Tatami can be fitted in different ways in a room, but number and layout of tatami can bring good or bad fortune. Tatami should not be laid in grid patterns, for example, as this will bring bad luck. The only time this layout can be used is during mourning. Many Japanese shops are designed to be the size of five and half tatami, as this will ensure good fortune, whatever the kind of business it is.

Tatami are very effective at absorbing heat. And they absorb a lot of water from the air. If the atmosphere is dry, the water will evaporate again.

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Hōïchi, unaware that the people around him know the tale all too well from their own experience, starts to recite the story of the battle of Dan-no-ura:

Then Hōïchi lifted up his voice, and chanted the chant of the fight on the bitter sea - wonderfully making his biwa to sound like the straining of the oars and the rushing of ships, the whirr and the hissing of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets, the plunging of slain in the flood. And to the left and right of him, in the pauses of his playing, he could hear voices murmuring praise: “How marvelous an artist!” - “Never in our province was playing heard like this!” - “Not in all the empire is there another singer like Hōïchi!” Then fresh courage came to him, and he played and sang better than before; and a hush of wonder deepened about him. But when at last he came to tell the fate of the fair and helpless - the piteous perishing of the women and children - and the death-leap of Nii-no-Ama, with the imperial infant in her arms - then all the listeners uttered together one long, long shuddering cry of anguish; and thereafter they wept and wailed so loudly and so wildy that the blind man was frightened by the violence of the grief that he had made.

Biwa page at Things Japanese
part of David van Ooijen's web presence