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Updated: June 2, 2025
"Come home with me and see my new house, all of you," Take said when the little girls had looked at O Kiku San's dolls. So they marched in a gay procession to the little house in the garden. All the other girls' brothers had had a very lonesome day, but Taro had had fun all the afternoon with the little garden. He had made a little well, and a kura to put in the garden He made them out of boxes.
The marriage-day, a fortunate or good-omened one, was fixed upon as the twenty-seventh from the day of betrothal. Was Kiku happy? Nay, you should ask, Can that word express her feelings? She had obeyed her parents: she could do nothing higher or more fraught with happiness. She was to be a wife woman's highest honor and a Japanese woman's only aim.
Again the bride sips three times, and the bridegroom does the same, and they are man and wife: they are married. This ceremony is called san-san-ku-do, or "three times three are nine." Like a wedding at once auspicious and distingué, the nuptials of Kiku and Taro passed off without one misstep or incident of ill omen.
"May I, Mother?" said Take. Her Mother said, "Yes," so the little girls ran together to O Kiku San's house. Other little girls came, too, to see O Kiku San's dolls. She had just as many dolls as Take. She had five shelves, too, and she had an Emperor and Empress doll. But she had no little house to play with.
We first pursued a westerly course, through Sumner Strait, between Kupreanof and Prince of Wales Islands, then, turning northward, sailed up the Kiku Strait through the midst of innumerable picturesque islets, across Prince Frederick's Sound, up Chatham Strait, thence northwestward through Icy Strait and around the then uncharted Glacier Bay.
Caucasians in Japan even make Fusiyama's summit the goal of their wedded steps, but our Kiku and Taro went nowhere. "At home" for three days is the general rule in Japan. All their friends came to see them, and presents were showered on the happy pair. The great Shô-gun, remembering his former page, sent Taro a present of a flawless ball of pure rock-crystal five inches in diameter.
From his own father he received a jet-black horse brought from the province of Nambu, and an equine descendant of the Arab sire presented by the viceroy of India to the Japanese embassy to the pope in 1589. On the delightful wonders of the gifts to Kiku our masculine pen shrinks from expatiating.
Next to them in his love was his only daughter Kiku, seventeen years old, and as fair as the fairest of Yedo's many fair daughters. No vain doll was Kiku, but, inheriting her mother's beauty, she added to it the inner grace of a meek and dutiful spirit. Besides being deft at household duties, her memory was well stored with the knowledge of Japanese history and the Chinese classics.
Here Kiku rearranges her dress, retouches her lower lip with golden paint and puts on her hood of floss silk. This is of a half-moon shape, completely covering her face. She does not lift it until she has drunk the sacramental marriage-cup. Many a Japanese maiden has seen her lord for the first time as she lifted her silken hood.
He was a cruel and violent man, without heart or compassion, and thought nothing of killing or torturing a man to gratify spite or revenge. One day O Kiku accidentally broke one of a set of ten porcelain plates, upon which he set a high value.
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