Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/237

 love also to tell of the peonies of Ono-no-Komachi, the celebrated poetess, whose life included the most luxurious and the most illustrious experiences, as well as the most miserable and the most abject, that ever fell to the lot of an Oriental lady. In the village where she was born a shrine stands dedicated to her memory, and near it grow ninety-nine peony-trees, planted by her own hand, just a thousand years ago, and now tended by her spirit. From time to time a few of the little trees were transplanted to some city garden for the sake of their magnificent blossoms, but invariably they pined away and would have perished had they not been carried back to their old place beside the shrine, where the homage of all sympathetic souls is paid to them still under the name of Komachi-Shakuyaku.

Tombstones, too, are supposed to have healing power. A fragment of the Sankatsu sepulchre in Ōsaka, if powdered and drunk with water, cures consumption; and the tomb of a green-grocer's daughter, Oshichi, in Tōkyō, if similarly treated, has the property of conferring an exceptional capacity for wine-bibbing.

Buddhism, with its worlds of hungry devils and of infernal beings, and its realistic pictures of the torments suffered by the souls of men in the kingdom of the god of Hades (Yemma), is responsible for the Japanese people's conception of an anthropomorphic demon (oni). They represent him with horns, a vast, heavy-fanged mouth,