about their daughter, who seemed, oddly, to be shrinking slightly every day.

“Do you suppose,” Mr. Nomura asked Junko, “that our Himeko is the famous lost space alien princess?”

“I’ll ask her tomorrow”, promised Mrs. Nomura.

But that night, it was the full moon. Mr. and Mrs. Nomura were lying on their futons and heard festive music, flutes and drums, outside in their small garden. Mrs. Nomura pushed aside the wooden shoji doors to look outside and saw Himeko, now doll-sized again, dressed in a luminous white kimono and gliding along in a somber procession of Heian courtiers on a magical and glittering road of rose-colored stars that seemed to stretch forever into the dark cloudless sky, all the way to the shining, perfect Pink April Moon.

***********************

  • “Pink Moon” is a name for the full Moon around the time of April, when the moss pink, or wild ground phlox, is in blossom.

For more by Marianne Kimura, please see her story of Last Snow,; an account of how her second novel, The Hamlet Paradigm, was taken up by an independent publisher; her double life as academic and fiction writer; her third prize winning entry for the Writers in Kyoto Competition; an extract from a work in progress, Seven Forms of Infiltration; an interview with her about goddesses and ninjas; or an extract from her first novel, The Hamlet Paradigm.

Writers in focus

Hearn 7: Kimiko

April 29, 2021

This is the seventh and last in a series of Lafcadio Hearn stories set in Kyoto. ‘Kimiko’ first appeared in Kokoro (1896). For an introduction to Hearn’s Kyoto stories, please click here.

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Synopsis

The story is set in the ‘Street of the Geisha’, which at night ‘is one of the queerest in the world’. Narrow like a gangway, with tightly packed houses several storeys high and lit by paper-lanterns of differing shapes. On them are beautifully written Japanese characters giving the names of the geisha who live there. In one of the houses are Kimika and Kimiko No. 2.

Kimiko No. 1 was beautiful, clever and accomplished. Kimika acted as ‘older sister’ and took a protective role since the younger sister attracted men like moths to a flame. One tried to buy her out, another sought to get her drunk, and a foreign prince sent her diamonds. Such was Kimiko’s fame she became one of Kyoto’s sights, yet she managed to evade all amorous entanglements.

One day came the startling news that she had parted with Kimika and gone off with a suitor ‘willing to die for her ten times over’. According to Kimika, a fool had tried to kill himself, and Kimiko had taken pity and ‘nursed him back to foolishness’. However, things were more complicated.

As a child, Kimiko was known as Ai, which when written with different characters can mean ‘love’ or ‘grief’. She was well brought up and attended a school run by an old samurai, then went to one of the new elementary public schools with the first modern textbooks. However, the Meiji reforms meant that families of rank such as that of Ai were reduced to obscurity. Family misfortune followed, and she was left with just a destitute mother and younger sister.

The family sold off all their possessions, and in desperation even opened the grave of Ai’s grandfather to reclaim the sword with which he was buried. His features were still recognizable after his long entombment, and he seemed to nod assent to what they were doing. They took the sheaf and mountings made of gold, but left the sword.

When her mother became ill and weak, Ai asked to be sold to the ‘dancing girls’. She remembered a geisha named Kimika, who had appeared at banquets in her father’s house. An agreement was made whereby Kimika would support the mother in return for Ai staying with her till the age of twenty four, or until such time as she could pay back the debt.

[Flash forward] The man with whom Kimiko had run off was the only son in a well-to-do family, but happily they were willing to accept his choice of lover. He prepared a palace-like home for her, but she turned down his offer of marriage three times, confessing that she had been through hell and that ‘the scorch of the fire is upon me’. Ashamed of her past, she told him he would be better off with a true sweet lady.

Not long afterwards Kimiko vanished completely, leaving her clothes and possessions behind. No one could locate her. As the years passed by the young man ‘became wiser’ and found another woman, married and had a son.

One day a travelling nun came begging to the house. The young son went to the door and donated some rice. For her part she asked him to give his father a message. ‘Tell him that one whom he will never see again said that she was glad, because she had seen his son.’ With that, she disappeared.

[The following is the last paragraph in Hearn’s own words.]

‘… it were vain to ask in what remote city, in what fantastic riddle of narrow nameless streets, in what obscure little temple known only to the poorest poor, she waits for the darkness before the Dawn of the Immeasurable Light – when the Face of the Teacher will smile upon her – when the Voice of the Teacher will say to her, in tones of sweetness deeper than ever came from a human lover’s lips: “Oh my daughter in the Law, thou hast practiced the perfect way; thou hast believed and understood the highest truth; therefore come I now to meet and to welcome thee!”‘

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Commentary

Lafcadio Hearn’s interest in the macabre and the mysterious is clearly reflected in the story, as is his sentimental attitude to women. Like Charlie Chaplin, Hearn’s idealisation of the female sex was shaped by attachment to a mother who was vulnerable and frail. In both cases they were separated from the mother they adored while young. For Hearn self-sacrifice was the greatest of virtues (he advocated dying for the emperor to his Kumamoto students), and the florid language of the final paragraph justifies Kimiko’s choices in life in the most emphatic of terms.

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For Hearn’s other Kyoto stories, click here for ‘Common Sense’; here for ‘The Sympathy of Benten’; here for ‘Screen Maiden’; here for ‘The Ditty of O-Kichi and Seiza’; here for ‘Story of a Fly; and here for ‘The Reconciliation’.

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