United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But shadows on shoji are so remarkable as to suggest explanation of certain Japanese faculties of drawing by no means primitive, but developed beyond all parallel, and otherwise difficult to account for. Of course, the quality of Japanese paper, which takes shadows better than any frosted glass, must be considered, and also the character of the shadows themselves.
At night the perfume crept in to him through crannies of the close-shut amado and shoji, revivifying, to keen agony, his longing for his wife. There were moonlit nights he could not rest for it, but would rise, pacing the cold, wet pebbles of the garden, or wandering, like a distracted spirit that had lost its way, through the thoroughfares of the sleeping town.
At last, Asako said helplessly: "Is he dead?" The cook, a man, was glad of the opportunity to escape. "I go and call doctor," he said. "No, stay with me," said Asako; "I am afraid. O Hana can go for the doctor." Asako and the cook waited by the open shoji, staring blankly at the body of Ito. Presently the cook said that he must go and get something. He did not return. Asako called to him to come.
The June sun, pouring through the open shoji, illuminates an artistic confusion of brasses gracefully shaped and multi-coloured things images, lanterns, paintings, gilded inscriptions, pendent scrolls. There are three altars. Above the central altar Amida Buddha sits enthroned on his mystic golden lotus in the attitude of the Teacher.
The shoji, or sliding partitions, were drawn together, and in the dim mellow light which filtered through these opaque walls they saw Onoye. She was stretched on the mat which is the usual Japanese bed, her neck on the uncomfortable little pillow bench. With a murmur of surprise and apology, she pulled herself weakly to her knees and touched her forehead to the floor.
All at once it seemed to Umè-ko an unbearable thing for any spark of life to be so prisoned. She longed to set him free, but even though she opened wide her shoji, the outer night-doors, the amado stretched, a relentless opaque wall, along the four sides of the house. She lay quiet now for a long time. "I will return with the sun," he had said.
It is devoted entirely to chrysanthemum plants, which are shielded from heavy rain and strong sun by slanting frames of light wood fashioned, like shoji with panes of white paper, and supported like awnings upon thin posts of bamboo.
By the light thus given the room stood revealed, an eyrie, encased on all sides except the one of approach by shoji only. Into these had been let a belt of glass eighteen inches wide all the way round the room, at the height at which a person sitting on the mats could see out. It is much the fashion now thus to graft a Western window upon a Far-Eastern wall.
"Oh, Yes," said Little Silver to herself, as she remembered how her father had said of a certain neighbor who had lately been drinking hard, "he swills saké like a Shōji." She also understood why picnic or "chow-chow" boxes were often decorated with pictures of Shōji, with their cups and dippers.
It was, perhaps, the clamor of these feathered parents that, at last, awoke old Mata in her sleeping closet near the kitchen. She turned drowsily. The presence of an unusual light under the shoji brought her to her knees. The amado in the further part of the house were undoubtedly open. Could robbers have come in the night? And were her master and Miss Umè weltering in gore?
Word Of The Day