 CHAPTER 17 OF KOTTO. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Martin Giesen. Koto. Being Japanese Curios with Sundry Cobwebs. By Lafcadio Hearn. Chapter 17. Reverie. It has been said that men fear death, much as the child cries at entering the world, being unable to know what loving hands are waiting to receive it. Certainly, this comparison will not bear scientific examination, but as a happy fancy, it is beautiful, even for those to whom it can make no religious appeal whatever. Those who must believe that the individual mind dissolves with the body, and that an eternal continuance of personality could only prove an eternal misfortune. It is beautiful, I think, because it suggests in so intimate a way the hope that to large a knowledge the Absolute will reveal itself as mother-love made infinite. The imagining is oriental rather than occidental, yet it accords with a sentiment vaguely defined in most of our western creeds. Through ancient grim conceptions of the Absolute as father, there has gradually been infused some later and brighter dream of infinite tenderness, some all-transfiguring hope created by the memory of woman as mother, and the more that races evolve toward higher things, the more feminine becomes their idea of a God. Conversely, this suggestion must remind even the least believing that we know of nothing else in all the range of human experience so sacred as mother-love, nothing so well deserving the name of Divine. Mother-love alone could have enabled the delicate life of thought to unfold and to endure upon the rind of this wretched little planet. Only through that supreme unselfishness could the nobler emotions ever have found strength to blossom in the brain of man. Only by help of mother-love could the higher forms of trust in the unseen ever have been called into existence. But musings of this kind naturally lead us to ask ourselves emotional questions about the mysteries of whither and whence. Must the evolutionist think of mother-love as a merely necessary result of material affinities, the attraction of the atom for the atom? Or can he venture to assert with ancient thinkers of the East that all atomic tendencies are shaped by one eternal moral law, and that some are in themselves divine, being manifestations of the four infinite feelings? What wisdom can decide for us, and of what avail to know our highest emotions divine, since the race itself is doomed to perish? When mother-love shall have wrought its uttermost for humanity, will not even that uttermost have been in vain? At first thought indeed the inevitable dissolution must appear the blackest of imaginable tragedies, tragedy made infinite. Eventually our planet must die, its azure ghost of air will shrink and pass, its seas dry up, its very soil perish utterly, leaving only a universal waste of sand and stone, the withered corpse of a world. Still for a time this mummy will turn about the sun, but only as the dead moon wheels now across our nights, one face forever in scorching blaze, the other in icy darkness. So it will circle, blank and bald as a skull, and like a skull will it bleach and crack and crumble, ever drawing nearer and yet more near to the face of its flaming parent, to vanish suddenly at last in the cyclonic lightning of his breath. One by one the remaining planets must follow, then will the mighty star himself begin to fail, to flicker with ghastly changing colours, to crimson toward his death, and finally the monstrous, viscerate cinder of him, hurled into some colossal sun-pire, will be dissipated into vapor, more tenuous than the dream of the dream of a ghost. What then will have availed the labour of the life that was? The life effaced without one sign to mark the place of its disparition in the illimitable abyss. What then the worth of mother-love, the whole dead world of human tenderness, with its sacrifices, hopes, memories, its divine delights and divine pains, its smiles and tears and sacred caresses, its countless passionate prayers to countless banished gods. Such doubts and fears do not trouble the thinker of the East. Us they disturb chiefly because of old wrong habits of thought, and the consequent blind fear of knowing that what we have so long called soul belongs not to essence, but to form. Forms appear and vanish in perpetual succession, but the essence alone is real. Nothing real can be lost even in the dissipation of a million universes. Utter destruction, everlasting death, all such terms of fear have no correspondence to any truth but the eternal law of change. Even forms can perish only as waves pass and break. They melt but to swell anew. Nothing can be lost. In the nebulous haze of our dissolution will survive the essence of all that has ever been in human life, the units of every existence that was or is, with all their affinities, all their tendencies, all their inheritance of forces making for good or evil, all the powers amassed through myriad generations, all energies that ever shaped the strength of races, and times innumerable will these again be awed into life and thought. Transmutations there may be, changes also made by augmentation or diminution of affinities, by subtraction or addition of tendencies, for the dust of us will then have been mingled with the dust of other countless works, countless worlds and of their peoples. But nothing essential can be lost. We shall inevitably bequeath our part to the making of the future cosmos, to the substance out of which another intelligence will slowly be evolved. Even as we must have inherited something of our psychic being out of numberless worlds dissolved, so will future humanities inherit, not from us alone, but from millions of planets still existing, for the vanishing of our world can represent in the disparition of a universe but one infinitesimal detail of the quenching of thought. The peopled spheres