Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
    Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
    Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
    Ebook277 pages4 hours

    Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life

    By Lafcadio Hearn

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Kokoro, meaning "heart," "spirit," and “way of being” is a fitting title for this 1896 collection, for these fifteen essays focus on the interior life of Japan and its people.  Hearn's insights into Japan’s soul are unmatched by any Westerner, and his portraits of individual Japanese are as profound as his long essays on the civilization.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble
    Release dateApr 12, 2011
    ISBN9781411449206
    Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
    Author

    Lafcadio Hearn

    Lafcadio Hearn, also called Koizumi Yakumo, was best known for his books about Japan. He wrote several collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, including Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

    Read more from Lafcadio Hearn

    Related to Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      The Mind Reader

      Sep 10, 2022

      It happened so long ago you’d think I’d just forget it. But I haven’t, I can’t; it’s nested in my mind, coiled and twisted into my memory like a serpent I can’t get rid of. I remember it at odd moments: when I’m eating breakfast or riding the train t

      23 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Small Flame in the Dark: On Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Go, Went, Gone’

      Feb 7, 2018

      “People have always moved. The story of humanity is essentially a story of movement.” —Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey Some of the romance of my life in Rome was the view out my apartment’s windows: two medieval churches, cobblest

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cry Our Beloved Country

      May 15, 2024

      “There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it…” Those opening lines of the classic 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country by Pietermaritzburg-born wri

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Keeping Spirits Up

      Jan 5, 2020

      ‘Tragedy does not occur because something has been broken,” says Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma, on the phone from Nebraska. “A thing is tragic if it cannot be mended again.” Readers of his stunning novels will know that he is a master of that which

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Storytelling Should Never Be Confused with Sociology: The Millions Interviews John Domini

      Oct 3, 2019

      John Domini’s new novel concludes his trilogy set in Naples after a fictional earthquake, engrossing readers in a gripping mystery. The post Storytelling Should Never Be Confused with Sociology: The Millions Interviews John Domini appeared first on T

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Farewell to Larry Siedentop

      Sep 26, 2024

      Farewell to Larry Siedentop
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Arthur Apanski

      May 23, 2018

      Arthur Apanski
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Spotlight Anthony Joseph

      Apr 17, 2019

      Spotlight Anthony Joseph
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bourne To Run

      Feb 24, 2022

      Bourne To Run
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bourne To Run

      Feb 24, 2022

      Bourne To Run
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      After The Fall

      Oct 15, 2021

      After The Fall
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Life Always Wins. Follow Me

      Jul 28, 2021

      Japanese cuisine is so varied and refined that it’s hard to happen upon something unpleasant to the palate. My personal procedure in Japan is to take a seat at the counter and start pointing, completely at random, to a series of dishes chosen on the

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cambodia: Generation Hope.

      Mar 10, 2023

      Cambodia: Generation Hope.
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Life Always Wins. Follow Me

      Dec 24, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Harmony” issue in July, 2021. Japanese cuisine is so varied and refined that it’s hard to happen upon something unple

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Sense Of Place

      Mar 14, 2018

      A Sense Of Place
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Heartbreaks & misadventures

      Aug 21, 2020

      Among other things, your book is a culinary adventure. Why is food such a central theme? You can’t write a book about Italians without food playing a major role. It is such a fundamental part of the Italian culture. Italians bond over eating – it’s

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      George Takei

      Aug 16, 2019

      You were in Japanese-American internment camps from ages 5 to 8. What was that like? We were plunked down in the swamps of southeastern Arkansas. To me, it was an exotic, alien planet. Trees grew out of the water of the bayou that was right next to t

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Roberto Bolaño’s Guide to Complicity

      Feb 12, 2018

      A few years ago, getting lectured by an online dictionary blog post about being complicit with evil would have been incredibly bizarre. But we live in bizarre times. As its choice for 2017 Word of the Year, Dictionary.com chose “complicit.” Here is a

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      ‘Where Do We Find Hope?’

