A photograph of Wenceslau de Moraes.

Wenceslau de Moraes. (Source: Moraes of Tokushima editorial committee, Moraes of Tokushima, Tokushima City Central Community Center, March 1972)

Wenceslau de Moraes, the heir of an old, established Portuguese family, was born in 1854 in Lisbon, Portugal. After serving as a naval officer in Mozambique for more than 10 years, he was given a position in Macau in 1881 (Meiji 14) and wrote a series of articles about his experiences there for a Lisbon newspaper (Traços do Extremo Oriente, Lisbon, 1895). After his first visit to Japan in 1889, he fell in love with the country, and from then on he frequently visited Japan as part of his business activities. Once relieved of his position as deputy commander of the port of Macau in 1898 and ordered to return to his home country, he decided to emigrate to Japan and became the first Portuguese consul there, living in Kobe among his fellow countrymen and acquaintances. In 1900, he made a common-law marriage with a geisha, Fukumoto Yoné, paying her debit out of bondage. While working as consul, he continued to send correspondence and essays from Japan to Portuguese magazines (e.g., “Nihon Tsushin,” Oporto, 1904–1907). The course of Moraes’ life had to change, once again, owing to the Portuguese revolution of 1910 and the fall of the monarchy, followed by OYoné’s death in 1912, as well as the disruption of remittances to the consulate (due to political unrest in his home country). In 1913 (Taishō 2), he resigned as Consul General and moved to OYoné’s hometown, Tokushima City. He stayed there with her niece, Saitō Koharu, and even after her subsequent death, he remained in Tokushima, writing essays such as O Bon-Odori Em Tokushima (Bon Dancing in Tokushima) (Oporto, 1916) and Ó-Yoné e Ko-Haru (OYoné and Koharu) (Oporto, 1923), all of which he continued to send to Portugal. In 1929 (Shōwa 4), he fell on the dirt floor of the house where he lived alone and died a lonely death at the age of 75.

Ó-Yoné e Ko-Haru (OYoné and Koharu), a late masterpiece by Wenceslau de Moraes, is a collection of 18 short stories. These were written intermittently in Tokushima between 1916 and 1920, when Moraes was in his sixties, and published in the Portuguese literary and scientific journal Lusa, and finally put together as a book in 1923.

Moraes’ debut work was Traços do Extremo Oriente (1895), an account of his observations and impressions in Singapore, Macau, and Japan, which was first serialized in the Lisbon newspaper O Correio da Manhã (The Morning Post). When it was published, his publisher and friend, Vicente Almeida d’Eça, described Moraes as “without flattery, a good naval officer, ... with a melancholy face, a thin body, blond hair, thoughtful blue eyes, ... a very shy and timid man.” He also described his “melancholy gloom, a deep sympathy for human misery, and the ability to grasp the small facts that others consider insignificant, but which, when studied closely, contain a world full of significance.” He suggests that Morares “can be called the Pierre Loti of Portugal, but he is not as dandyish or snobbishly proud as Loti, nor does he have the smug pride of his genius,” (Introduction to Traços do Extremo Oriente).

In 1898 (Meiji 31), 3 years after the publication of Traços do Extremo Oriente, Moraes decided to settle in Japan. From then until his death in 1929 (Shōwa 4) at 75 years of age, he wrote extensively about Japan from his vantage point in Kobe and Tokushima. The words above used by his friend to describe him concisely capture the basic characteristics that would remain with Moraes until his later years.

It is relatively well known that Moraes was a naval officer who came to Japan at around the same time as Lafcadio Hearn, later became a consul in Kobe, retired to Tokushima and died there. His personal story, however, has somewhat more unusual and dramatic aspects, such as the desperate love affair he had with a married woman while a naval officer in Lisbon. Then, in Mozambique, East Africa, where he was posted, he lived with a native woman, and in Macau with an Anglo-Chinese woman named Atchan. (Moraes adopted Atchan’s two sons and made them the only legitimate heirs in his will.) After arriving in Japan, he made a common-law marriage with a geisha, Fukumoto Yoné, paying her debt to take her out of bondage. The 13 years he lived with her OYoné in Kobe seemed to be relatively peaceful and productive for Moraes. During this period, from 1902 to 1913, he wrote an enormous amount of correspondence on Japan for O Comércio do Porto.