that must share our doom will exceed for multitude the visible lights of heaven. Yet those countless solar fires, with their viewless millions of living planets, must somehow reappear. Again the wondrous cosmos, self-born as self-consumed, must resume its sidereal whirl over the deeps of the eternities, and the love that strives forever with death shall rise again through fresh infinitudes of pain to renew the everlasting battle. The light of the mother's smile will survive our sun. The thrill of her kiss will last beyond the thrilling of stars. The sweetness of her lullaby will endure in the cradle songs of worlds yet unevolved. The tenderness of her faith will quicken the fervour of prayers to be made to the hosts of another heaven, to the gods of a time beyond time. And the nectar of her breasts can never fail. That snowy stream will still flow on to nourish the life of some humanity, more perfect than our own, when the milky way that spans our night shall have vanished forever out of space. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Ava'i in June 2010 Kotto, being Japanese couriers with Sanji cobwebs by Lafcadio Hearn Chapter 18 Pathological Very much do I love cats, and I suppose that I could write a large book about the different cats which I have kept in various climbs and times on both sides of the world. But this is not a book of cats, and I am writing about Tama for merely psychological reasons. She has been uttering in her sleep beside my chair a peculiar cry that touched me in a particular way. It is the cry that a cat makes only for her kittens a pure caress of tone, and I perceive that her attitude as she lies there on her side is the attitude of a cat holding something, something freshly caught. The four paws are stretched out as to grasp and the pearly talons are playing. We call her Tama, Jewel, not because of her beauty, though she is beautiful, but because Tama is a female name accorded by custom to pet cats. She was a very small tortoise shell kitten when she was first brought to me as a gift worth accepting, a cat of three colors, Mikeneko, being somewhat uncommon in Japan. In certain parts of the country, such a cat is believed to be a luck bringer and gifted with power to frighten away goblins as well as rats. Tama is now two years old. I think that she has foreign blood in her veins. She is more graceful and more slender than the ordinary Japanese cat, and she has a remarkably long tail, which, from a Japanese point of view, is her only defect. Perhaps one of her ancestors came to Japan in some Dutch or Spanish ship during the time of Ieyasu. But from whatever ancestors descended, Tama is quite a Japanese cat in her habits. For example, she eats rice. The first time that she had kittens, she proved herself an excellent mother, devoting all her strength and intelligence to the care of her little ones, until, by dint of nursing them and moiling for them, she became picturesly and ludicrously thin. She taught them how to keep clean, how to play and jump and wrestle, how to hunt. At first, of course, she gave them only her long tail to play with, but later she found them other toys. She brought them not only rats and mice, but also frogs, lizards, a bat, and one day a small lamprey, which she must have managed to catch in a neighboring rice field. After dark, I used to leave open for her a small window at the head of the stairs leading to my study, in order that she might go out to hunt by way of the kitchen roof. And one night she brought in, through that window, a big straw sandal for her kittens to play with. She found it in the fields, and she must have carried it over a wooden fence ten feet high, up the house wall to the roof of the kitchen, and then through the bars of the little window to the stairway. There she and her kittens played boisterously with it till morning, and they dirtied the stairway, for that sandal was muddy. Never was Cat more fortunate in her first maternal experience than Thama. But the next time she was not fortunate, she had gotten to the habit of visiting friends in another street at a perilous distance, and one evening, while on her way thither, she was hurt by some brutal person. She came back to a stupid and sick, and her kittens were born dead. I thought that she would die also, but she recovered much more quickly than anybody could have imagined possible, though she still remains, for obvious reasons, troubled in spirit by the loss of the kittens. The memory of animals, in regard to certain forms of relative experience, is strangely weak and dim. But the organic memory of the animal, the memory of experience accumulated through countless billions of lives, is superhumanly vivid and very seldom at fault. Think of the astonishing skill with which a cat can restore the respiration of her drowned kitten. Think of her untaught ability to face a dangerous enemy seen for the first time, a venomous serpent, for example. Think of her wide acquaintance with small creatures and their ways, her medical knowledge of herbs, her capacities of strategy, whether for hunting or fighting. What she knows is really considerable, and she knows it all perfectly, or almost perfectly. But it is the knowledge of other existences. Her memory, as to the pains of the present life, is mercifully brief. Tama could not clearly remember that her kittens were dead. She knew that she ought to have had kittens, and she looked everywhere and called everywhere for them, long after they had been buried in the garden. She complained a great deal to her friends, and she made me open all the cupboards and closets over and over again to prove to her that the kittens were not in the house. At last she was able to convince herself that it was useless to look for them anymore. But she plays with them in dreams and coos to them and catches for them small shadowy things, perhaps