three hundred dollars!...



I wonder what would be said if the city-government of Tokyo -- which is
aggressively scientific and progressive -- were suddenly to command that
all water-surfaces in the Buddhist cemeteries should be covered, at regular
intervals, with a film of kerosene oil! How could the religion which
prohibits the taking of any life -- even of invisible life -- yield to such
a mandate? Would filial piety even dream of consenting to obey such an
order? And then to think of the cost, in labor and time, of putting
kerosene oil, every seven days, into the millions of mizutame, and the tens
of millions of bamboo flower-cups, in the Tokyo graveyards!... Impossible!
To free the city from mosquitoes it would be necessary to demolish the
ancient graveyards;-- and that would signify the ruin of the Buddhist
temples attached to them;-- and that would mean the disparition of so many
charming gardens, with their lotus-ponds and Sanscrit-lettered monuments
and humpy bridges and holy groves and weirdly-smiling Buddhas! So the
extermination of the Culex fasciatus would involve the destruction of the
poetry of the ancestral cult,-- surely too great a price to pay!...



Besides, I should like, when my time comes, to be laid away in some
Buddhist graveyard of the ancient kind,-- so that my ghostly company should
be ancient, caring nothing for the fashions and the changes and the
disintegrations of Meiji (1). That old cemetery behind my garden would be a
suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty of exceeding
and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been shaped by some old,
old ideal which no longer exists in any living brain; even the shadows are