Kimono Part 46

"Of course, I love him," cried Sadako, starting up from her sorrow.

"You see me. I am no more virgin. He is my life to me. Why cannot I love him? Why cannot I be free like men are free to love as they wish?

I am new woman. I read Bernard Shaw. I find one law for men in j.a.pan, and another law for women. But I will break that law. I have made Sekine my lover, because I am free."

Asako could never have imagined her proud, inhuman cousin reduced to this state of quivering emotion. Never before had she seen a j.a.panese soul laid bare.

"But you will marry Sekine, Sada dear; and then you will be happy."

"Marry Sekine!" the girl hissed, "marry a boy with no money and leave you to be the Fujinami heiress, when I am promised to the Governor of Osaka, who will be home Minister when the next Governor comes!"

"Oh, don't do that," urged Asako, her English sentimentalism flooding back across her mind. "Don't marry a man whom you don't love. You say you are a new woman. Marry Sekine. Marry the man whom you love. Then you will be happy."

"j.a.panese girls are never happy," groaned her cousin.

Asako gasped. This morality confused her.

"But that would be a mortal sin," she said. "Then you could never be happy."

"We cannot be happy. We are Fujinami," said Sadako gravely. "We are cursed. The old woman of Akabo said that it is a very bad curse. I do not believe superst.i.tion. But I believe there is a curse. You also, you have been unhappy, and your father and mother. We are cursed because of the women. We have made so much money from poor women. They are sold to men, and they suffer in pain and die so that we become rich. It is a very bad _inge_. So they say in Akabo, that we Fujinami have a fox in our family. It brings us money; but it makes us unhappy.

In Akabo, even poor people will not marry with the Fujinami, because we have the fox."

It is a popular belief, still widely held in j.a.pan, that certain families own spirit foxes, a kind of family banshee who render them service, but mark them with a curse.

"I do not understand," said Asako, afraid of this wild talk.

"Do you know why the Englishman went away?" said her cousin brutally.

It was Asako's turn to cry.

"Oh, I wish I had gone with him. He was so good to me, always so kind and so gentle!"

"When he married you," said Sadako, "he did not know that you had the curse. He ought not to have come to j.a.pan with you. Now he knows you have the curse. So he went away. He was wise."

"What do you mean by the curse?" asked Asako.

"You do not know how the Fujinami have made so much money?"

"No," said Asako. "It used to come for me from Mr. Ito. He had shares or something."

"Yes. But a share that means a share of a business. Do you not know what is our business?"

"No," said Asako again.

"You have seen the Yos.h.i.+wara, where girls are sold to men. That is our business. Do you understand now?"

"No."

"Then I will tell you the whole story of the Fujinami. About one hundred and twenty years ago our great-great-grandfather came to Yedo, as Tokyo was then called. He was a poor boy from the country. He had no friends. He became clerk in a dry goods store. One day a woman, rather old, asked him: 'How much pay you get?' He said, 'No pay, only food and clothes.' The woman said, 'Come with me; I will give you food and clothes and pay also,' He went with her to the Yos.h.i.+wara where she had a small house with five or six girls. Every night he must stand in front of the house, calling. Then the drunken workmen, and the gamblers, and the bad _samurai_ would come and pay their money. And they pay their money to him, our great-great-grandfather. When the girls were sick, or would not receive guests, he would beat them, and starve them, and burn _o kyu_ (a medical plant called moxa, used for cauterization) on their backs. One day he said to the woman who was mistress of the house, 'Your girls are too old. The rich friends do not come any more. Let us sell these girls. I will go into the country and get new girls, and then you will marry me and make me your partner.' The woman said, 'If we have good luck with the girls and make money, then I marry you.' So our great-great-grandfather went back to his own country, to Akabo; and his old friends in the country were astonished, seeing how much money he had to spend. He said 'Yes.

