Page:Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan, volume 2.pdf/129

Rh to themselves as soon as he turned his head away for one moment.

At first the Naigu put it down to the fact that his face had somewhat changed in appearance; yet even this did not thoroughly convince him, but,—of course this must be the reason for the laughter of the chudoji and the gehoshi. Though their laughter was the ordinary kind of laughter, he observed something different in their mirth, something which was never there before when his nose was long. We may even say that the shortened nose looked more of a caricature than the long nose to which they were accustomed. If he could feel satisfied with such an explanation of their mirth, it would have been all right, but there was still something in their laughter which he could not explain.

“They certainly never laughed at me in this way before!” The Naigu used to stop in the middle of reading the sutras, and inclining his bald head on one side, he would murmur this to himself. The loving-hearted Naigu, when he was thus meditating, absentmindedly allowed his gaze to wander to the portrait of “Fugen” (a Buddhist Saint), and he thought about the length of his nose as it had been a few days before, and somehow he felt distressed at heart like one in humble circumstances who recollects his prosperoueprosperous [sic] past. The Naigu was clever enough to find somr answer to this worrying problems: From the human heart there springs two different kinds of feelings. Of course there are people who sympathise with the