"GOOD morning," Kaname called in from the hall.

"May I come in?"

"Please. We're quite presentable."

He went into their room, which looked out to the front of the inn, and found O-hisa seated before the mirror at work on the upswept rolls of her Japanese coiffure. She was dressed in a cotton kimono tied at the waist with a narrow checkered sash. The old man, beside her, was on the point of taking out his thick glasses to study a leaflet that lay on his knee. The sea, clear into the distance, was so bright a blue that it turned black as one stared at it. Even the smoke from the ships seemed motionless. Now and then, with the faintest breath of a breeze, the leaflet stirred very slightly and a tear in the paper door rustled like a kite.

AWAJI GENNOJŌ THEATER
Licensed by the Ministry of the Interior
Tokiwa Bridge, Sumoto
Program for the Third Day

Morning-Glory Diary

Firefly Hunt on the River Uji

Farewell at Akashi

Yuminosuke's Villa

Teahouse at Ōiso

Mount Maya

Shelter at Hamamatsu

Tokuemon's Inn

Along the Way

Extra

The Tenth Scene from Taikōki

The Love of Osbun and Dembei

Guest Performance

Stammering Matahei

(recited by Toyotake Rodayū

of the Osaka Bunraku Theater)

Admission:

50 sen

30 sen for those entitled to discount

"Do you know of a scene in a teahouse at Ōiso?" the old man asked O-hisa.

"What play is it in?"

"Morning-Glory Diary."

"Teahouse at Ōiso.... I wonder if there is such a scene."

"So you see they put in scenes that are hardly ever played in Osaka.... Next comes Mount Maya. What would that be?"

"Wouldn't it be the one where Miyuki is kidnapped?"

"You're probably right.... She's kidnapped and taken to Hamamatsu. But in that case what happens to the moor at Makuzu? Isn't there supposed to be a scene on the moor at Makuzu?"

O-hisa had a comb in her mouth and did not answer. The fingers of her right hand were pressed lightly to one of her rolls of hair. A hand mirror she held behind her to reflect into the dresser sent the sun dancing brightly around the room.

Kaname still had no real idea how old she was. It suited the old man's tastes to search the old-clothes shops at Gojō and the morning bazaars at Kitano for materials no longer in style, for crepes and brocades tightly woven in small, subdued patterns, heavy and stiff as strands of chain. O-hisa was forced into them, protesting helplessly at "the musty old tatters." The somberness of her dress made her look to be in her late twenties—and indeed it appeared that she had been instructed by the old man to say she was, so that they might seem a slightly better-matched couple—but the glow of her pink fingers, their fine pattern of ridges cleanly marked as she held the mirror in her left hand, was not simply a product of the oil in her hair, Kaname felt sure. He had never seen her so informally dressed before. The flesh of her shoulders and thighs, swelling through the thin kimono, seemed with its richness to deny her pretensions as a delicate, refined Kyoto maiden, and told clearly that she could be no more than twenty-two or twenty-three at the most.

"Then the inn," the old man continued, "and the last scene on the road."

"I see."

"The first I've heard of a travel scene in Morning-Glory Diary," put in Kaname. "Miyuki has finally found Komazawa and they're going off together?"

"No, I've seen it. They leave the inn, you remember, and Miyuki is stopped at the ford after Komazawa has crossed? Well, in the last scene she's got across and is hurrying down Tōkaidō Highway after him."

"She's alone?"

"Someone, a young fellow—what's his name?—has been sent by her family to take care of her," the old man explained.

"His name is Sekrisuke," O-hisa added. The reflection flashed across the wall again. She went out to the veranda with the basin of hot water she had been using to repair the flaws in her coiffure.

"Sekisuke. He goes along with her. It's a master-servant scene."

"And Miyuki has regained her eyesight?"

"That's right. And won back her place as a samurai's daughter. She goes off down the road dressed as a lady again. It's a bright scene, something like the walk through the cherries in Sembonzakura."

The theater was a temporary one in a vacant lot somewhere, and the plays lasted from ten in the morning to eleven at night, sometimes even to past midnight. Since the whole program would really be quite impossible to sit through, it might be best to go toward evening, the manager of the inn suggested, but the old man retorted that he had come purposely for the plays and that they would start out immediately after breakfast. He had brought along the usual lacquer boxes, which made up a large part of his pleasure at the theater, and handed them over with elaborate instructions—there would be this vegetable, that omelet—on what was to be put into them for lunch and dinner.

"Well, O-hisa, let's get ourselves ready," he prodded.

"Could you pull this tight, please?" O-hisa turned so that the knot of her sash was toward him. Even before the order came she had set about tying the brocade, its material crisp and crackly as a priest's robe, over a solid-colored kimono so stiff that it seemed on the verge of splitting at the creases.

"Is that tight enough?"

"A little more, please."

O-hisa strained forward, bracing herself from the hip. Sweat came out on the old man's forehead.

"The damned thing refuses to budge. It's almost impossible to tie."

"You were the one who bought it, I believe. Certainly I never approved. It beats me to exhaustion. Tight, uncomfortable."

"But it's a good color, isn't it?" Kaname stood admiringly beside the old man. "I don't quite know what you'd call it, but it's something you don't much see these days."

"A sort of chartreuse, I suppose it would be. It's still used often enough, but the real flavor doesn't come out till it's old and faded like this."

"What's the material?"

"Figured satin, I should say. The old silks are the only ones that crackle this way. There's almost always rayon in the new ones."

Since the theater was within walking distance, they started out on foot, each with his share of lacquer boxes and small packages.

"It's bright enough so that I'll need a parasol." O-hisa, always afraid of sunburn, shaded her face with her hand. The sun came through her fingers brilliant as through red parasol paper, and on down over her delicate palm, with its callus from playing the samisen. The shaded upper part of her face seemed even whiter than her sun-bathed chin.