A major turn of events in Moraes’ life occurred in 1912, when OYoné died suddenly of heart disease at 38 years of age. Furthermore, his country was plunged into turmoil after the Revolution destroyed the Portuguese royal family. Moraes abruptly resigned as consul the following year, at 59 years of age, deregistered himself from Portuguese military service and moved to Tokushima. It is not surprising that there was a rumour at the time in the Macau political office in Portugal that Moraes had gone insane. Moraes began living in Tokushima alone with 20-year-old Saitō Koharu (OYoné’s niece) as his “maid.” When World War I broke out in 1914 (Taishō 3), the police were on high alert in Moraes’ neighborhood and the citizens showed blatant hostility (even though Portugal and Japan were allied against Germany), which was unpleasant for him. Soon after, Koharu gave birth to a baby, fathered by her former Japanese lover, and the following year she was hospitalized with hemoptysis and died. Koharu could claim the right to choose her own course, but from Moraes’ point of view, the situation was a complete disaster.

A letter written by Moraes to his Portuguese friend Dias Branco at that time reads as follows: “Since you worry about so many things, I’ll tell you the truth of it. I have not told you the truth enough. In fact, I had a maid here. She used to be my maid in Kobe, and she is the same here. She was an uneducated, unattractive maid, but she loved me at least. But on the second of this month, she died in hospital of tuberculosis. An alarmingly horrible way to die!” (From “Personal Letters – Osoroshi (Fearful),” October 22, 1916).

Five months later, he wrote again to the same friend, “As you see. I have suffered a terrible blow with the death of the poor girl I told you about, Koharu. She is the little maid who appears in Bon Odori (Bon Dancingin Tokushima, 1916). She gave me countless pieces of advice, but then did something stupid [i.e., pregnancy and childbirth] and I had to let her go. Anyway, even though she was such a girl, she had some respect for me, and was the only person in Tokushima whom I trusted very much. Above all, I was going to have her attend my deathbed and carry out my last testament. That hope was gone. Everything is gone. Now I am all alone. I am utterly alone. Oh, poor Koharu, at the young age of twenty-three, she died in such agony. ... I wrote a confession about it, titled Koharu” (ibid., March 23, 1917).

The opening story of OYoné and Koharu, “Koharu,” was written under these circumstances. Moraes had already decided that this would be his last book and that he would never write another line for publication, but perhaps with the comfort, encouragement, and suggestions of friends who had read “Koharu” in Portugal, he picked up the pen again and started writing one small story after another.

The resulting OYoné and Koharu is much more personal in quality than the other works by Moraes such as Dai-Nippon (1897), Paisagens da China e do Japão (Landscapes of China and Japan) (1906) and Os serões no Japão (Evenings in Japan) (1926). The latter seemed to contain the message of “This is the Japan you do not know.” OYoné and Koharu, on the other hand, is a piece of writing about the most personal and most particular aspects of life. It is an essay written by a person who has come to realize that not only has his own heart been deeply wounded, but that he has also deeply wounded others. This notion of his is what gives OYoné and Koharu a depth and a complicating sense of eternity that makes it more than a mere theory of Japan.

However, this does not necessarily mean that his writing style in these small stories is heavy. For example, “Koharu” begins brightly as follows.

Koharu is a literal translation of “little spring” (“ko” means little and “haru” means spring), and Japanese people use this sweet name to describe the last days of autumn, when the breeze is balmy, the sun is absorbed into the transparent blue sky and shines clearly, and the days are fading away in a hurry.

