Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/294

256 scenes in which he lived. Even his drawings of Fuji, the holy mountain, are defiled by grinning carpenters and ostlers." He promised to show me specimens of what his countrymen considered far higher art when we should reach his father's house, and in effect, when we were seated in a pretty tea-room, overlooking a large garden, he unrolled for me some fine kakemono by Sesshu, Yeitoku, and Kiyonaga, which his family cherished with intense veneration. But nothing could arouse in me the enthusiasm which he evidently felt for three or four pieces of Chinese calligraphy. There was, of course, no colour in such masterpieces, no historic or anecdotic interest, for he assured me that the words themselves had no particular depth or beauty. Their sole charm consisted in the divine sureness of touch, which had traced the intricate flying characters through a maze of stroke and curve, and it seemed to my untrained intelligence that to appreciate them properly one must be a brush rather than a man.

From kakemono we turned to masks, of which he had a splendid collection. Students of Japanese demonology could have told me many weird stories of the cruel, leering monsters, whose faces reflected so vividly the devilish imagination of their makers. But Kishimoto only knew one story, and that rather a pretty one, concerning Kijin, whose rank in the diabolic hierarchy I have not been able to ascertain. He had it from a Buddhist nun, his aunt, and it bears every mark of having been invented pour les jeunes filles.

. "When her mother died O Kamma was so overcome with grief that she lost for a time all interest