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Updated: June 17, 2025
Surely the sweet, wandering soul was now to be given its kaimyo, was to be soothed by prayer, and be refreshed by the ghostly essence of tea and rice and fruit, placed before its ihai upon the shrine! What must the dead girl's mother have been thinking all this time? Mata woke before the dawn to pray. Kano, too, was awake early. She hurried to him, her first words a petition.
Furthermore, the wife loses her living name among all her friends and relatives, and is thereafter addressed only by a fragment of her kaimyo as, for example, 'Shin-toku-in-San, an abbreviation of the much longer and more sonorous posthumous name, Shin-toku-in-den-joyo-teiso-daishi.
As a general rule all this is richly lacquered and gilded; the tablet itself being lacquered in black, and bearing the posthumous name, or kaimyo, in letters of gold ken-mu-ji-sho-shin-ji, or other syllables indicating the supposed virtues of the departed.
They returned, some hours later, and were busied all the afternoon with the placing and decorations of an exquisite "butsu-dan," or Buddhist shelf, on which the ihai of the dead are placed. Kano, visiting it, unperceived, next day, noted with the same curious, half-quizzical, half-pathetic look that no Buddhist kaimyo or after-name had been given to his daughter.
And she sometimes also writes upon the papers words signifying 'For the sake of . . inscribing never the living, but the kaimyo or soul-name only, which the Buddhist priest has given to the dead, and which is written also upon the little commemorative tablet kept within the Buddhist household shrine, or butsuma. Doubtless this pious little woman, praying beside me in the dusk, is very poor.
She tells us that the shoryobune is to be launched for her husband and brother both fishermen of the village, who perished in sight of their own home eight years ago. The priest of the neighbouring Zen temple is to come in the morning to write the kaimyo upon the sail, as none of the household are skilled in writing the Chinese characters.
Thus to be called by one's kaimyo is at once an honour to the memory of the husband and the constancy of the bereaved wife. A precisely similar pledge is taken by a man after the loss of a wife to whom he was passionately attached; and one crimson letter upon his ihai registers the vow not only in the home but also in the place of public worship.
"Here lie the clean ashes of my young wife, Kano Uta-ko," said the old man, without preface or explanation. "In former days, before before my illness, I came here often," said the other. His eyes hung on the written words of the kaimyo. "If you grieved deeply, it must have been great solace that you could come thus to her grave," he added wistfully.
Entering alone softly, he perceived that the woman was lying there, wrapped in a single thin and tattered futon, seemingly asleep. On a rude shelf he recognised the butsudan of' forty years before, with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning in front of the kaimyo.
You learn that the kaimyo upon the tablet is that of a geisha; and that the comrades of the dead girl assemble in the temple on certain days to gladden her spirit with songs and dances. Then whosoever pleases may attend the ceremony free of charge. But the dancing-girls of ancient times were not as the geisha of to-day.
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