      Sep 18, 2023

      ‘Where Do We Find Hope?’
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Neal Stephenson Mixes Polo, Politics, And Power In The Novel ‘Polostan’

      Dec 5, 2024

      Early in the fall of 2024, a new novel from bestselling author Neal Stephenson – he of the historical sagas, tech fables, and doorstop tomes – galloped onto bookstore shelves and e-reader screens. “Polostan,” a swashbuckling mashup of spies, science,

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      I, Spy

      Aug 7, 2018

      Many things happened to me for the first time on a night in April 1944. I rode in a Black Maria; I jumped from a bomber with a tangled parachute; and I began my mission in wartime France as a British secret agent. We drove in the Black Maria from Int

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Magic In His Bones

      Jan 26, 2023

      Magic In His Bones
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

    4/5

    15 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A variety of anecdotes and journal entries printed in 1896 during the Meiji era (1868-1912) connotes Hearn’s strong conviction in spirituality, ethnicity, fine arts and nationality of Japan, a mysterious and exotic land to the Westerners waiting to be explored.

    Book preview

    Kokoro (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) - Lafcadio Hearn

    KOKORO

    Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life

    LAFCADIO HEARN

    logo.jpg

    This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

    Barnes & Noble, Inc.

    122 Fifth Avenue

    New York, NY 10011

    ISBN: 978-1-4114-4920-6

    CONTENTS

    I. AT A RAILWAY STATION

    II. THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION

    III. A STREET SINGER

    IV. FROM A TRAVELING DIARY

    V. THE NUN OF THE TEMPLE OF AMIDA

    VI. AFTER THE WAR

    VII. HARU

    VIII. A GLIMPSE OF TENDENCIES

    IX. BY FORCE OF KARMA

    X. A CONSERVATIVE

    XI. IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

    XII. THE IDEA OF PREËXISTENCE

    XIII. IN CHOLERA-TIME

    XIV. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ANCESTOR-WORSHIP

    XV. KIMIKO

    APPENDIX. THREE POPULAR BALLADS

    I

    AT A RAILWAY STATION

    Seventh day of the sixth Month;—

    twenty-sixth of Meiji.

    YESTERDAY a telegram from Fukuoka announced that a desperate criminal captured there would be brought for trial to Kumamoto today, on the train due at noon. A Kumamoto policeman had gone to Fukuoka to take the prisoner in charge.

    Four years ago a strong thief entered some house by night in the Street of the Wrestlers, terrified and bound the inmates, and carried away a number of valuable things. Tracked skillfully by the police, he was captured within twenty-four hours,—even before he could dispose of his plunder. But as he was being taken to the police station he burst his bonds, snatched the sword of his captor, killed him, and escaped. Nothing more was heard of him until last week.

    Then a Kumamoto detective, happening to visit the Fukuoka prison, saw among the toilers a face that had been four years photographed upon his brain. Who is that man? he asked the guard. A thief, was the reply,—registered here as Kusabé. The detective walked up to the prisoner and said:—

    Kusabé is not your name. Nomura Teïchi, you are needed in Kumamoto for murder. The felon confessed all.

    I went with a great throng of people to witness the arrival at the station. I expected to hear and see anger; I even feared possibilities of violence. The murdered officer had been much liked; his relatives would certainly be among the spectators; and a Kumamoto crowd is not very gentle. I also thought to find many police on duty. My anticipations were wrong.

    The train halted in the usual scene of hurry and noise,—scurry and clatter of passengers wearing geta,—screaming of boys wanting to sell Japanese newspapers and Kumamoto lemonade. Outside the barrier we waited for nearly five minutes. Then, pushed through the wicket by a police-sergeant, the prisoner appeared,—a large wild-looking man, with head bowed down, and arms fastened behind his back. Prisoner and guard both halted in front of the wicket; and the people pressed forward to see—but in silence. Then the officer called out,—

    Sugihara San! Sugihara O-Kibi! is she present?

    A slight small woman standing near me, with a child on her back, answered, "Hai!" and advanced through the press. This was the widow of the murdered man; the child she carried was his son. At a wave of the officer's hand the crowd fell back, so as to leave a clear space about the prisoner and his escort. In that space the woman with the child stood facing the murderer. The hush was of death.

