Lafcadio Hearn "In A Japanese Garden"part2

from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" 1894
renewal!

since8/31/98




The garden on the south side




Japanese version is here







The whole effect is that of the shores of a still stream in some lovely, lonesome, drowsy place.
There is nothing to break the illusion, so secluded the garden is. High walls and fences shut out streets and contiguous things; and the shrubs and the trees, heightening and thickening toward the boundaries, conceal from view even the roofs of the neighboring katchiu-yashiki. Softly beautiful are the tremulous shadows of leaves on the sunned sand; and the scent of flowers comes thinly sweet with every waft of tepid air; and there is a humming of bees.









There are large rocks in it, heavily mossed; and divers fantastic basins of stone for holding water;

    And a shachihoko, such as one sees at the peaked angles of castle roofs - a great stone fish, an idealizes porpoise, wish its nose in the ground and its tail in the air.


Floewrs in summer garden of Hearn's dwelling.
Kikyo, kawaranadesiko, and manryo.


And there are long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river bank; and there are green knolls like islets. All these verdant elevations rise from spaces of pale yellow sands, smooth as a surface of silk and miming the curves and meanderings of a river course.
    I do not know what human sentiment the principal division of my garden was intended to reflect; and there is none to tell me.

    But as a poem of nature it requires no interpreter.




another pictures are here 10/6/1998


    Screens of bamboos and woven rushes, with wide gateless openings in their midst, mark the boundaries of the three divisions of the pleasure-grounds.




Please go to

the second garden, on the north side.






to "In A Japanese Garden"
to the third garden
extre version

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