even brings to them through some dim window of memory a sandal of ghostly straw. Chapter 19 In the dead of the night Black, chill and still, so black, so still, that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body. Then I grope about me to make sure that I am not under the earth, buried forever beyond the reach of light and sound. O'clock strikes three. I shall see the sun again. Once again, at least, possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn, a stillness never to be broken by any sound. This is certain, as certain as the fact that I exist. Nothing else is equally certain. Reason deludes, feeling deludes, all the senses delude. But there is no delusion whatever in the certain knowledge of that night to come. Doubt the reality of substance, the reality of ghost, the faith of man, the gods. Doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror. There will always remain one thing impossible to doubt, one infinite, blind black certainty. The same darkness for all, for the eyes of creatures and the eyes of heaven. The same doom for all, act and man, and hill and city, races and worlds, suns and galaxies, inevitable dissolution, desperation and oblivion. And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think. The veil that old faith wove to hide the void has been rend forever away and she always naked before us and destruction has no covering. So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist, which is horror. But must I believe that I really exist? In the moment of that self questioning the darkness stood about me as a wall and spoke I am only the shadow I shall pass but the reality will come and will not pass. I am only the shadow in me there are lights the glimmering of a hundred millions of suns and in me there are voices with the coming of the reality there will be no more lights nor any voice nor any rising nor any hope but far above you there will still be sun for many a million years and warmth and youth and love and joy vast Asia of sky and sea fragrance of summer bloom shrillings in grass and grove flood of shadows and flicker of light laughter of waters and laughter of girls blackness and silence for you and cold blind creepings I made reply of thoughts like this I am now afraid it is only because I have been startled out of sleep when all my brain awakens I shall not be afraid for this fear is brute fear only the deep and dim primordial fear bequeathed me from the million ages of the life of instinct already it is passing I can begin to think of deaths as dreamless rest a sleep with no sensation of either joy or pain the darkness whispered what is sensation and I could not answer and the gloom took weight and pressed upon me and said you do not know what is sensation how then can you say whether there will or will not be pain for the dust of you the molecules of your body the atoms of your soul atoms what are they again I could make no answer and the weight of the gloom walks greater a weight of pyramids and the whisper hissed their repulsions their attractions the awful clingings of them and the leapings what are these passions of lives burned out furies of insatiable desire frances of everlasting hate madnesses of never ending torment you do not know but you say that there will be no more pain then I cried out to the mocha I am awake awake fully awake I have ceased to fear I remember all that I am is all that I have been before the beginnings of time I was beyond the uttermost circling of the eternities I shall endure in myriad million forms I but seem to pass as form I am only wave as essence I am sea sea without show I am and doubt and fear and pain are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth asleep I behold the illusions of time but awaken I know myself timeless one with the life that has neither form nor name yet also one with all that begins and ends even the grave and the maker of graves the corpse and the eater of corpses a sparrow tweeted from the roof another responded shapes of things began to define in a soft gray glimmering and the gloom slowly lightened murmurs of the city's awakening came to my ears and grew and multiplied and the dimness flushed then rose the beautiful and holy sun the mighty quickener the mighty petrifier symbols a blime of that infinite life whose forces are also mine end of chapter 19 Libraryvox.org Recorded by David Barnes Cotto being Japanese Curios with Sondry Cobwebs by Lafcadio Hearn Chapter 20 Kusahibari His cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide its tiny wooden door turning upon a pivot will scarcely admit the tip of my little finger but he has plenty of room in that cage room to walk and jump and fly for he is so small that you must look very carefully through the brown gore's sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him I have always to turn the cage round and round several times in a good light before I can discover his whereabouts and then I usually find him resting in one of the upper corners clinging upside down to his ceiling of gore's imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito with a pair of antennae much longer than his own body and so fine that you can distinguish them only against the light Kusahibari or grasslark is the Japanese name of him and he is worth in the market exactly twelve cents that is to say very much more than his weight in gold twelve cents for such a nat-like thing by day he sleeps or meditates except while occupied with the slice of fresh egg plant or cucumber which must be poked into his cage every morning to keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome could you see him you would think it absurd to take any pains for the sake of a creature so ridiculously small but always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awakens then the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of