"You will be married in two years, and have three children by the time you are thirty!"
I bowed gravely and thanked him, telling him that he was a wonderful soothsayer--a verdict with which he seemed to agree perfectly. It may be mentioned, however, that I am over thirty, and have been married many years, with no children.
Great reliance is placed on fortune-telling by the Japanese of the lower classes. I have seen a mother with a sick child shake the curiously lacquered box of sticks which the priest of a temple has in his charge, hoping to get help. She exchanged the numbered stick that fell out for a slip of paper which had a prescription printed on it, and then went out to buy the medicine with a sublime faith that it was just what her baby needed for its recovery.
Fortune-telling is not confined to _matsuris_ or to temples. One hears the calls of the prognosticator in the streets at night. There is also a very elaborate system of foretelling the future, based on the colouring and formation of the head and features, which a few men of a higher class practise with quite wonderful results.
To these amusements, which any one may enjoy, I add two other forms of a more serious nature which are of great interest, although the foreigner rarely has time or opportunity to see them during a hurried visit. They are the _No_ dance and the _cha-no-yu_, or tea-ceremony.
The Japanese nobility rarely attend the public theatres, but they do attend--and even take part in--the _No_ dances, which are not really dances, but high-class theatrical performances. Why a play should be called a dance is hard to explain, unless one remembers that this is Japan, where they begin a book at the wrong end, wipe with wet towels, saw and plane toward themselves, shoe their horses with straw, and even have their compass-needles pointing to the south! The Japanese world is "topside down" to us, but I suppose ours is just as much so to them.
We were fortunate enough to see an excellent _No_ dance which was being performed in a private house. The performance was given in honour of an ancestor of theirs, who had died two hundred years before. It was a very aristocratic audience--the upper class people are easily distinguished, as they are more intelligent and stronger looking, as well as more refined, than the middle and lower classes. The play was given in a very dignified and ceremonious manner, and the acting was of the highest order, but to one unacquainted with the language and the meaning of the various postures even the best _No_ dance is apt to prove tedious. The _No_ is further described in the chapter on literature.
