become for the first time conscious that a crowd has gathered about me,
-tanned kindly-faced labourers from the fields, and mothers with their
babies on their backs, and school children, and jinricksha men, all
wondering that a stranger should be thus interested in their gods. And
although the pressure about me is very, very gentle, like a pressure of
tepid water for gentleness, I feel a little embarrassed. I give back the
old kakemono to the guardian, make my offering to the god, and take my
leave of Koshin and his good servant.

All the kind oblique eyes follow me as I go. And something like a
feeling of remorse seizes me at thus abruptly abandoning the void,
dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless
lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its
kindly guardian whom I see still watching my retreating steps, with the
yellow kakemono in his hand. The whistle of a locomotive warns me that I
shall just have time to catch the train. For Western civilisation has
invaded all this primitive peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways
of iron. This is not of thy roads, O Koshin!--the old gods are dying
along its ash-strewn verge!




Chapter Five At the Market of the Dead

1

IT is just past five o'clock in the afternoon. Through the open door of
my little study the rising breeze of evening is beginning to disturb the
papers on my desk, and the white fire of the Japanese sun is taking that