OUT OF THE STREET

I

"THESE," said Manyemon, putting on the table a roll of wonderfully written Japanese manuscript, "are Vulgar Songs. If they are to be spoken of in some honorable book, perhaps it will be good to say that they are Vulgar, so that Western people may not be deceived."

Next to my house there is a vacant lot, where washermen (sentakuya) work in the ancient manner,--singing as they work, and whipping the wet garments upon big flat stones. Every morning at daybreak their singing wakens me; and I like to listen to it, though I cannot often catch the words. It is fall of long, queer, plaintive modulations. Yesterday, the apprentice--a lad of fifteen--and the master of the washermen were singing alternately,

as if answering each other; the contrast between the tones of the man, sonorous as if boomed through a conch, and the clarion alto of the boy, being very pleasant to bear. Whereupon I called Manyemon and asked him what the singing was about.

"The song of the boy," he said, "is an old song:--

Things never changed since the Time of the Gods
The flowing of water, the Way of Love.

I heard it often when I was myself a boy." And the other song? "The other song is probably new:--

Three years thought of her,
Five years sought for her;
Only for one night held her in my arms.

A very foolish song!"

"I don't know," I said. "There are famous Western romances containing nothing wiser. And what is the rest of the song?"

"There is no more: that is the whole of the song. If it be honorably desired, I can write down the songs of the washermen, and the songs which are sung in this street by the smiths and the carpenters and the bamboo-weavers

and the rice-cleaners. But they are all nearly the same."

Thus came it to pass that Manyemon made for me a collection of Vulgar Songs.

By "vulgar" Manyemon meant written in the speech of the common people. He is himself an adept at classical verse, and despises the hayari-uta, or ditties of the day; it requires something very delicate to please him. And what pleases him I am not qualified to write about; for one must be a very good Japanese scholar to meddle with the superior varieties of Japanese poetry. If you care to know how difficult the subject is, just study the chapter on prosody in Aston's Grammar of the Japanese Written Language, or the introduction to Professor Chamberlain's Classical Poetry of the Japanese. Her poetry is the one original art which Japan has certainly not borrowed either from China or from any other country; and its most refined charm is the essence, irreproducible, of the very flower of the language itself: hence the difficulty of representing, even partially, in any Western tongue, its subtler delicacies of sentiment,