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Updated: June 7, 2025
Each man had his own little table and eight or ten separate dishes, a bottle of saki, tea-pipe, and hibatchi, arranged exactly as ours had been at the tea-house at Yokohama. How well they managed their chop-sticks, how quickly they shovelled the food down, and how clean they left each dish! Habit is everything.
Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise Omar Khayyam's mocking lines: And fear not lest Existence, closing your Account and mine, should know the like no more; The Eternal Saki from that bowl hath pour'd Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.
It was a general reception day. Whenever a Chinaman met an acquaintance, putting his hands in the wide, flowing sleeves of his gown, he greeted him with many bows, wished him a happy New Year, and invited him to have a cup of tea or saki. Even the poorest people had saved up enough to take part in the celebration. All over the great city joy reigned.
Passepartout wandered for several hours in the midst of this motley crowd, looking in at the windows of the rich and curious shops, the jewellery establishments glittering with quaint Japanese ornaments, the restaurants decked with streamers and banners, the tea-houses, where the odorous beverage was being drunk with saki, a liquor concocted from the fermentation of rice, and the comfortable smoking-houses, where they were puffing, not opium, which is almost unknown in Japan, but a very fine, stringy tobacco.
His second daughter, whose name was Saki, sixteen years of age, was married to one Tôjiurô, chief of a village on the property of my lord Naitô Geki. No punishment was decreed against these two women.
Saki is a kind of spirit, distilled from rice, always drunk hot out of small cups. It is not unpleasant in this state, but when cold few European palates can relish it. The Japanese cookery was very good, though some of the dishes were compounded of ingredients not generally mixed together by the cooks of the West. Here is the bill of fare: Soup. Shrimps and Seaweeds.
It must be remembered that during the meal, which lasted from seven until past midnight, saki was served constantly yet no one felt its influence in more than a sense of increased exhilaration. It is customary to let the emptied bottles remain on the table until the close of the meal, and there was a mighty showing.
Perhaps the words of the old Khayyam will come to him: "And fear not lest Existence, closing your Account and mine, should know the like no more; The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour." Or,
In a nearby tavern he waited for Totu for that was the youth's name knowing that while the missioners and their pupils were at table, he was accustomed to come here for a glass of saki, a wine made from burnt rice. When he entered, Lihoa went and sat down beside him, addressed him as cousin, and ordered and paid for a second glass of saki.
The torpedo-boats' crews made much of us and, I believe, would have given us everything they had, if we would have taken it; but I contented myself with a pannikin of saki, to counteract the cold of my drenched clothing, and then asked them to run me off alongside my own ship, the Kasanumi, which was hove-to about a mile further out.
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