I have many rich friends in Yedo. They want pretty country girls to be their wives. See, I pay you in advance five pieces of gold. After the marriage more money will be given. Let me take your prettiest girls to Yedo with me. And they will all get rich husbands.' They were simple country people, and they believed him because he was a man of their village, of Akabo. He went back to Yedo with about twenty girls, fifteen or sixteen years old. He and the other clerks of the Yos.h.i.+wara first made them _jor[=o]_. From those twenty girls he made very much money. So he married the woman who kept the house. Then he hired a big house called Tomonji. He furnished it very richly; and he would only receive guests of the high-cla.s.s people. Five of his girls became very famous _oiran_. Even their pictures, drawn by Utamaro, are worth now hundreds of _yen_. When our great-great-grandfather died he was a very rich man. His son was the second Fujinami. He bought more houses in the Yos.h.i.+wara and more girls. He was our great-grandfather. He had two sons. One was your father's father, who bought this land and first built a house here. The other was my grandfather, Fujinami Gennosuke, who still lives in the _inkyo_. They have all made much money from girls; but the curse was hurting them all, especially their wives and daughters."

"And my father?" asked Asako.

"Your father wrote a book to say how bad a thing it is that money is made from men's l.u.s.t and the pain of Women. He told in the book how girls are tricked to come to Tokyo, how their parents sell them because they are poor or because there is famine, how the girls are brought to Tokyo ten and twenty at a time, and are put to auction sale in the Yos.h.i.+wara, how they are shut up like prisoner, how very rough men are sent to them to break their spirit and to compel them to be _jor[=o]_. There is a trial to see how strong they are. Then, when the spirit is broken, they are shown in the window as 'new girls' with beautiful kimono and with wreath of flowers on their head. If they are lucky they escape disease for a few years, but it comes soon or late--_rinbyo, baidoku_ and _raibyo_. They are sent to the hospital for treatment; or else they are told to hide the disease and to get more men. So the men take the disease and bring it to their wives and children, who have done no wrong. But the girls of the Yos.h.i.+wara have to work all the time, when they are only half cured. So they become old and ugly and rotten very quickly. Then, if they take consumption or some such thing, they die and the master says, 'It is well. She was already too old. She was wasting our money.' And they are buried quickly in the burial place of the _jor[=o]_ outside the city boundary, the burial place of the dead who are forgotten. Or some, who are very strong, live until their contract is finished. Then they go back to the country, and marry there and spread disease. But they all die cursing the Fujinami, who have made money out of their sorrow and pain. I think this garden is full of their ghosts, and their curses beat upon the house, like the wind when it makes the shutters rattle!"

"How do you know all these terrible things?" asked Asako.

"It is written in your father's book. I will read it to you. If you do not believe, ask Ito San. He will tell you it is true."

So for several evenings Sadako read to this stranger Fujinami her own father's words, the words of a forerunner.

j.a.pan is still a savage country, wrote Fujinami Katsundo, the j.a.panese are still barbarians. To compare the conventional codes, which they have mistaken for civilization, with the depth and the height of Occidental idealism, as Christ perceived it and Dante and St. Francis of a.s.sisi and Tolstoy, is "to compare the tortoise with the moon."

j.a.pan is imitating from the West its worst propensities--hard materialism, vulgarity and money-wors.h.i.+p. The j.a.panese must be humble, and must admit that the most difficult part of their lesson has yet to be learned. Cut and dried systems are useless. Prussian const.i.tution, technical education, military efficiency and bravado--such things are not progress. j.a.pan must denounce the slavery of ancestor-wors.h.i.+p, and escape from the rule of the dead. She must chase away the bogeys of superst.i.tion, and enjoy life as a lovely thing, and love as the vision of a life still more beautiful. She must cleanse her land of all its filth, and make it what it still might be--the Country of the Rising Sun.

Such was the message of Asako's father in his book, _The Real s.h.i.+nto_.