After this, he mentions a specific Japanese woman, “I was intimate with a Koharu [...]” and the “tomboy” must have fallen in love, but “[...] her naughty life didn’t last any longer [...] The name ‘Koharu’ is a well-chosen name. It reminds me of the fleeting, false spring that appears suddenly and then quickly disappears.” By placing the word “Koharu” in “Koharu-biyori” (balmy autumn day) at the beginning of this story, he cleverly suggests the springlike splendor of the maiden’s name “Koharu” and the pity that it was a false spring. Other stories in OYoné and Koharu that deal with Koharu’s death include “The shot of the Noon-gun,” “The last glance of the landscape,” and “Half a banana.”

“Dreaming,” a remembrance of OYoné, whom he loved as a wife for more than a decade during his Kobe years, is also a beautiful little storYoné day OYoné appears in Moraes’ dream and she says, “I then, in life, was the opposite; I kept all, even the meanest crumbs, a little rag which I judged useless, any meaningless thing.” Moraes is tempted by these words to open the kitchen chest that OYoné left behind. There he found “small pieces of silk already worn, small cases spoiled by the use, remains of a skein of silk thread, remains of skeins of woolen thread, post cards received, receipts of shops [...] and still an infinity of unqualifiable trifles [...] all were carefully and neatly arranged either in pieces or tied together with ribbons or twine. They [...] were tidy enough to honor the delicacy of the hands that patiently and carefully put them away and the simple, organizing, good, innocent, and adorable nature of the bearer of such hands.” This is a fine story that unexpectedly depicts one of the ideal types of tender and modest Japanese housewives who were everywhere in those days, and whom we may nostalgically recall.

Also, in the short story of “Kimono or Money?......Kimono,” Moraes asks Chiyoko, Koharu’s younger sister, “Since Obon—the season of the festival of the dead—is coming, would you like me to buy you a kimono, or would you prefer me to give you money?” She clearly answered “Kimono!” and Moraes was overjoyed at her reply, saying that “That’s a swell answer. [...] Money, the shabby money, the ignoble money! Try walking down the street wearing a kimono.” The image of Chiyoko, since we know she too would die of tuberculosis a few weeks later at 13 years of age, emerges even more vividly. Perhaps it is because we know that there were many girls like Chiyoko who grew up in poverty, were not nourished or cared for by their parents, and died of tuberculosis. Reading the short stories in OYoné and Koharu one by one, it almost seems as if Moraes is writing elegies to the many Japanese women and girls who have died young and in poverty.

Why in the world did Moraes stay in Japan until his death, especially after Koharu’s death? Yoshii Isamu, a tanka poet (thirty one-syllable Japanese verse), composed a poem which means that “Moraes was pathetically in love with Japan until his death in the remote Awa province”. But did Moraes really long for Japan, believing—for example—that he could achieve bliss by assimilating into Japan? Did he not return to Portugal because there was no place for him in his homeland, or because his homeland would not accept him? No, that was not the case. His letters to his friend Dias Branco, his two sisters and their husbands, and his nephews and nieces, written over the decades while he lived in Japan, clearly reflect his strong attachment to his native Portugal and his deep affection for his homeland, its people and its culture. It is evident from these letters that he was keenly aware of his Portuguese identity and proud of being Portuguese until the very end. Rather, after Koharu’s death, Moraes stubbornly remained in Tokushima, which was never a comfortable place to live, either psychologically or physically, because he felt in his heart that he would continue to take responsibility for the choice he had made at the age of 60 when he decided to leave the consulate and retire to Tokushima. Another people for whom he felt responsible feature in his will. In the will he skillfully handled the distribution of his possesseions, namely to Achan’s sons. But for the women he loved who died in Tokushima, he chose to die himself there. It was his way of taking responsibility. In that sense he was a martyr to them.

The English translations of quotations from Moraes’ works were based in part on the following:

Wenceslau de Moraes, OYoné and Koharu: Essays of a Portuguese Recluse Who Lived in Japan, translated by Okamoto Kazuo. Kyoiku Shuppan Center, Tokushima, 1980.

Wenceslau de Moraes, Bon-Odori in Tokushima: Essays of a Portuguese Hermit in Japan, translated by Okamoto Kazuo. Kyoiku Shuppan Center, Tokushima, 1979.