on the floor, placing all this plaything of a meal at my feet.

At this moment, my impressions of Japan are charming enough; I feel
myself fairly launched upon this tiny, artificial, fictitious world,
which I felt I knew already from the paintings on lacquer and porcelains.
It is so exact a representation! The three little squatting women,
graceful and dainty, with their narrow slits of eyes, their magnificent
coiffures in huge bows, smooth and shining as shoe-polish, and the little
tea-service on the floor, the landscape seen through the veranda, the
pagoda perched among the clouds; and over all the same affectation
everywhere, in every detail. Even the woman's melancholy voice, still to
be heard behind the paper partition, was evidently the proper way for
them to sing--these musicians I had so often seen painted in amazing
colors on rice-paper, half closing their dreamy eyes among impossibly
large flowers. Long before I arrived there, I had perfectly pictured
Japan to myself. Nevertheless, in the reality it almost seems to be
smaller, more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more
mournful, no doubt by reason of that great pall of black clouds hanging
over us, and this incessant rain.

While awaiting M. Kangourou (who is dressing himself, it appears, and
will be here shortly), it may be as well to begin luncheon.

In the daintiest bowl imaginable, adorned with flights of storks, is the
most wildly impossible soup made of seaweed. After which there are
little fish dried in sugar, crabs in sugar, beans in sugar, and fruits in
vinegar and pepper. All this is atrocious, but above all unexpected and
unimaginable. The little women make me eat, laughing much, with that
perpetual, irritating laugh which is peculiar to Japan--they make me eat,
according to their fashion, with dainty chop-sticks, fingered with