    Not to the woman at all, but to the child only, did the officer then speak. He spoke low, but so clearly that I could catch every syllable:—

    Little one, this is the man who killed your father four years ago. You had not yet been born; you were in your mother's womb. That you have no father to love you now is the doing of this man. Look at him—[here the officer, putting a hand to the prisoner's chin, sternly forced him to lift his eyes]—look well at him, little boy! Do not be afraid. It is painful; but it is your duty. Look at him!

    Over the mother's shoulder the boy gazed with eyes widely open, as in fear; then he began to sob; then tears came; but steadily and obediently he still looked—looked—looked—straight into the cringing face.

    The crowd seemed to have stopped breathing.

    I saw the prisoner's features distort; I saw him suddenly dash himself down upon his knees despite his fetters, and beat his face into the dust, crying out the while in a passion of hoarse remorse that made one's heart shake:—

    Pardon! pardon! pardon me, little one! That I did—not for hate was it done, but in mad fear only, in my desire to escape. Very, very wicked I have been; great unspeakable wrong have I done you! But now for my sin I go to die. I wish to die; I am glad to die! Therefore, O little one, be pitiful!—forgive me!

    The child still cried silently. The officer raised the shaking criminal; the dumb crowd parted left and right to let them by. Then, quite suddenly, the whole multitude began to sob. And as the bronzed guardian passed, I saw what I had never seen before,—what few men ever see,—what I shall probably never see again,—the tears of a Japanese policeman.

    The crowd ebbed, and left me musing on the strange morality of the spectacle. Here was justice unswerving yet compassionate,—forcing knowledge of a crime by the pathetic witness of its simplest result. Here was desperate remorse, praying only for pardon before death. And here was a populace—perhaps the most dangerous in the Empire when angered—comprehending all, touched by all, satisfied with the contrition and the shame, and filled, not with wrath, but only with the great sorrow of the sin,—through simple deep experience of the difficulties of life and the weaknesses of human nature.

    But the most significant, because the most Oriental, fact of the episode was that the appeal to remorse had been made through the criminal's sense of fatherhood,—that potential love of children which is so large a part of the soul of every Japanese.

    There is a story that the most famous of all Japanese robbers, Ishikawa Goëmon, once by night entering a house to kill and steal, was charmed by the smile of a baby which reached out hands to him, and that he remained playing with the little creature until all chance of carrying out his purpose was lost.

    It is not hard to believe this story. Every year the police records tell of compassion shown to children by professional criminals. Some months ago a terrible murder case was reported in the local papers,—the slaughter of a household by robbers. Seven persons had been literally hewn to pieces while asleep; but the police discovered a little boy quite unharmed, crying alone in a pool of blood; and they found evidence unmistakable that the men who slew must have taken great care not to hurt the child.

    II

    THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION

    I

    WITHOUT losing a single ship or a single battle, Japan has broken down the power of China, made a new Korea, enlarged her own territory, and changed the whole political face of the East. Astonishing as this has seemed politically, it is much more astonishing psychologically; for it represents the result of a vast play of capacities with which the race had never been credited abroad,—capacities of a very high order. The psychologist knows that the so-called adoption of Western civilization within a time of thirty years cannot mean the addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously absent from it. He knows that it cannot mean any sudden change in the mental or moral character of the race. Such changes are not made in a generation. Transmitted civilization works much more slowly, requiring even hundreds of years to produce certain permanent psychological results.

    It is in this light that Japan appears the most extraordinary country in the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole episode of her Occidentalization is that the race brain could bear so heavy a shock. Nevertheless, though the fact be unique in human history, what does it really mean? Nothing more than rearrangement of a part of the preexisting machinery of thought. Even that, for thousands of brave young minds, was death. The adoption of Western civilization was not nearly such an easy matter as unthinking persons imagined. And it is quite evident that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which remains to be told, have given good results only along directions in which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds. Thus, the appliances of Western industrial invention have worked admirably in Japanese hands,—have produced excellent results in those crafts at which the nation had been skillful, in other and quainter ways, for ages. There has been no transformation,—nothing more than the turning of old abilities into new and larger channels. The scientific professions tell the same story. For certain forms of science, such as medicine, surgery (there are no better surgeons in the world than the Japanese), chemistry, microscopy, the Japanese genius is naturally adapted; and in all these it has done work already heard of round the world. In war and statecraft it has shown wonderful power; but throughout their history the Japanese have been characterized by great military and political capacity. Nothing remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign to the national genius. In the study, for example, of Western music, Western art, Western literature, time would seem to have been simply wasted.¹ These things make appeal extraordinary to emotional life with us; they make no such appeal to Japanese emotional life. Every serious thinker knows that emotional transformation of the individual through education is impossible. To imagine that the emotional character of an Oriental race could be transformed in the short space of thirty years, by the contact of Occidental ideas, is absurd. Emotional life, which is older than intellectual life, and deeper, can no more be altered suddenly by a change of milieu than the surface of a mirror can be changed by passing reflections. All that Japan has been able to do so miraculously well has been done without any self-transformation; and those who imagine her emotionally closer to us today than she may have been thirty years ago ignore facts of science which admit of no argument.

    Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can never be real to more than a small extent outside of the simplest phases of common emotional life,—those phases in which child and man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For converse reasons, the Japanese cannot, even though they would, give Europeans their best sympathy.

    But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to discern the true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or emotional (since the one is woven into the other), it is equally impossible for him to escape the conviction that, compared with his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds delicate potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable manifestations. So judging, what a contrast between the emotional and intellectual worlds of West and East! Far less striking that between the frail wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the tremendous solidity of a thoroughfare in Paris or London. When one compares the utterances which West and East have given to their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations,—a Gothic cathedral with a Shintō temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a Japanese poem,—how incalculable the difference in emotional volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our music is an essentially modern art; but in looking back through all our past the difference in creative force is scarcely less marked,—not surely in the period of Roman magnificence, of marble amphitheatres and of aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in the Greek period of the divine in sculpture and of the supreme in literature.

    And this leads to the subject of another wonderful fact in the sudden development of Japanese power. Where are the outward material signs of that immense new force she has been showing both in productivity and in war? Nowhere! That which we miss in her emotional and intellectual life is missing also from her industrial and commercial life,—largeness! The land remains what it was before; its face has scarcely been modified by all the changes of Meiji. The miniature railways and telegraph poles, the bridges and tunnels, might almost escape notice in the ancient green of the landscapes. In all the cities, with the exception of the open ports and their little foreign settlements, there exists hardly a street vista suggesting the teaching of Western ideas. You might journey two hundred miles through the interior of the country, looking in vain for large manifestations of the new civilization. In no place do you find commerce exhibiting its ambition in gigantic warehouses, or industry expanding its machinery under acres of roofing. A Japanese city is still, as it was ten centuries ago, little more than a wilderness of wooden sheds,—picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are, but scarcely less frail. And there is no great stir and noise anywhere,—no heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious haste. In Tōkyō itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a country village. This want of visible or audible signs of the new-found force which is now menacing the markets of the West and changing the maps of the Far East gives one a queer, I might even say a weird feeling. It is almost the sensation received when, after climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shintō shrine, you find voidness only and solitude,—an elfish, empty little wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old. The strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs little material display: both exist where the deepest real power of any great people exists,—in the Race Ghost.

    II

    As I muse, the remembrance of a great city comes back to me,—a city walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea. The memory of that roar returns first; then the vision defines: a chasm, which is a street, between mountains, which are houses. I am tired, because I have walked many miles between those precipices of masonry, and have trodden no earth,—only slabs of rock,—and have heard nothing but thunder of tumult. Deep below those huge pavements I know there is a cavernous world tremendous: systems underlying systems of ways contrived for water and steam and fire. On either hand tower façades pierced by scores of tiers of windows,—cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun. Above, the pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,—an infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right there dwell nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice facing it pay the annual rent of a million dollars. Seven millions scarcely covered the cost of those bulks overshadowing the square beyond,—and there are miles of such. Stairways of steel and cement, of brass and stone, with costliest balustrades, ascend through the decades and double-decades of stories; but no foot treads them. By water-power, by steam, by electricity, men go up and down; the heights are too dizzy, the distances too great, for the use of the limbs. My friend who pays rent of five thousand dollars for his rooms in the fourteenth story of a monstrosity not far off has never trodden his stairway. I am walking for curiosity alone; with a serious purpose I should not walk; the spaces are too broad, the time is too precious, for such slow exertion,—men travel from district to district, from house to office, by steam. Heights are too great for the voice to traverse; orders are given and obeyed by machinery. By electricity far-away doors are opened; with one touch a hundred rooms are lighted or heated.

