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He lisped and laughed and held out his arms, being evidently used to petting; and while playing with him I looked closely at the tablet. It was a Shinshu ihai, bearing a woman's kaimyo, or posthumous name; and Manyemon translated the Chinese characters for me: Revered and of good rank in the Mansion of Excellence, the thirty-first day of the third month of the twenty-eighth year of Meiji.
The best room is placed at our disposal; but I linger awhile to examine a very fine shoryobune, waiting, upon a bench near the street entrance, to be launched to-morrow. It seems to have been finished but a short time ago; for fresh clippings of straw lie scattered around it, and the kaimyo has not yet been written upon its sail.
The poorest people, unable to afford such handsome tablets, have ihai made of plain wood; and the kaimyo is sometimes simply written on these in black characters; but more commonly it is written upon a strip of white paper, which is then pasted upon the ihai with rice-paste. The living name is perhaps inscribed upon the back of the tablet.
But the widower is never called by his kaimyo, as is the widow. The first religious duty of the morning in a Buddhist household is to set before the tablets of the dead a little cup of tea, made with the first hot water prepared O-Hotoke-San-nio-cha-to-ageru.
The good old priest, to comfort her, chanted a sutra over the bier of her lost playmate, and bestowed upon it a high-sounding Buddhist kaimyo which Kano carved, in his finest manner, upon a wooden grave post. In time, the artist forgot the episode. Mata never forgot. Often in the long hours she thought of it now as she watched the girl's face bent always so silently above the bridal sewing.
They are much more elaborately and expensively constructed on this coast than in some other parts of Japan; for though made of straw only, woven over a skeleton framework, they are charming models of junks, complete in every detail. Some are between three and four feet long. On the white paper sail is written the kaimyo or soul-name of the dead.
However these high things might be, Mata knew she had gained strange comfort in the very fact of Tatsu's presence, in the companionship of his suffering. When, being nourished, Tatsu insisted on sitting upright, and had recalled the scene about him, his first question was of Umè's shrine, where the ihai had been set, and what the kaimyo.
When a husband dies, two ihai are made, in case the wife resolves never to marry again. On one of these the kaimyo of the dead man is painted in characters of gold, and on the other that of the living widow; but, in the latter case, the first character of the kaimyo is painted in red, and the other characters in gold. These two tablets are then placed in the household butsuma.
In that gray cemetery on the further slope Kano's wife, the young mother who died so long ago that Umè-ko could not remember her at all, slept beneath a granite shaft which said, "A Flower having blossomed in the Night, the Halls of the Gods are fragrant." This was the Buddhist kaimyo, or priestly invocation to the spirit of the dead.
Sometimes, I fear, the offering is forgotten, for I have seen rows of cups containing only dust, the fault, perhaps, of some lazy acolyte. 16 This is a fine example of a samurai kaimyo The kaimyo of kwazoku or samurai are different from those of humbler dead; and a Japanese, by a single glance at an ihai, can tell at once to what class of society the deceased belonged, by the Buddhist words used.
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