Lafcadio Hearn

1 Mionoseki

2 Zashiki, the best and largest room of a Japanese dwelling - the guest- room of a private house, or the banquet-room of a public inn.

1

KITZUKI, July 20, 1891.

AKIRA is no longer with me. He has gone to Kyoto, the holy Buddhist city, to edit a Buddhist magazine; and I already feel without him like one who has lost his way - despite his reiterated assurances that he could never be of much service to me in Izumo, as he knew nothing about Shinto.

1 Fourteenth of August.

2 In the pretty little seaside hotel Inaba-ya, where I lived during my stay in Kitzuki, the kind old hostess begged her guests with almost tearful earnestness not to leave the house during the Minige.

3 There are ten rin to one sen, and ten mon to one rin, on one hundred to one sen. The majority of the cheap toys sold at the matsuri cost from two to nine rin. The rin is a circular copper coin with a square hole in the middle for stringing purposes.

KITZUKI, August 10, 1891.

1 This deity is seldom called by his full name, which has been shortened by common usage from Susano-o-no-mikoto.

2 A kichinyado is an inn at which the traveller is charged only the price of the wood used for fuel in cooking his rice.

3 The thick fine straw mats, fitted upon the floor of every Japanese room, are always six feet long by three feet broad. The largest room in the ordinary middle-class house is a room of eight mats. A room of one hundred mats is something worth seeing.

by Lafcadio Hearn

"Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back
to a time of rigid and pervading discipline" - WALTER BAGEHOT.

by Lafcadio Hearn