indescribable sweetness a thin, thin silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest electric bells as the darkness deepens the sound becomes sweeter sometimes swelling till the whole house seems to vibrate with the elfish resonance sometimes thinning down into the faintest imaginable thread of a voice but loud or low it keeps a penetrating quality that is weird all night the atomy thus sings he ceases only when the temple bell proclaims the hour of dawn now this tiny song is a song of love vague love of the unseen and unknown it is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known in this present existence of his not even his ancestors for many generations back could have known anything of the nightlife of the fields or the amorous value of song they were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay in the shop of some insect merchant and they dwelt thereafter only in cages but he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note of course he did not learn the song it is a song of organic memory deep dim memory of other quintillions of lives when the ghost of him shrilled at nights from the dewy grasses of the hills then that song brought him love and death he has forgotten all about death but he remembers the love and therefore he sings now for the bride that will never come so that his longing is unconsciously retrospective he cries to the dust of the past he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of time human lovers do very much the same thing without knowing it they call their illusion an ideal and their ideal is after all a mere shadowing of race experience a phantom of organic memory the living present has very little to do with it perhaps this atomy also has an ideal or at least the rudiment of an ideal but in any event the tiny desire must utter its plaint in vain not altogether mine I had been warned that if the creature were mated he would cease to sing and would speedily die but night after night the plaintive sweet unanswered trilling touched me like a reproach became at last an obsession an affliction a torment of conscience and I tried to buy a female it was too late in the season there were no more ready for sale either males or females the insect merchant laughed and said he ought to have died about the twentieth day of the ninth month it was already the second day of the tenth month but the insect merchant did not know that I have a good stove in my study and keep the temperature at above seventy-five degrees fahrenheit wherefore my grasslark still sings at the close of the eleventh month and I hope to keep him alive until the period of greatest cold however the rest of his generation are probably dead neither for love nor money could I now find him a mate and were I to set him free in order that he might make the search for himself he could not possibly live through a single night even if fortunate enough to escape by day the multitude of his natural enemies in the garden ants, centipedes and ghastly earth spiders last evening the twenty-ninth of the eleventh month an odd feeling came to me as I sat at my desk a sense of emptiness in the room then I became aware that my grasslark was silent contrary to his won't I went to the silent cage and found him lying dead beside a dried up lump of eggplant as grey and hard as a stone evidently he'd not been fed for three or four days but only the night before his death he'd been singing wonderfully so that I foolishly imagined him to be more than usually contented my student Aki who loves insects used to feed him but Aki had gone into the country for a week's holiday and the duty of caring for the grasslark had devolved upon Hannah, the housemaid she is not sympathetic Hannah, the housemaid she says that she did not forget the mite but there was no more eggplant and she had never thought of substituting a slice of onion or of cucumber I spoke words of reproof to Hannah, the housemaid and she dutifully expressed contrition but the fairy music has stopped and the stillness reproaches and the room is cold in spite of the stove absurd I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley grain the quenching of that infinitesimal life troubles me more than I could have believed possible of course the mere habit of thinking about a creature's wants even the wants of a cricket may create by insensible degrees an imaginative interest an attachment of which one becomes conscious only when the relation is broken besides I had felt so much in the hush of the night the charm of the delicate voice telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure as upon the favour of a god telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage and the atom of ghost within myself were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the vast of being and then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting night after night and day after day while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams how bravely nevertheless he sang on to the very end an atrocious end for he had eaten his own legs may the gods forgive us all especially Hannah the housemaid yet after all to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song there are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing end of chapter 20 Kusahibadi Chapter 21 of Koto This is a LibriVox recording The LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Scott Carpenter Koto being Japanese curios with Sundry Kobwebs by Lofkario Hearn Chapter 21 The Eater of Dreams Mijikayo-ya Baku no yumeku Hima monashi Alas how short this night of ours the Baku will not even have time to eat our dreams Old Japanese love song The name of the creature is Baku or shirokina katsukami and its particular function is the eating of dreams It is variously represented and described An ancient book in my possession states that the male Baku