"There's no point in worrying about an umbrella," the old man said curtly. "You'll be burned black before we get home anyway."

O-hisa did not agree. While they waited in the entrance she took out the cream she had slipped into the bottom of her bag and applied it with soft little pats to her face, neck, wrists, even her ankles. The pains this Kyoto lady took with her fair complexion struck Kaname as at the same time charming and ridiculous. The pleasure-minded old man, however, for all that he seemed to be concerned with just such fine points, showed curiously little sympathy now that he had made his views known.

"We won't be there before eleven." It was O-hisa's turn to prod the old man, who stopped now and then in front of an antique shop.

"What lovely weather!" She looked up into the clear sky as she walked slowly on ahead with Kaname, adding in a low voice, a little wistfully: "On a day like this I'd rather be out looking for spring greens."

"It is a better day for that than for a play."

"I wonder if there are good greens around here."

"I know nothing about this part of the country. I should think there would be plenty in the hills around Kyoto, though."

"There are indeed. Just last month we went out to Yase to look for aster sprouts. We took in a great supply."

"Aster sprouts?"

"He eats them. I looked through the markets in Kyoto, but there were none to be had. The grocers all said the things were too bitter for human consumption."

"Even in Tokyo it's not everybody who can get them down. So you went all the way to Yase after them?"

"We filled a basket this big."

"It's fun to go looking for greens, I suppose, but it's fun too just to wander through a country town on a day like this."

The main road through the town stretched on under the blue sky before them, so clear and serene that they could count the people passing back and forth far into the distance. Even the bicycles tinkling their bells as they moved by seemed calm and unhurried. The town was not an especially remarkable one, but like every town in this part of the country it had its lines of fine earthen walls. The old man had gone into that too: the driving winds and rains farther to the east make it necessary to put up board fences rather than these earthen walls, he found, and the wood, no matter how fine it is, soon turns dark and begins to look dirty. Tokyo is a special problem of course, rebuilt with tin-roofed barracks after the earthquake, but one might expect the small provincial centers around it to have a patina in proportion as they are old. In fact they are gloomy as though overlaid with a coating of soot. Earthquakes and fires are common, and each rebuilding brings characterless houses of cheap imported woods that might better be used for matches, and shabby Western-style buildings that suggest a run-down, end-of-the-line town in the United States. A very old city in the east, the medieval military seat at Kamakura for instance, might not indeed have all the beauty of the ancient capital at Nara if it were moved west, but it would certainly have more repose and grace than it has. The country from Kyoto west has been blessed by nature, and disasters are few; and the earthen walls and tiles of even obscure town houses and farms can make the traveler stop and gaze for a moment. The smaller of the old castle towns have more of this charm than large, modernized cities like Osaka, or even Kyoto, a much less extreme example. With the heart of Kyoto changing so rapidly, one has to go to Wakayama, Sakai, Himeji, Nishinomiya, to find the old cities as they have always been.

As his eye fell on a corner of crumbling wall with white blossoms arching out over the rounded tiles at its ridge, Kaname thought of something else the old man had once said: "People talk about famous places in the east like Shiobara and Hakone, but Japan is a volcanic country and you can find that kind of scenery everywhere. When the Mainichi was running its poll for the best eight views in the country, they say, it uncovered more 'lion rocks' than you could count. I don't doubt it a moment. The places really worth going to are the little towns and harbors from here on west."

The island of Awaji showed not very large on the map, and its harbor very possibly consisted of but this one road. You go straight down, the inn manager had said, till you come out at the river, and the theater is in the flats beyond. The rows of houses therefore most probably ended at the river. This may have been the seat of some minor baron a century ago—even then it could hardly have been imposing enough to be called a castle town—and it had probably changed little since. A modern coating goes no farther than the large cities that are a country's arteries, and there are not many such cities anywhere. In an old country with a long tradition, China and Europe as well as Japan—any country, in fact, expect a very new one like the United States—the smaller cities, left aside by the flow of civilization, retain the flavor of an earlier day until they are overtaken by catastrophe.

This little harbor, for instance: it had its electric wires and poles, its painted billboards, and here and there a display window, but one could ignore them and find on every side townsmen's houses that might have come from an illustration to a seventeenth-century novel. The earthen walls covered to the eaves with white plaster, the projecting lattice fronts with their solid, generous slats of wood, the heavy tiled roofs held down by round ridge-tiles, the shop signs—"Lacquer," "Soy," "Oil" —in fading letters on fine hardwood grounds, and inside, beyond earth-floored entrances, the shop names printed on dark-blue half-curtains—it was not the old man's remark this time, but every detail brought back—how vividly!—the mood and air of old Japan. Kaname felt as if he were being drunk up into the scene, as if he were losing himself in the clean white walls and the brilliant blue sky. Those walls were a little like the sash around O-hisa's waist: their first luster had disappeared in long years under the fresh sea winds and rains, and bright though they were, their brightness was tempered by a certain reserve, a soft austerity.

Kaname felt a deep repose come over him. "These old houses are so dark you have no idea what's inside."

"Partly it's because the road is so bright." The old man had come up beside them. "The ground here seems almost white."

Kaname thought of the faces of the ancients in the dusk behind their shop curtains. Here on this street people with faces like theater dolls must have passed lives like stage lives. The world of the plays —of O-yumi, Jūrōbei of Awa, the pilgrim O-tsuru, and the rest—must have been just such a town as this. And wasn't O-hisa a part of it? Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a woman like her, dressed in the same kimono, was perhaps going down this same street in the spring sun, lunch in hand, on her way to the theater beyond the river. Or perhaps, behind one of these latticed fronts, she was playing "Snow" on her koto. O-hisa was a shade left behind by another age.