Now Daredesuka was a wonderful man with kites. He had made large ones when he was with his old lord, and had once dropped a line far over a junk that was blowing out to sea, and so saved many lives. He decided that he would use a kite to get the scale that Eikibo had declared would tell if he spoke true. Secretly he went to work and made a kite so large that he was sure it would carry the weight of his body. He found another _ronin_ to help him in his strange plan, and on a stormy night, in wind and rain and clouds, he went up with his kite, and secured a golden scale from the ridge of the fifth story of the tower. But the tool he had used in prying it off was wet and slippery, and it fell from his hands to the ground far beneath him. The guards' attention was attracted. At the fatal moment a rift in the clouds let the moon shine down, and they discovered the kite. So it happened that when Daredesuka reached the earth they caught him with the golden scale. But because he was a _samurai_ he was allowed to commit _hara-kiri_, and performed the act serenely before the State officials.
Eikibo did not do the fan dance at the _matsuri_ in Nagoya, for on the morning of the day on which she was to appear, an old priest found her body on Daredesuka's grave.
At first it seemed that the opening of the country to foreigners was to be a death-blow to the old Japanese forms of art and literature. Translations of American and European books have become very common, and Western ideas permeate their work. But side by side with the newer forms, the classic writings are again coming into vogue.
Paradoxical as it may sound, much of the classical Japanese literature is Chinese. This is especially true of the older works, but it holds good only in less degree to-day. Chinese has always been the written language of the students, and of the higher classes in general, while Japanese was considered fit only for the common people, much as English was regarded down to the time of More's "Utopia." But while written in Chinese characters, much of this literature is distinctly national in spirit and feeling, and belongs as much to the country as does that written in the native tongue. Only within recent times has the common language of the people been used for writing books and scholarly treatises.