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There was nothing to distinguish them except the different woods used in their ceilings and walls, a distinction which betrayed its costliness and its taste only to the practised eye. Each room was spotless and absolutely bare, with golden tatami, rice-straw mats with edgings of black braid, fixed into the flooring, by whose number the size of a Japanese room is measured.
The multitudes of fleas that infest the normal Japanese home are convincing proof of the real state of the "tatami." There are those who declare that a Japanese crowd has the least offensive odor of any people in the world. One writer goes so far as to state that not only is there no unpleasant odor whatever, but that there is even a pleasant intimation of lavender about their exhalations.
But grave memories were flung into her consciousness that sobered her frivolity: she remembered being in Japan waiting for Michael to return from his dates with Kato. Sitting on her futon on the tatami of her living room, she would blow into the shakuhachi, that wailing instrument that was the only thing she could communicate with in a grief so tacit and incommunicable.
Fujinami's study like all Japanese rooms, a square box with wooden framework, wooden ceiling, sliding paper shoji, pale golden tatami and double alcove.
You see they are just laying down the tatami: and when that is done the house will be ready. Besides, I feel so well here. I like the heat." "But I've never been away without you!" objected Geoffrey, "I think it would be beastly." This side of the question had not struck Asako. She was so taken up with her project. Now, however, she felt a momentary thrill of relief.
From the house could be heard the swish of the maids' brooms brushing the tatami, and the flip-flap of their paper flickers, like horses' tails, with which they dislodged the dust from the walls and cornices. A big black crow had been perched on one of the cherry-trees in the garden. He rose with a shaking of branches and a flapping of broad black wings.
Before us, as we steamed on, the sea-surface appeared to become suddenly speckled with queer craft previously invisible light, long fishing- boats, with immense square sails of a beautiful yellow colour. I could not help remarking to my comrade how pretty those sails were; he laughed, and told me they were made of old tatami.
The use of the tatami was greatly extended after the twelfth century. No longer laid on the dais only, these mats were used to cover the whole of the floors, and presently they were supplemented by cushions made of silk crepe stuffed with cotton-wool. In the great majority of cases, roofs were covered with boards.
Still they were nexuses; and as fulsomely inconsequential as they might seem to others if they were able to peer into his sordid domain and not be repulsed by these orgies on tatami mats, still they were human connections; and it was human connections that were a man's life raft and dinghy when floating in the empty effluvia of self, water, space, and time.
After his shower, a brief phase in the hot whirlpool, and a second cool shower, he put on a robe from those that were on hangers and went to a hallway of rooms where orgies were in progress. Some men in the hallway wandered from room to room, selective of that which most excited them on the tatami mats of the floors.
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