Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/28

 There are few countries where rain falls as in Japan. The dear idols must be wet under the rain even now while you and I talk right here.”

When I reached my hotel and sat myself on the cushion, and after a while began to smoke, my mind roamed leisurely from the idols under the rains to the man wet through by the rains of failure; and now it reflected on this and that, and then it recalled that and this. Oh, how can I forget the very words of that reporter of one Francisco paper who mystified, startled, and shocked me, well, by his ignorance or wisdom seven years ago? I said to him on being asked why I returned home that I was going to hunt after the Nirvana; he looked up with a half-humorous smile and said, “That's so! But let me ask you with pardon, are you not rather too late in the season for that?”

It seems that it is too late now even in Japan to get the Nirvana, as that San Francisco reporter said. How can I get it, the capital-lettered Nirvana, even at Nikko, when I could not find it in London and New York? I laughed on my silliness of thought that I might Rh