He is a good-looking young man. Whenever I used to think of him I thought of the smile. . . . One day I looked through a little hole in the shoji and saw him alone. The face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showed queer lines worn by old hardship. I thought: ‘He will look just like that when he is dead.’ I went in and the man was all changed—young and happy again—nor have I ever seen that look of trouble in his face since. But I knew when he is alone he wears it. He never shows his real face to me; he wears the mask of happiness as an etiquette. . . .” In cold Kumamoto, it was the real face that Hearn became interested in—the real face of the cook, the real face of Japan. Consequently, he wrote much less about landscape and general impressions; he wrote about particulars—particular people. Japan became much less a reflection of his own feelings; rather, he took as his own the feelings of the people he met. In 1895—now in modern, Westernized Kobe—he wrote Chamberlain that it was a day when “I felt as if I hated Japan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came two women to the house, to sell ballads.
