Part 46 (1/2)
”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.