    And all this enormity is hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and durability. These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business structures, of buildings describable and indescribable, are not beautiful, but sinister. One feels depressed by the mere sensation of the enormous life which created them, life without sympathy; of their prodigious manifestation of power, power without pity. They are the architectural utterance of the new industrial age. And there is no halt in the thunder of wheels, in the storming of hoofs and of human feet. To ask a question, one must shout into the ear of the questioned; to see, to understand, to move in that high-pressure medium, needs experience. The unaccustomed feels the sensation of being in a panic, in a tempest, in a cyclone. Yet all this is order.

    The monster streets leap rivers, span seaways, with bridges of stone, bridges of steel. Far as the eye can reach, a bewilderment of masts, a web-work of rigging, conceals the shores, which are cliffs of masonry. Trees in a forest stand less thickly, branches in a forest mingle less closely, than the masts and spars of that immeasurable maze. Yet all is order.

    III

    Generally speaking, we construct for endurance, the Japanese for impermanency. Few things for common use are made in Japan with a view to durability. The straw sandals worn out and replaced at each stage of a journey; the robe consisting of a few simple widths loosely stitched together for wearing, and unstitched again for washing; the fresh chopsticks served to each new guest at a hotel; the light shōji frames serving at once for windows and walls, and repapered twice a year; the mattings renewed every autumn,—all these are but random examples of countless small things in daily life that illustrate the national contentment with impermanency.

    What is the story of a common Japanese dwelling? Leaving my home in the morning, I observe, as I pass the corner of the next street crossing mine, some men setting up bamboo poles on a vacant lot there. Returning after five hours' absence, I find on the same lot the skeleton of a two-story house. Next forenoon I see that the walls are nearly finished already,—mud and wattles. By sundown the roof has been completely tiled. On the following morning I observe that the mattings have been put down, and the inside plastering has been finished. In five days the house is completed. This, of course, is a cheap building; a fine one would take much longer to put up and finish. But Japanese cities are for the most part composed of such common buildings. They are as cheap as they are simple.

    I cannot now remember where I first met with the observation that the curve of the Chinese roof might preserve the memory of the nomad tent. The idea haunted me long after I had ungratefully forgotten the book in which I found it; and when I first saw, in Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shintō temples, with queer cross-projections at their gable-ends and upon their roof-ridges, the suggestion of the forgotten essayist about the possible origin of much less ancient forms returned to me with great force. But there is much in Japan besides primitive architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for the race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people, except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact that even during the comparatively brief period of her written history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which the greater number have completely disappeared, it may be broadly stated that every Japanese city is rebuilt within the time of a generation. Some temples and a few colossal fortresses offer exceptions; but, as a general rule, the Japanese city changes its substance, if not its form, in the lifetime of a man. Fires, earthquakes, and many other causes partly account for this; the chief reason, however, is that houses are not built to last. The common people have no ancestral homes. The dearest spot to all is, not the place of birth, but the place of burial; and there is little that is permanent save the resting-places of the dead and the sites of the ancient shrines.

    The land itself is a land of impermanence. Rivers shift their courses, coasts their outline, plains their level; volcanic peaks heighten or crumble; valleys are blocked by lava-floods or landslides; lakes appear and disappear. Even the matchless shape of Fuji, that snowy miracle which has been the inspiration of artists for centuries, is said to have been slightly changed since my advent to the country; and not a few other mountains have in the same short time taken totally new forms. Only the general lines of the land, the general aspects of its nature, the general character of the seasons, remain fixed. Even the very beauty of the landscapes is largely illusive,—a beauty of shifting colors and moving mists. Only he to whom those landscapes are familiar can know how their mountain vapors make mockery of real changes which have been, and ghostly predictions of other changes yet to be, in the history of the archipelago.

    The gods, indeed, remain,—haunt their homes upon the hills, diffuse a soft religious

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1