ath.

However, in Japanese belief, a butterfly may be the soul of a dead
person as well as of a living person. Indeed it is a custom of souls to
take butterfly-shape in order to announce the fact of their final
departure from the body; and for this reason any butterfly which
enters a house ought to be kindly treated.

To this belief, and to queer fancies connected with it, there are many
allusions in popular drama. For example, there is a well-known play
called Tonde-deru-Kocho-no-Kanzashi; or, "The Flying Hairpin of Kocho."
Kocho is a beautiful person who kills herself because of false
accusations and cruel treatment. Her would-be avenger long seeks in
vain for the author of the wrong. But at last the dead woman's hairpin
turns into a butterfly, and serves as a guide to vengeance by hovering
above the place where the villain is hiding.

--Of course those big paper butterflies (o-cho and me-cho) which figure
at weddings must not be thought of as having any ghostly signification.
As emblems they only express the joy of living union, and the hope that
the newly married couple may pass through life together as a pair of
butterflies flit lightly through some pleasant garden,--now hovering
upward, now downward, but never widely separating.

II

A small selection of hokku (1) on butterflies will help to illustrate
Japanese interest in the aesthetic side of the subject. Some are
pictures only,--tiny color-sketches made with seventeen syllables; some
are nothing more than pretty fancies, or graceful suggestions;--but the
reader will find variety. Probably he will not care much for the verses
in themselves. The taste for Japanese poetry of the epigrammatic sort
is a taste that must be slowly acquired; and it is only by degrees,
after patient study, that the possibilities of such composition can be
fairly estimated. Hasty criticism has declared that to put forward any
serious claim on behalf of seventeen-syllable poems "would be absurd."
But what, then, of Crashaw's famous line upon the miracle at the
marriage feast in Cana?--

Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit. [1]

Only fourteen syllables--and immortality. Now with seventeen Japanese
syllables things quite as wonderful--indeed, much more wonderful--have
been done, not once or twice, but probably a thousand times... However,
there is nothing wonderful in the following hokku, which have been
selected for more than literary reasons:--

Nugi-kakuru [2]