HŌRAI
Blue
vision of depth lost in height — sea and sky intermixing through
luminous haze. The day is of spring, and the hour morning.
Only sky and sea — one azure
enormity. In the foreground, ripples are catching a silvery light, and threads
of foam are swirling. But a little further off no motion is visible, nor
anything except color: dim warm blue water widening away to melt into blue air.
Horizon, there is none: only distance soaring into space — infinite concavity hollowing
before you, and hugely arching above you — the color deepening with the height.
But far in the midway blue, there hangs a faint, faint vision of palace towers,
with high roofs horned and curved like moons — some shadowing of splendor
strange and old, illumined by a sunshine soft as memory.
What I have thus been trying to describe is a kakémono,51
that is to say, a Japanese painting on silk, suspended on the wall of my alcove
and the name of it is “Shinkirō,” which means “mirage.” But the shapes of the
mirage are unmistakable. Those are the glimmering portals of Hōrai the Blest;52
and those are the moony roofs of the palace of the Dragon King; and their style
(though drawn by a Japanese brush of today) is the style of things Chinese,
twenty-one hundred years ago. Thus, much is told of the place in the Chinese
books of that time.
In Hōrai there is neither death
nor pain; and there is no winter. The flowers in that place never fade, and the
fruits never fail; and if a man tastes those fruits even once, he can never
again feel thirst or hunger. In Hōrai grow the enchanted plants So-rin-shi,
Riku-gō-aoi, and Ban-kon-tō, which heal all manner of
sickness — and there also grows the magical grass, Yo-shin-shi, that
revives the dead; and the magical grass is watered by a fairy water of which a
single drink confers perpetual youth. The people of Hōrai eat their rice out of
very, very small bowls; but the rice never diminishes within those bowls —
however much of it be eaten — until the eater desires no more. And the people
of Hōrai drink their wine out of very, very small cups; but no man can empty
one of those cups — however stoutly he may drink — until the pleasant
drowsiness of intoxication comes upon him.
All this and more is told in the
legends of the time of the Shin dynasty; although, that the people who wrote
down those legends ever saw Hōrai, even in a mirage, is not believable. For
really, there are no enchanted fruits that leave the eater forever satisfied —
nor any magical grass that revives the dead — nor any fountain of fairy water —
nor any bowls that never lack rice, — nor any cups that never lack wine. It is
not true that sorrow and death never enter Hōrai — neither is it true that
there is not any winter. The winter in Hōrai is cold — the winds bite to the
bone, and the heaping of snow on the roofs of the Dragon-King is monstrous.
Nevertheless, there are wonderful
things in Hōrai; and the most wonderful of all has not been mentioned by any
Chinese writer. I mean the atmosphere of Hōrai. It is an atmosphere unique to
the place, and because of it, the sunshine in Hōrai is whiter than any other sunshine — a milky light that
never dazzles — astonishingly clear, but very soft. This atmosphere is not of
our human era: it is enormously old — so old that I feel afraid when I try to
think how old it is — and it is not a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. It is not
made of air at all — but of ghost — the substance of quintillions of
quintillions of gener- ations of souls, blended into one immense translucency —
souls of people who thought in ways never resembling our ways. If a mortal man
inhales that atmosphere, he takes the thrilling of these spirits into his
blood; and they change the sense within him — reshaping his notions of space
and time — so that he can see only as they used to see, and feel only as they
used to feel, and think only as they used to think. Soft as sleep are these
changes of sense; and Hōrai, discerned across them, might thus be described:
Because in Hōrai there is no
knowledge of great evil, the hearts of the people never grow old. And, by
reason of being always young in heart, the people of Hōrai smile from birth
until death — except when the Gods send sorrow among them; and faces are then
veiled until the sorrow goes away. All folk in Hōrai love and trust each other,
as if all were members of a single household — and the speech of the women is
like birds singing, because their hearts are as light as the souls of birds —
and the swaying of the sleeves of the maidens at play seems like the fluttering
of wide, soft wings. In Hōrai nothing is hidden but grief, because there is no
reason for shame — and nothing is locked away, because there could not be any
theft — and by night as well as by day all doors remain unbarred, because there
is no reason for fear. And because the people are fairies — though mortal — all
things in Hōrai, except the palace of the Dragon King, are small and quaint and
strange — and these fairy-folk really do eat their rice out of very, very small
bowls, and drink their wine out of very, very small cups.
Evil winds from the West are
blowing over Hōrai; and the magical atmosphere, alas, is shrinking away before
them. It lingers now only in patches and bands — like those long bright bands
of clouds that trail across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these
shreds of the elfish vapor you still can find Hōrai — but not everywhere.
Remember that Hōrai is also called “Shinkirō,” which means mirage — the
Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading — never again to appear
except in pictures and poems and dreams.
(From The Annotated Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn, Edited and Illustrated by Hayato Tokugawa, Copyright 2017 by Hayato Tokugawa and Shisei-Do Publications.)