has the body of a horse the face of a lion the trunk and tusks of an elephant the rhinoceros the tail of a cow and the feet of a tiger The female Baku is said to differ greatly in shape from the male but the difference is not clearly set forth In the time of the old Chinese learning pictures of the Baku used to be hung up in Japanese houses such pictures being supposed to exert the same beneficent power as the creature itself My ancient book contains this legend about the custom of seiroku It is declared that Kote while hunting on the eastern coast once met with a Baku having the body of an animal but speaking like a man Kote said since the world is quiet and at peace why should we still see goblins if a Baku be needed to extinguish evil sprites then it were better to have a picture of the Baku suspended to the wall of one's house thereafter even though some evil wonder should appear it could do no harm then there is given a long list of evil wonders and the signs of their presence when the hen lays a soft egg the demon's name is Taifu when snakes appear entwined together the demon's name is Jinzu when dogs go with their ears turned back the demon's name is Taiyou when the fox speaks with the voice of a man the demon's name is Guaishu when blood appears on the clothes of men the demon's name is Yuki when the rice pot speaks with a human voice the demon's name is Kanjo when the dream of the night is an evil dream the demon's name is Iringetsu and the old book further observes whenever any such evil marvel happens let the name of the Baku be invoked then the evil sprite will immediately sink three feet under the ground but on the subject of evil wonders I do not feel qualified to discourse it belongs to the unexplored and appalling world of Chinese demonology and it has really very little to do with the subject of the Baku in Japan the Japanese Baku is commonly known only as the Eater of Dreams and the most remarkable fact in relation to the cult of the creature is that the Chinese character representing its name used to be put in gold upon the lacquered wooden pillows of lords and princes by the virtue and power of this character on the pillow the sleeper was thought to be protected from evil dreams it is rather difficult to find such a pillow today even pictures of the Baku or Hakutaku as it is sometimes called have become very rare but the old invocation to the Baku still survives in common parlance when you awake from a nightmare or from any unlucky dream you should quickly repeat that invocation three times then the Baku will eat the dream and will change the misfortune or the fear into good fortune and gladness it was on a very sultry night during the period of greatest heat that I last saw the Baku I had just awakened out of misery and the hour was the hour of the ox and the Baku came in through the window to ask have you anything for me to eat I gratefully made answer assuredly listen good Baku to this dream of mine I was standing in some great white-walled room where lamps were burning but I cast no shadow upon the naked floor of that room and there upon an iron bed I saw my own dead body how I had come to die and when I had died I could not remember women were sitting near the bed six or seven and I did not know any of them they were neither young nor old and all were dressed in black watchers I took them to be they sat motionless and silent there was no sound in the place in the same moment I became aware of something nameless in the atmosphere of the room a heaviness that weighed upon the will some viewless numbing power that was slowly growing then the watchers began to watch each other stealthily and I knew that they were afraid soundlessly one rose up and left the room another followed then another so one by one and lightly as shadows they all went out alone with the corpse of myself the lamp still burned clearly but the terror in the air was thickening the watchers had stolen away almost as soon as they began to feel it but I believed that there was yet time to escape I thought that I could safely delay a moment longer a monstrous curiosity obliged me to remain I wanted to look at my own body to examine it closely I approached it and I wondered because it seemed to me very long unnaturally long then I thought that I saw one eyelid quiver but the appearance of motion might have been caused by the trembling of a lamp flame I stooped to look slowly and very cautiously because I was afraid that the eyes might open it is myself I thought as I bent down and yet it is growing queer the face appeared to be lengthening it is not myself I thought again as I stooped still lower and yet it cannot be any other and I became much more afraid unspeakably afraid that the eyes would open they opened horribly they opened and that thing sprang sprang from the bed at me and fastened upon me moaning and gnawing and rending with what madness of terror did I strive against it but the eyes of it and the moans of it and the touch of it sickened and all my being seemed about to burst a thunder and a frenzy of loathing when I knew not how I found in my hand an axe and I struck with the axe I clove, I crushed, I braided the moaner until they lay before me only a shapeless, hideous reeking mass the abominable ruin of myself baku kurai baku kurai devour o baku devour the dream nay, made answer the baku I never eat lucky dreams that is a very lucky dream a most fortunate dream the axe, yes the axe of the excellent law by which the monster of self is utterly destroyed the best kind of a dream my friend I believe in the teaching of the Buddha and the baku went out of the window I looked after him and I beheld him fleeing over the miles of moonlit roofs passing from housetop to housetop with amazing soundless leaps like a great cat end of chapter 21 end of koto being Japanese curios with sundry cobwebs by lafcadio herne