W: LP: GRP: LH: Japan, p1

Lafcadio Hearn's "Japan" is divided into two major sections: The Land and The People. I am still in the first section and have just completed the chapter entitled The Chief City of the Province of Gods. I just wanted to stop here and quote a small passage to show how poetic a writer LH is in describing this new world he had come to live in. This is from the above mentioned chapter on LH's visit to Matsue:

There are no such sunsets in Japan as in the tropics: the light is gentle as a light of dreams; they are no furies of color; there are no chromatic violences inn nature in this Orient. All in sea or sky is tint rather than color, and tint vapor-toned. I think that the exquisite taste of the race in the matter of colors and tints, as exemplified in the dyes of their wonderful textures, is largely attributable to the sober and delicate beauty of nature's tones in this all-temperate world where nothing is garish.

Before me the fair vast lake sleeps, softly luminous, far-ringed with chains of blue volcanic hills shaped like a sierra. On my right, at its eastern end, the most ancient quarter of the city spreads its roofs of blue-gray tile; the houses crowd thickly down to the shore, to dip their wooden feet into the flood. With a glass I can see my own windows and the far spreading of the roofs beyond, and above all else the green citadel with its grim castle, grotesquely peaked. The sun begins to set, and exquisite astonishments of tinting appear in water and sky.

Dead rich purples cloud broadly behind and above the indigo blackness of the serrated hills--mist purples, fading upward smokily into faint vermilions and dim gold, which again melt up through ghostliest greens into the blue. The deeper waters of the lake, far away, take a tender violet indescribable, and the silhouette of the pine-shadowed island seems to float in that sea of soft sweet color. But the shallower and nearer is cut from the deeper water by the current as sharply as by a line drawn, and all the surface on this side of that line is a shimmering bronze,--old rich ruddy gold-bronze.

All the fainter colors change every five minutes,--wondrously change and shift like tones and shades of fine shot-silks.

The author draws such pictures with words throughout his work and in between these word-paintings, he also includes short little tales from myth and legend which I find very interesting. It makes me want to study the history of Japan in more depth especially the early history as it fades backward in time to prehistory and legend.

This book is worth a read even if just to experience a poetic word-painting of an enchanted land.