"We are not allowed to read this book," Sadako explained; "the police have forbidden it. But I found a secret copy. It was undutiful of your father to write such things. He went away from j.a.pan; and everyone said, 'It is a good thing he has gone; he was a bad man; he shamed his country and his family.'"

There was much in the book which Asako could not follow. Her cousin tried to explain it to her; and many nights pa.s.sed, thus, the two girls sitting up and reading by the pale light of the _andon_. It was like a renewal of the old friends.h.i.+p. Sometimes a low whistle sounded from outside the house. Sadako would lay aside the book, would slip on her cloak and go out into the garden, where Sekine was waiting for her.

When she was left to herself Asako began to think for the first time in her life. Hitherto her thoughts had been concerned merely with her own pleasures and pains, with the smiles and frowns of those around her, with petty events and trifling projects. Perhaps, because some of her father's blood was alive in her veins, she could understand certain aspects of his book more clearly than her interpreter, Sadako.

She knew now why Geoffrey would not touch her money. It was filthy, it was diseased, like the poor women who had earned it. Of course, her Geoffrey preferred poverty to wealth like that. Could she face poverty with him? Why, she was poor already, here in her cousins' house. Where was the luxury which her money used to buy? She was living the life of a servant and a prisoner.

What would be the end of it? Surely Geoffrey would come back to her, and take her away! But he had no money now, and it would cost much money to travel to j.a.pan. And then, this terrible war! Geoffrey was a soldier. He would be sure to be there, leading his men. Supposing he were killed?

One night in a dream she saw his body carried past her, limp and bleeding. She screamed in her sleep. Sadako awoke, terrified.

"What is the matter?"

"I dreamed of Geoffrey, my husband. Perhaps he is killed in the war."

"Do not say that," said Sadako. "It is unlucky to speak of death. It troubles the ghosts. I have told you this house is haunted."

Certainly for Asako the Fujinami mansion had lost its charm. Even the beautiful landscape was besieged by horrible thoughts. Every day two or three of the Yos.h.i.+wara women died of disease and neglect, so Sadako said and therefore every day the invisible population of the Fujinami garden must be increasing, and the volume of their curses must be gathering in intensity. The ghosts hissed like snakes in the bamboo grove. They sighed in the pine branches. They nourished the dwarf shrubs with their pollution. Beneath the waters of the lake the corpses--women's corpses--were laid out in rows. Their thin hands shook the reeds. Their pale faces rose at night to the surface, and stared at the moon. The autumn maples smeared the scene with infected blood; and the stone foxes in front of the shrine of Inari sneered and grinned at the devil world which their foul influence had called into being through the black witchcraft of lechery, avarice and disease.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE AUTUMN FESTIVAL

_Yo no naka ni Us.h.i.+ no Kuruma no Nakari-seba, Omoi no iye wo Ikade ide-mas.h.i.+?_

In this world If there were no Ox-cart (_i.e._ Buddhist religion), How should we escape From the (burning) mansion of our thought?

During October, the whole family of the Fujinami removed from Tokyo for a few days in order to perform their religious duties at the temple of Ikegami. Even grandfather Gennosuke emerged from his dower-house, bringing his wife, O Tsugi. Mr. Fujinami Gentaro was in charge of his own wife, s.h.i.+dzuye San, of Sadako and of Asako. Only Fujinami Takes.h.i.+, the son and heir, with his wife Matsuko, was absent.

There had been some further trouble in the family which had not been confided to Asako, but which necessitated urgent steps for the propitiation of religious influences. The Fujinami were followers of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism. Their conspicuous devotion and their large gifts to the priests of the temple were held to be causes of their ever-increasing prosperity. The dead Fujinami, down from that great-great-grandfather who had first come to seek his fortune in Yedo, were buried at Ikegami. Here the priests gave to each _hotoke_ (Buddha or dead person) his new name, which was inscribed on small black tablets, the _ihai_. One of these tablets for each dead person was kept in the household shrine at Tokyo, and one in the temple at Ikegami.