"I shall go with you at once," he said. "But what did you think
of the personages?"

"To Western thinking," I made answer, "Shinzaburo is a despicable
creature. I have been mentally comparing him with the true lovers
of our old ballad-literature. They were only too glad to follow a
dead sweetheart into the grave; and nevertheless, being
Christians, they believed that they had only one human life to
enjoy in this world. But Shinzaburo was a Buddhist,--with a
million lives behind him and a million lives before him; and he
was too selfish to give up even one miserable existence for the
sake of the girl that came back to him from the dead. Then he was
even more cowardly than selfish. Although a samurai by birth and
training, he had to beg a priest to save him from ghosts. In
every way he proved himself contemptible; and O-Tsuyu did quite
right in choking him to death."

"From the Japanese point of view, likewise," my friend responded,
"Shinzaburo is rather contemptible. But the use of this weak
character helped the author to develop incidents that could not
otherwise, perhaps, have been so effectively managed. To my
thinking, the only attractive character in the story is that of
O-Yone: type of the old-time loyal and loving servant,--
intelligent, shrewd, full of resource,--faithful not only unto
death, but beyond death.... Well, let us go to Shin-Banzui-In."


We found the temple uninteresting, and the cemetery an
abomination of desolation. Spaces once occupied by graves had