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Updated: May 23, 2025
Asako jumped in at once and squatted down on the clean matting; but her more cautious cousin dusted the place with her handkerchief before risking a stain. "Do you often have tea-ceremonies?" asked Asako. The Muratas had explained to her long ago something about the mysterious rites. "Two or three times in the Spring, and then two or three times in the Autumn. But my teacher comes every week."
He had never had a long talk with a Japanese man before; but he felt that if they were all like that, so formal, so unnatural, so secretive, then he had better keep out of the range of Asako's relatives. He wondered what his wife really thought of the Muratas, and during the return to their hotel, he asked, "Well, little girl, do you want to go back again and live at Auteuil?" She shook her head.
But Fujinami had insisted, and disobedience to a man's dying wish brings the curse of a "rough ghost" upon the recalcitrant, and all kinds of evil consequences. So the Muratas took Asako and cherished her as much as their hearts, withered by exile and by unnatural living, were capable of cherishing anything.
"Captain Geoffrey," she would complain, "it is the Chinese who wear the pigtail; they are a very savage people." Then he would call her his little geisha, and this she resented; for she knew from the Muratas that geisha were bad women who took husbands away from their wives, and that was no joking matter.
He had left special word when he was dying that Asako was not to go back to Japan, that Japanese men were bad to women, that she was to be brought up among French girls and was to marry a European or an American. But the Muratas could not tell her any intimate details about her father, whom they had not known very well.
Asako Fujinami had been brought to Paris by her father, who had died there while still a young man. He had entrusted his only child to the care of the Muratas with instructions that she should be educated in European ways and ideas, that she should hold no communication with her relatives in Japan, and that eventually a white husband should be provided for her.
She could recall great brown shining eyes, and a thin face wasted by the consumption which killed him, and a tenderness of voice and manner quite apart from anything which she had ever experienced since. This soon came to an end. After that she had known only the conscientiously chilly care of the Muratas.
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