wers is a tea-house, an elegant
rendezvous. There I should inquire for a certain Kangourou-San, who is at
the same time interpreter, laundryman, and confidential agent for the
intercourse of races. Perhaps this very evening, if all went well, I
should be introduced to the bride destined for me by mysterious fate.
This thought kept my mind on the alert during the panting journey we
made, the djin and I, one dragging the other, under the merciless
downpour.

Oh, what a curious Japan I saw that day, through the gaping of my
oilcloth coverings, from under the dripping hood of my little cart! A
sullen, muddy, half-drowned Japan. All these houses, men, and beasts,
hitherto known to me only in drawings; all these, that I had beheld
painted on blue or pink backgrounds of fans or vases, now appeared to me
in their hard reality, under a dark sky, with umbrellas and wooden shoes,
with tucked-up skirts and pitiful aspect.

At times the rain fell so heavily that I closed up tightly every chink
and crevice, and the noise and shaking benumbed me, so that I completely
forgot in what country I was. In the hood of the cart were holes, through
which little streams ran down my back. Then, remembering that I was going
for the first time in my life through the very heart of Nagasaki, I cast
an inquiring look outside, at the risk of receiving a drenching: we were
trotting along through a mean, narrow, little back street (there are
thousands like it, a labyrinth of them), the rain falling in cascades
from the tops of the roofs on the gleaming flagstones below, rendering
everything indistinct and vague through the misty atmosphere. At times we
passed a woman struggling with her skirts, unsteadily tripping along in
her high wooden shoes, looking exactly like the figures painted on
screens, cowering under a gaudily daubed paper umbrella. Again, we passed
a pagoda, where an old granite monster, squatting in the water, seemed to
make a hideous, ferocious grimace at me.

How large this Nagasaki is! Here had we been running hard for the last
hour, and still it seemed never-ending. It is a flat plain, and one never
would suppose from the view in the offing that so vast a plain lies in
the depth of this valley.

It would, however, have been impossible for me to say where I was, or in
what direction we had run; I abandoned my fate to my djin and to my good
luck.

What a steam-engine of a man my djin was! I had been accustomed to the
Chinese runner