Tales of Old Japan - Maybe You Like It

what a sad and cruel world this is, they would not act as they do. The
quotation is from a song of remorse. This sort of thing but too often happens
in the world.
When a man marries a wife, he thinks how happy he will be, and how
pleasant it will be keeping house on his own account; but, before the bottom
of the family kettle has been scorched black, he will be like a man
learning to swim in a field, with his ideas all turned topsy-turvy, and,
contrary to all his expectations, he will find the pleasures of housekeeping
to be all a delusion. Look at that woman there. Haunted by her cares,
she takes no heed of her hair, nor of her personal appearance. With her
head all untidy, her apron tied round her as a girdle, with a baby twisted
into the bosom of her dress, she carries some wretched bean sauce which
she has been out to buy. What sort of creature is this? This all comes of
not listening to the warnings of parents, and of not waiting for the proper
time, but rushing suddenly into housekeeping. And who is to blame
in the matter? Passion, which does not pause to reflect. A child of five or
six years will never think of learning to play the guitar for its own pleasure.
What a ten-million times miserable thing it is, when parents, making
their little girls hug a great guitar, listen with pleasure to the poor little
things playing on instruments big enough for them to climb upon, and
squeaking out songs in their shrill treble voices! Now I must beg you to
listen to me carefully. If you get confused and don't keep a sharp lookout,
your children, brought up upon harp and guitar playing, will be
abandoning their parents, and running away secretly. Depend upon it,
from all that is licentious and meretricious something monstrous will
come forth. The poet who wrote the "Four Sleeves" regarded it as the
right path of instruction to convey a warning against vice. But the theatre
and dramas and fashionable songs, if the moral that they convey is
missed, are a very great mistake. Although you may think it very right
and proper that a young lady should practise nothing but the harp and
guitar until her marriage, I tell you that it is not so; for if she misses the
moral of her songs and music, there is the danger of her falling in love
with some man and eloping. While on this subject, I have an amusing
story to tell you.
Once upon a time, a frog, who lived at Kiôto, had long been desirous
of going to see Osaka. One spring, having made up his mind, he started
off to see Osaka and all its famous places. By a series of hops on all-fours
he reached a temple opposite Nishi-no-oka, and thence by the western
road he arrived at Yamazaki, and began to ascend the mountain called
Tenôzan. Now it so happened that a frog from Osaka had determined to
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